We need to talk about spotify

MASSIVE MUSIC INDUSTRY RANT

The news coming out about Spotify's PFC program is pretty damning. It's abhorrent that a company that just cashed in $1.1 billion in stock options is paying artists who feed it the content it needs to live around $0.003 per stream.

Now we find out that they're building systems that use what is essentially royalty-free music created by artists who don't get paid royalties in order to pack playlists with junk material that ensures that they have to pay artists even less.

Listen I'm all for music being easy to listen to, and I use Spotify. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, you're not going to fix this issue by cancelling your Spotify account or listening to music off another platform that pays artists a little bit more. The simple fact is that musicians' music is no longer the way that money is made. It's essentially the top-of-funnel for all the other bullshit that we have to do to get people to even consider us in their everyday listening. To find out that these systems are in place to basically box everyone out of making any money is just offensive.

Personally I am sick to death of the whole content creator mindset. There's people all over the internet saying that the way you "make it" as a musician is to post 10 times a day and create catchy bullshit content that's meant to be clickbait and has very little to do with art. It's fucking exhausting.

Musicians literally create the stuff that gets most people through their days. You may not know it, because these systems are what they are, but the average musician, even the "big" artists that you may listen to, aren't getting paid much if at all for their music regardless of the platform from which it is streamed.

I know we say this ALL THE TIME, but if you really want to support a musician, buy something directly from them. Getting free shit is great. We all love it and we're all fucking broke. I get that. But if this capitalist hellscape continues as it is, you're going to stop one day and say, "Why isn't so-and-so releasing music anymore?", and the answer will be that they simply couldn't keep doing it. They're working nine fucking jobs to be able to live and they're tired of working really hard on music only to have it reach no one, and if it does, they get paid nothing from it.

The literal ONLY way that you support art is by supporting it. It's not something you can do passively, and it never has been. If you decide to give an artist $20 on Bandcamp, that is literally more money than 75% of artists will make in a YEAR of streaming on Spotify because it is IMPOSSIBLE to build an audience on these platforms in a sustainable way. You cannot game them, you cannot falsely inflate your numbers, and you can't even utilize the platforms THEMSELVES to increase your reach because you only gain access to promotional tools and monetization when you reach insane thresholds of "followership".

An example? To get monetized on YouTube, you need to have gained over 500 subscribers AND 250 watch hours or THREE MILLION shorts views in the last 365 or 90 days, respectively.

So, if you're a musician who makes music that you're proud of and you want to put it out there, and you put it onto YouTube, nothing will happen. No one gives a shit. So then you have to make clickbait shitty "content" that gets people to pay attention to only YOU and not your music.

Now imagine having to do that OVER AND OVER AGAIN on every fucking social media platform in order to get "revenue sharing", which is still VERY LITTLE when it comes to payouts. You see why I say this is exhausting?

Gaining access to marquee or showcase on Spotify is about the same, as well. You have to have 1,000 streams in the "target market" in the last 28 days, and that's not easy. Even as a musician with a moderate following across all social media networks, I generally get around 200 streams every 28 days. There's VERY LITTLE that I can do to goose those numbers. Yes, I can run paid ads, and yes, I have, but good luck with getting people to give a shit once they click to your Spotify artist page.

So if you want to get them to give a shit, you have to incentivize them, which is also very difficult. So, you build a landing page for your Spotify so that you can track clicks to that landing page, in hopes of retargeting the people who don't stick to the page. You have to do this because if you send your paid traffic directly to to your Spotify page, you cannot track those results, and you cannot retarget those viewers because you cannot install tracking pixels onto those pages (you're not given a way to do that, and likely never will be by any platform).

So, you're now back at square A, which is constantly asking people if they'd at least CONSIDER listening to your music FOR FREE on a platform that's very literally not going to pay you anything for those streams anyway. You're doing it solely because you're just hoping that someone listens to your music because you worked hard on it, and you'd like it to have an audience.

If you're paying to get people to go to these landing pages, you're probably paying around $2/click and around $10 per 1,000 people reached. If you're lucky enough to convert ONE PERCENT of the people clicking, you'll be lucky if they listen to even one full song. And guess what? If they don't listen to a certain percentage of a song, YOU DON'T GET PAID. That's right, someone needs to listen to at least 30 seconds of a song.

30 seconds sounds easy, right? Well, guess what, Spotify has more roadblocks for you. For a song to be royalty-generating, it must have at least 1,000 streams in the past 12 months and meet a minimum number of unique listeners. A "Unique listener" means someone who streamed your music within a "Specified time period" which is usually 28 days. If they listen multiple times in that period, they are only counted ONCE as a "unique listener", which means, YOU'RE NOT GETTING PAID for every time that they stream your music.

So what this means is that is almost means nothing if people are listening to your music. Spotify's algorithm is gonna decide if that stream is income-generating, and it likely WON'T BE, because Spotify can use regional data to narrow down if someone is a unique listener or not. If someone doesn't meet all the markers of "unique", they won't count as a listener.

Are you starting to see what I'm getting at, here?

Spotify was the answer to what the legacy music industry was so butthurt about when Napster happened in 2000 -- they were no longer holding the keys to how people heard music, which was, previous to that, either in a live setting, on the radio, or on CD or other recorded media. Spotify used much of what Napster built itself off of to launch as an extremely profitable business for Daniel Ek and his shareholders, NOT FOR ARTISTS.

Lars Ulrich got REAL upset about Napster in 2000, dropped legal suits on thousands of listeners, and basically called fans thieves because they were "stealing" music. But here's the simple fact; most people weren't thinking about "stealing", they were simply saying, "Holy shit, here's a new way to listen to and get music", and they used it. That didn't jive with the record and music industry, and Napster died.

Was it good that people were downloading music en masse for free? Maybe not, but now it's the SAME THING, except the keys are held by people who very literally don't give a shit about music.

Daniel Ek isn't a musician, and he's not a person who cares about music or art. He's a dude who worked out how to make a LOT of money using a platform that made it easy for people to listen to music anytime, anywhere. That convenience is cool, but the fact is that it has a cost. Thousands of musicians don't have the reach that the top 1% of musicians in the industry have, yet they account for a massive amount of the music that is consumed daily.

So what's the answer to all of this? Cancel your Spotify? Go back to CDs? It's not any of this.

I don't have a simple answer, and anyone who says they do, is wrong. The short best answer would be to actually take a few of your dollars and throw them at artists you've found and enjoyed and do so in a way that is directly into their pocket, but I get that that can add up quickly -- many of us remember deciding which CDs we were going to purchase because we very literally couldn't purchase all the music we wanted. Well, that all changed when all the fucking music in the world was given to you for free via streaming platforms that are ad or subscriber-supported, but NONE of that money goes into the artists' pockets.

Music has become the most devalued entertainment commodity in the entertainment world. Musicians are expected to crank out "content" on a constant basis, which means writing music AND posting shitty, clickbait garbage content instead of making music. You've always had to promote yourself as a musician, but now, you have to promote yourself as a "content creator" who just happens to make music.

If I had the capital to do so I would create a music service that incentivizes people to listen to music that doesn't already have a huge following and pays artists properly. Unfortunately doing so requires a massive amount of startup capital to compete with the big boys.

Oh and BTW, the big boys are REAL BIG. YouTube, Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, they all account for millions of listeners and billions of streams. What they don't account for is actual money in the pockets of the people who worked really hard to create something that someone may listen to for less than 30 seconds before their Goldfish brain kicks in and they say, "Meh", and skip on to whatever spikes their fried dopamine receptors enough that they leave a song playing long enough for it to be revenue-generating. In the long run, all you're hoping is that your music is "Good enough" to tick these boxes for the average listener, and that's exhausting. Creating art specifically for making people gobble it up en masse is garbage. It never, ever leads to art that is going to actually have meaning.

All I can say is, if you read this far, and if you're surprised by everything I've said; Welcome to the party, pal. If there's an artist whose work you admire, consider visiting their website or sending them a message and asking them what the BEST way is for them to get money in their pockets from their art. They'll likely tell you that it's buying directly from them, and even then, most of them are going to know that 99% of people who may even take the time to do this won't bother doing so in the long run. That's not because they're bad people; it's because they're burnt-out from also being turned into cogs in a system that's meant to do ONE THING, and does it very well; extract capital and value from their labor, whatever it may be, and return to them the smallest modicum of capital in return.

Cancelling your Spotify subscription won't change this. Buying something directly from an artist will help. I urge you to consider this from time-to-time and throw $10-20 at someone, even someone random who makes music, because that little bit of capital that you gave them might help them continue to make music.

If you're not into all of this, that's fine. You don't have to be. But you should be informed about a system that's EATING artists alive and spitting out nothing but bones and broken careers.

Resources & sources:

https://futurism.com/spotify-accused-promoting-ghost-artists

https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/track-monetization-eligibility/

https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/listener-and-follower-data/

https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-started-with-campaign-tools/