'death to Spotify': the Diy Movement to Get Artists and Fans to Quit the App
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A movement to boycott Spotify is gaining traction among artists and fans, citing low payouts and algorithmic listening, but the discussion reveals mixed opinions on the effectiveness and feasibility of alternatives.
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One might be a paid subscriber and only listen a few small musicians, and yet majority of their money would go to the superstars and almost none to the musicians they listen to.
I’m not supporting music labels, but Spotify is not a good company either.
The whole system follows a brutal power law induced by network effects and engagement feedback loops.
This anger against Spotify and other streaming services just strikes me as misdirected. Spotify pays out ~70% of its revenue to music rights holders, which strikes me as reasonable, although I have nothing really to base this on. But I feel like the people behind this kind of movement expect a much bigger payout, so even if Spotify paid out 100% of their revenue to rights holders, they would still think its too low.
Even if they could pull their music from the platform, it's like shooting yourself in the foot. You lose most of the exposure that will lead to actual revenue: physical albums and show tickets.
[1] https://informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-ar...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift_masters_dispute
I’m sure the big labels are still valuable for advertising but after you’ve grown enough I can’t understand why you wouldn’t just have your own label.
In the mainstream music industry you can’t grow without being signed, so it's a bit of a catch-22.
Even artists known as "independent", like Billie Eilish, only have their big breakthrough after signing a deal that gives them access to producers, funding for music videos, radio shows, publicists, interviews, concerts, etc.. having access to streaming/publishing is only 10% of the deal.
1. Saying "hey, you can just not list on Spotify" is naive. Unless you're a major artist, you don't have the market power to convince people not to use Spotify. Essentially every labor movement is about pooling the collective power of individuals to fight larger entrenched market owners, and that's what this boycott is about.
2. To me the main issue is not the payout percentage, but how it's divvied up. I believe this is still the case, but payouts are divvied up by averaging across all plays. But the total plays are dominated by large artists. A better deal for smaller artists is to allocate each individual subscriber's revenue based on what that subscriber listens to. For example, if I love Obscure Artist A, and 90% of my songs are Obscure Artist A, then Obscure Artist A should get 90% of my $15 or whatever subscription fee (minus Spotify's cut). But instead, Spotify says "Obscure Artist A only had .000001% of total plays, so they only get .000001% of total revenue" - it ends up being a better payout for the big names but a worse deal for all the smaller artists.
Isn’t this Bandcamp?
[1] https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-la...
The article you linked is about Epic selling Bandcamp, which happened relatively quickly after they acquired it. I guess they didn't find any use for it in the end.
Abso-fucking-lutely! I pay $3.50 a month to listen to a madman with a mohawk rant about Formula 1. I doubt there's anyone who wouldn't pay their favorite artists $5 a month. On the flip side I would get to listen to three artists and every other artist would lose me as a listener. I don't feel anybody wins in that scenario.
My take on this: of course the top artists should not be taking a disproportionate cut at the expense of the less popular artists, a UCPS is not a panacea but it would be an improvement.
[1] https://legrandnetwork.blogspot.com/2021/02/user-centric-mod...
And I agree, I don't think it would be a panacea. But I think it would be a lot fairer, and would help a large selection of artists in that middle tier. For the most obscure artists, while the study says it has a "low impact" on them, they actually had the highest percentage increase, but since their royalties are already so low the euro amount increase was in the single digit euros. And again, that seems fair to me - if hardly anyone is listening to you, you're not going to be getting a big payout.
Why would the former pay obscure artists more? Are non-paying users more likely to listen to mainstream artists? Or do fans of obscure artists just play fewer songs each? Is ad revenue shared in the same proportions, but just lower per user? Is revenue really shared on the basis of plays, rather then playing time? If so, and if obscure artists make longer songs, does that contribute to their lack of revenue?
I don't want the obscure artists to get more ― or less, for that matter. I want the artists I listen to to get my money, obscure or not. That's a simple transaction and has worked forever. If I buy a CD from artist X, I know I won't be supporting artist Y with my money, just X. If I then want to listen to Y, I can support them as well. But in any case Z won't be getting any of my money because they make noises I don't consider music.
It doesn’t seem obvious that smaller artists have audiences who stream music less than listeners to Taylor swift. Because that’s the only way the current system might rip people off.
That's not entirely true, since by buying X's CD you're also giving money to the label/publisher of that CD, who may be allocating that money to Y if Y is also one of their artists. However, overall I agree that the buy-a-CD model makes it more clear where your money is going.
A sibling commenter linked a great study:
https://legrandnetwork.blogspot.com/2021/02/user-centric-mod...
So I have never even opened Swift’s page on Spotify — let alone played a song (if there are fans here, please don’t come after me). I pay for Spotify. So did you mean to say the largest portion of my monthly fee goes to Taylor Swift?
If you listen to more music than the average listener, those artists get paid out more than what you put in, and if you listen to less, they get less. But on average it all levels out anyway.
Unless people who listen to a particular artist on average stream less music entirely. Which doesn’t seem to be the case.
If you listened to less music than the average person then some of your fee went to the people who listened to more music, and the other way round if you listened to more music. Which is going to average out in the end anyway, while massively simplifying the accounting. Spotify can also tell artists exactly how much they are getting paid rather than having to wait for the end of the billing period to work it out. Only to come to roughly the same amount anyway.
There is no tracing routes with a pooled fund. Only inputs and outputs. And the outputs would seem to be pretty much identical in the pooled system vs individual pools per user.
If payed by total listens Taylor gets 99%.
Now if those 99 listens are from the one user and the other from the other user. Paying by listens ratio per user, Taylor will get 50%.
Over the entire population of Spotify listeners you are going to have high and low listen count users that average out.
1. Put all money in a big pot and pay out depending on all streams.
2. Put your money in a pot and pay out depending on your streams. Do the same for all users.
The total sum of money stays the same. If your audience listens to more music than the average Spotifier then you will get paid less using method 2.
All in all the difference isn’t massive.
Is there a market that actually uses a system like that? It just seems convoluted. It sounds like just some idea someone made up to back into paying some artists more in favor of others. And I'm not even sure it would have the desired effects. I'm sure Swift is on a lot more playlists that Spotify pushes than Obscure Artist.
Yes, it wouldn't be a direct relationship between number of plays and payout. It would instead be a direct relationship between user payment and payout.
>Is there a market that actually uses a system like that?
Yes, physical media.
Number of streams shouldn't necessarily be directly related to payout anyway. If you purchase a CD the artist gets that payment once, and you can listen to it as many times as you like.
That's simply wrong. Another commenter posted a study that looked at exactly this question, https://legrandnetwork.blogspot.com/2021/02/user-centric-mod... . It's not an enormous change, but on Spotify the top 10 artists would have their income reduced 12.5%, to be redistributed to lower tier artists.
But if the distribution would have been equal, then there will ne zero difference with the user based distribution. Because it would be the exact same number counted differently.
User A listens to artists 1, 2, 3 in a 50%, 25%, 25% proportion on a 15$ sub (same below)
User B listens to artists 1, 2, 4
User C listens to artists 4, 5, 6
So by current system, artist 1 has 4 plays, 2 has 2 plays, 4 has 3 plays, 3 and 5 and 6 have 1 play. So 1 gets 15$, 2 gets 7.5$, 4 gets 11.25$, and 3,5,6 all get 3.75$
If we recalculate to the per user scheme, then from user A, 1 gets 7.5$, 2,3 get 3.75$. From B, 1 gets 7.5$, 2,4 get 3.75$. And from C, 4 gets 7.5$, 5, get 3.75$. Sum it up and we get 1 get 15$, 2 gets 7.5$, 4 gets 11.25$, 3,5,6 get 3.75$.
It's very basic arithmetic, from shuffling numbers and then summing them up differently, the total won't change.
So what needs to be changed is a skew artificially made towards big names, that is the real root cause.
to make it simple
-----
userA: 999 plays of artist A: pays 5$
userB: 1 play of artist B: pays 5$
pool-centric: A gets 9.99$, B gets 0.01$
user-centric: A gets 5$, B gets 5$
-----
bonus: in spotify system artists under a certain threshold get 0$. which gives guaranteed distortions even if you suggest ideal conditions for the pool/user thing up there to not matter (independence and large numbers).
extra bonus: spotify also dilute the pool by running mass music production sweat shops aaaaand by running more and more AI music for which they run the money back to themselves.
in practice small artists lose money on spotify, and a significant section of spotify artists would earn more selling a few cds a year on bandcamp than on their spotify ever.
it's a scam.
Some will make less. Some will make more. In the end the pie stays the same: ~70% of Spotify’s revenue.
Dissatisfaction with the payout is only one aspect of why some artists are leaving Spotify. I personally find it super weird how much Spotify profit is getting funnelled into arm manufacturing. Like why should listening to music help new AI drone tech to get developed? Tf?
Assuming you pay taxes, your money is probably being funneled to arms manufacturing anyway.
In the article they do mention Massive Attack, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof and Hotline TNT delisting their music and then further speaking out in protest- removal being 1/3 parts of the listed "goal".
But really it seems like the discourse on Spotify is making waves again with the recent reveal of Ek's Helsing investment. Given this is the same dude who said that "the cost of making content is close to zero", it's understandable that people are speaking out.
Never heard of the others, but only King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard seems to be totally gone.
They want the listeners to change their habits away from Spotify and engage with music differently -- on another platform -- e.g. maybe like Bandcamp. The listeners would discover music at Bandcamp and make purchases there where the artists get more money.
But only a minority of hardcore fans will buy music à la carte like that. Most other mainstream listeners would prefer to have ~100 million songs for a flat monthly subscrption. The tiny 0.04 cents per stream is not a concern of the subscribers. That's why it's an uphill battle.
The vast majority of music listeners aren't music collectors. Those people mostly want to listen to what others are listening to in order to share something in common. It's a very different approach to music than the collector who's looking for new music they've never heard of.
Artists typically fall into the latter category and want everyone else to also. They fail to understand that music, for most people, is a cultural touchstone, not a hobby.
Actually no. Or at least not completely. Radio-style play has mechanical licensing with statuatory royalties. Users wouldn't be able to request specific songs, but they could request a similar songs or similar artists station and likely hear your music.
The trade you make is reach, you can't benefit from being discovered on Spotify, it's harder for prospective fans to become fans when they can't listen to your music. You could upload your music to other places but they seem to largely be against "uploading it online and giving it away for free."
This sounds very much like everyone does not want artists to get better payouts. (At least not all artists.)
If more than 50% of what listeners end up paying for the subscription goes to the artists, I guess they'd prefer that, rather than the money going elsewhere.
Netflix was the first ever streaming service I canceled the subscription without feeling I had lost anything, after more than 10 years as a paying subscriber their quality declined so much I didn't care about it at all. It's been 3 years and I never thought about subscribing again.
Where did you get this arbitrary number from?
And no, it doesn’t look like everyone wants artists to be paid more. What everyone wants is cheap access to a large catalog.
But, one simple question: how are the Creators (especially those not signed with a Big Bad Label) expecting to be paid in this marvelous post-Spotify era? Because, fact: like 80% of revenue (if not more, and the rest is pretty much evenly divided between YouTube, the remains of iTunes, and some niche portals like Beatport) flows through them these days.
And, for all Spotify's flaws, that revenue stream might be something to have a pretty good plan to replace, and I don't see any hints at that in the linked article?
Even if 80%[1] of all money is going through large platforms like Spotify and YouTube, the real question is how much % of indie money is going through them.
The best bet for semi professional or indie today is to do live performances, sell merch or have fans on Patreon or get viral on TikTok and so on, nobody is living on Spotify money.
Platforms are more used to grow audiences and improve discoverability than make any real money as an indie artist.
---
[1] Big platforms combined may very well be 80%, however I doubt Spotify alone is 80% of the even the English market, let alone global where it is just many times pretty much only YouTube or some regional player bundling services.
[2] iTunes may not be significant, Apple Music and Amazon Music are. They have enormous distribution due to install base and Prime, and they sell a ton of bundled deals with telecom and other packages.
Then there is TikTok which is huge for music too
There are other players in streaming like Satellite with Sirius XM or traditional FM/AM Radio who also pay for streaming music.
The organized music market is pretty vast, Spotify hardly controls 80% of anything.
To your point though, streaming allows people to listen to a greater variety of music for little cost, and I’ve discovered music through other peoples playlists that have been really enjoyable. I think most people want to have a larger library without paying more and that’s a significant part of the problem.
Like 99.98% of the music I've ever looked up is there, even pirate sites don't have that much coverage.
Doesn't Spotify do lossless now? How can it get better than lossless?
> Great playlists
That sounds like a skill issue if I've ever heard one.
Also that's a really rude comment. Curated playlists are great for those of us who aren't regularly exposed to new music in any other way.
How absolutely entitled. Almost 20 years ago I would have killed for a distribution platform as slick as what there is today. Is it a generational thing maybe? I don't know, but just because you create doesn't obligate people to consume.
But I think that's more about lack of knowledge rather than anything else.
I want universal basic income just so the most artistic and interesting of us can go and try cool innovative stuff without fear of death.
It is the most successful UBI experiment.
Now that the gravy train is over, I suspect open source projects will suffer and will increasingly be at the mercy of corporate funding or VCs.
How is this that much different to criticizing the cut that a dominant distributor takes from vendors in e-commerce or video games?
Even if you exclude all the discoverability functionality, just the pure distribution aspect, at this scale, makes the Spotify system impressive. Why should that system and all the work that went into it, be free?
I don't think there are any legal barriers for someone to go ahead and build their own music distribution system that is more fair than Spotify. It's just a matter of putting in the time, no?
As a consumer, my primary objection to streaming platforms is that you don't own any of the stuff you pay for. That's obviously different to these artists' main objection, but if the solution they propose (whether it's switching to Bandcamp or something else) also addresses that concern I could get on board with it (and will always have sympathy for artists who want a bigger cut vs the middle man).
I do still pay for Spotify despite that objection. I find it provides just enough value to justify the cost. I have found it good for discoverability and, unlike other streaming services, Spotify gives me access to pretty much any music I might like to listen to. (Others with more niche tastes might disagree.)
I'm happy to stream, ownership or not, if my song isn't on a service, I just listen to others.
The convenience and discovery is just too good for me to ever want to pay per album or song.
If they went away tomorrow, that spend would not magically be transferred to a more artist-friendly form or platform. I'd just not pay for new music. There's already more than enough old music I own/free music than I would ever need.
I can't imagine I'm an outlier.
I’m not sure why people believe that artists selling copies of their music being a viable source of income in itself is something that’s necessarily critical and/or a moral imperative to preserve. Humans made music for thousands of years before technology made that possible, and after some decades technology has now made that particular business model less lucrative (it’s now very easy and basically free to share essentially unlimited copies of a piece of music, which has tanked the monetary value of such copies)
As long as music is being made, I don’t think it’s a disaster for society that some artists’ preferred way of making money isn’t so viable anymore (if it ever was - what percentage of acts were ever making real bank selling albums?)
Yes, anyone can _do_ music at little cost at any time. But there is a real cost to make "good music" and it isn't in sheer musicianship or equipment - it's also in time.
I've never done music full time but I've been in several studio and live sessions and I assure you it's exhausting and time consuming.
Even if the answer is ”fewer”, and we thought that was such a horrible thing that we had to have a massive social movement or introduce strict regulation to move away from streaming, how would you put the genie back in the bottle when piracy is so easy, and people have become used to the technological advancements we’ve made?
Before the internet, you weren't going to get famous without being an actor, musician, artist, author, etc.
Sam Walton was not famous the way Elon or Jeff Bezos are famous.
I would think there is less because music just isn't as important as it use to be and there are just so many other creative outlets now. The hard thing to account for though is electronic music. You would have had to spend quite a bit of money in the 90s just to make a track and now you can do it basically for free.
If it was 1990, I would be in a band because there wasn't much else to do. Being in a band then was like having a podcast now.
The music industry was never this static thing either. There isn't much before 1950. It is hard now to imagine how huge folk music was in the 70s. MTV was such a big deal in my youth but that only had a 25 year run of being relevant if that.
I don't think there is a real alternative to streaming or the power law distributions that are going to come with that.
I don't want this to come off as backpedaling - the original comment I was responding to said that if the artist became unavailable on streaming services, then they would not engage with the artist. As it turns out, artists don't rely on these people for income.
Both streaming services and piracy have the knock-on effect of increasing concert and merchandise sales (through reach), which have much higher margins for artists. I've obtained studio grade LP's from several artists entirely for free, as they have the expectation that we'll be paying them in person at concert. If the only way you support your artist is through a streaming service, then your specific engagement doesn't matter.
When I browse Spotify randomly I'm frequently surprised by coming across artists that I've never heard of with 1 million, 3 million, 15 million, etc monthly listeners, and then finding good, interesting, historically significant but obscure artists with just a few hundred or thousand listeners.
My friend, a recording artist, recently broke the 1 million monthly listeners barrier on Spotify, he's dead chuffed of course, but this is more listeners than innumerable great, classic artists. I don't see this discrepancy as a failure of the streaming system, but as a success: my friend is a young artist making money and getting good exposure.
Just saying: yes Spotify has it's faults, but it's also great too.
I will also throw some points Spotify's way for having half decent support for API clients, decent hardware support (that is for consumers, not sure what the experience is like for a developer). I have an NFC card system setup for albums and playlists so I can have a limited physical library. This uses Spotify's libraries because the support is good.
For no fuss music Tidal has been good, but it certainly has fewer artists.
The "song radio" playlists are useful though, you get a decent list of songs in a similar style when you are in that mood.
My new music discovery is almost entirely outside of Spotify, mostly online radio.
I have listened to Audiobooks so no issue with that myself, it was a sweetener when they started ramping the price after COVID. Handy for young kids as an TV alternative as well.
The desktop client UX has gotten much better over the last ~2 years. Nice compact layout options and really responsive scrolling artists with massive catalogues like in classical. It's the first time I've felt it matches their pre-Electron native UI client from 2012-ish.
Even worse, algorithmically generated playlists of algorithmically generated music
I don't see what is not intuitive about it, how could it be better?
It is intentional. That kind of poor UX takes _designing_.
Americans! Do you want to help defeat fascism in Europe? Are you tired of your tech companies capitulating to Trump? Do you really want your music to support the IDF in Gaza?
There is something very easy you can do: simply switch to Spotify. Cancel your Apple, Amazon and Google subscriptions. Pull your music from their platforms.
It is also disingenuous for millionaire artists to take this stand while they have the means to sit a war out in their mates bunker in New Zealand, and we die for them.
This has been coming up every other year. The problem is that everyone trying to build a platform wants $10. I'm not paying for two such services, because the marginal benefit over the first is maybe $2. Perhaps the solution is regulation, I dunno. But keeping marginal costs down needs to be part of the solution. Or it'll be Netflix all over where movie studios started doing the Sony thing, and (some) customers went back to pirating.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.mp3...
Now nobody including the billionaires will get my money out of me!
The problem with Spotify, Apple Music's streaming and YouTube music's algorithm is that it wants you to keep listening and it will feed you whatever it guesses you will like. Which means they will feed listeners AI-generated slop if they can get away with it. So I guess it's time for independent musicians who can prove their humanity to just put a damn ad for their music in front of potential listeners and try the direct sales routes. Mind-you, a non-AI generated ad, created by actual human filmmakers with AI-free tools and workflows.
Of course, there may be a second problem, and that's the youth who can enjoy happy music are broke. Middle-agers are too busy caring for kids and for the elderly, and thus naturally depressed and running in coping mechanisms, and that's before coming to our ossified musical tastes. And anybody older than that must use their running-out time wisely and only shop for funerary tunes. Woe if the arts should depend on our patronage.
putting the energy into LIVE music and getting a few bucks, and a case of beer to split back stage is going to be a bigger pay day than what many ,many thoudands ever get from shitif6, oops,spottyfeh, sorry guitarer here,clumsy without strings attached, anyway the web is chock full of tunes so good it's a job to give some small percentage of that a proper listen, and it seems that most of it is stashed somewhere that it just plays when you hit the button, click, music, click music, oh! look a guitar
Is blockchain the next evolution for tracking media ownership, access rights, and consumption? I hate "blockchain" being the fix for everything, but seems logical.
I used Spotify a lot until I quit many years ago not because of not having my freedom to listen (their approach of lossless drove me away). I use Tidal, it is a piece of sh*t, the player is made by unattentive stupid children with no clue, the single worst piece of software I had the unfortune to use, but the access to the catalogue and the reasonable price I got keeps me there still. I can browse, discover, build up my own beautiful playlists that I listen to for months so the individual palylists become the sound of an era in my life.
If there was a different service from musicians themselves with rich database - must contain lukewarm lemonade too! as sometimes it is lukewarm lemonade day, also oldies and goldies - and not too high prices but a better player (not hard to do), I'd switch in an instant never looking back.
Just like I did with Spotify (for a different reason).
I use the free version and put up with the ads. I make playlists of my favorite songs, sometimes Spotify suggests great music I didn’t know about.
It’s superior to any other way of listening to music, for me. I’ll keep using it ‘till something better comes along. Hooray for progress!
Nobody (not enough) pays for music, and streaming made that even more true.
Most of the music I don’t intentionally listen to, I instead hear is often out in public (or outside my control): grocery store, restaurant, hotel lobby, subway station, park, neighbors speaker, person on a bike, etc.
A lot of this music is often either the radio or ad-based streaming platforms.
The only people who pay for music are either die hard fans or people who have been guilted into paying for a streaming subscription. Often times even die hard fans/enthusiasts will purchase an vinyl LP or only use the streaming purchase to offset the pirating they do for high quality formats or rarity reasons.
Most listeners of music are not paying for it; if you are…you’re a sucker.*
* I have a Tidal subscription
I'm sorry the artists get screwed over, but this needs to be worked out between them and Spotify and whatever music labels are in the picture.
Investing the Spotify fee every month into my own music collection is a great investment, and it has meant that I am actually listening to the music and not just playing the same songs off a Spotify playlist every now and then again
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