Angry Metal Guy Speaks: on Spotify

These days I listen to virtually all of my music from a Plex server containing all the music I've bought over the last few decades of my life. They have an app called Plexamp that brings almost all of the conveniences of Spotify to your local music collection (searching, streaming, offline downloads, smart playlists, auto artist mixes, etc.)

On the first Friday of every month (sometimes, but not always, "Bandcamp Friday") I buy a few more albums for the collection. I wind up spending more on music monthly than I would for a Spotify subscription, but not by a whole lot.

This is extremely misleading. Spotify has regional pricing; for streams from the US it's around $0.01/stream (not on my music computer right now so can't see the exact number). The "average" may be a lot lower just because Spotify is available in more countries with lower per-stream rates.

> AI tracks falsely attributed to deceased artists like Blaze Foley—a country singer who died in 1989—were found on their official Spotify pages, which raises a ton of questions about how these are curated.

I hate this too and I wish Spotify would do more about it, but this is a common nefarious tactic by musicians, not by Spotify. The idea is that you upload a song with multiple artists credits including yourself + some more popular musicians. Preferably famous enough to get streams but not famous enough to get instantly noticed. Unsuspecting listeners will get your track in their Release Radar, Discover Weekly etc feeds because they're following the more popular artist. You collect the stream revenue.

People who do this should be insta-banned from Spotify, for sure, but this isn't Spotify doing anything malicious.

> In response, bands that I have never fucking heard of like Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu have announced they are removing their music from Spotify

I realize it's a metal blog but c'mon, if you're a music blogger you can take the five seconds to search (or ask an LLM...) to find out that Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu are extremely popular indie darlings, and not sub-100 follower Soundcloud artists.

Prior to Spotify, if you didn't have money you were pirating. Whilst there was something magical about knowing every drumfill on an album as a 15 year old because you could only afford to buy one or two a month, Spotify absolutely opened up the world. As a listener you could discover without cost or piracy. Being a musician (that made money) was never easy, but now it could be done without a label and with some hustle.

Aside from a few 'Tidal only' exclusives, the music industry has mostly avoided the fractured model the TV and Film industry suffers from. Pretty much every record ends up on pretty much every service (as opposed to me needing to subscribe to Netflix, Prime and Disney).

It pains me to think we'll end up (back) in a world where you need 3 subscriptions (or worse) piracy. And sure, people could go back to buying every record, but they won't.

Anyway. Complicated.

And FWIW, I agree, Spotify does itself zero favours and could do soooo much better for artists.