I call bullshit. Yeah I’m sure they spend 2/3 of their income on rights holders, mainly Joe Rogan, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift.
The average musician isn’t making shit, and yet the spotify execs are sipping champagne.
The rights holders are the record labels. As much as artists want to complain about Spotify they should direct their criticism to their record labels.
Spotify is far from powerless in this arrangement too. Nobody is forcing them to be in this business.
Pretty sure Spotify is more powerless than you think. The record labels nearly burned their industry to the ground in the 2000s over digital piracy.
Netflix wouldn’t be around today if it wasn’t for their move into becoming their own movie studio thanks to just about every big Hollywood studio pulling out, arrogantly thinking that they can each run their own service for a bigger slice of the pie. Newsflash, it’s going really bad. Especially for Disney, who deserve everything coming to them.
I reckon if Spotify makes even a small move to undermine the big record labels, they would yank all the popular music. Spotify either wouldn’t last long or best case they down size into a niche music platform.
it’s going really bad. Especially for Disney, who deserve everything coming to them. <
I can’t like a statement hard enough. Amen.
Hold on, what’s going to happen to Disney? I got the impression they’re really eating into Netflix’ market share. They basically own a huge chunk of the content most people care about.
Basically the moral of the story is that Spotify should have followed in their footsteps and become their own record company.
Moral of the story is people should stop lowering their standards so those richer than them can be even richer.
What about independent artists?
If they were getting as many listens as Taylor Swift, I’m sure they’d be making bank. But they’re not. A listen ain’t worth a lot and never has been.
“not making profits”
Just massive salaries and equity
You know they don’t pay the artist directly? Like with physical the ones taking the biggest share are the labels… Also the average musician isn’t making shit cause compared to a very few bigger artists they represent an extremely low percentage of the overall streams on the platform.
Average musician probably makes more than you think https://youtu.be/qjb-pJIfQXI?si=Zbi54GvD3NqomIrv
Taylor Swift somehow being a hallmark of the times makes me wish the whole world would end in a giant ball of fire.
She’s not the worst role model we’ve ever seen, so at least the world isn’t completely mad. I think her music is mediocre, and don’t understand the fanfare, but to each their own.
I think as a person she’s fine. But as a branding machine… meh.
I’m glad bands I like aren’t big so I can afford to go to their shows :)
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I’m 30…and you? (kinda afraid to ask at this point lol)
I’ll take “Unethical accounting” for 500, Alex
How is this news? The price you pay for media of any kind I can think of goes mostly to the rights holders, not the companies physically delivering it to you. You may object to the rights holders being shitty record labels, but that term also includes independent artists. And more to the point, rights holders are by definition the people who are entitled to profit from selling access to the media they own.
If you want to get pissed at someone, get pissed at the record labels sharing a ridiculously small part of their licensing fees with the artists who make their product.
Man, a lot of people here don’t understand how the music industry works. From the perspective of someone who’s been loosely following the music industry, what I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter if Spotify gave up 2/3rds of their revenue, or 100% of it, the artists would still make fuck all.
Why?
The labels love taking their cuts and as a result, artists make very little. Instead of taking the blame for giving artists a <10% cut of the label’s revenue from their music (my understanding is that it’s pretty common for musicians to get <10%, sometimes <5% if you’re on a particularly shitty label), the labels are blaming platforms like Spotify.
Now, I’m not saying that Spotify is blameless, however I think there’s a lot of misdirection from the labels going on. I don’t remember anyone complaining about pre-spotify services like Pandora Radio for not paying out enough when they were largely ad-supported, which is another reason I’m not totally buying the, “it’s cause it’s free” argument either.
Fuck, remember Pandora?
Pandora didn’t replace buying music. They did not add the “on demand streaming” option until after Spotify was prevalent.
And yet, they still aren’t even close to the highest paying service when it comes to musicians getting their cut.
https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-services-pay-musicians
It’s hilarious that Napster now tops the list. I use Tidal, myself, since it’s got great quality audio. Spotify is horrible quality for 2023.
Spotify is horrible quality for 2023
To my surprise, even Spotify’s standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify’s standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar’s ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that’s apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn’t grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would’ve added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).
Our conclusion is that the quality “difference” is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.
i figured having volume normalizer off would be the best quality
i think a lot of people that complain about the “bad” quality simply have the volume normalizer on, which makes the quality worse for some songs
I wholeheartedly disagree. I have more trained ears then most (worked in video production), but not by much, and when i got my AirPods Max, I thought they sounded awful at first. They were crunchy and dithered sounding in this weird way. I was gonna return them, but I did some testing, and discovered that I was hearing Spotify compression. I turned up the quality as high as it would go in the settings, and that made it a little bit better, but I could still hear it, and can to this day. I did some further testing by signing up for a tidal free trial, in addition to Apple Music. Listening in lossless was an entirely different experience, I could definitely tell the two apart blindly, without even specifically looking for sound quality. There were like 2 to 3 instruments in a given song that I wouldn’t be able to pick out in the lower quality audio, that I could easily pick out in the lossless audio. You have to have a pretty decent pair of headphones to be able to hear it, but some of the higher and consumer stuff can definitely hit that level, and when you do, it’s not something you have to go looking for, it sounds very obvious.
Do you realize AirPods Max/iPhone is capped at AAC/256 kbps over BT, and needs DAC -> ADC -> DAC to use a wired connection?
Yep, absolutely this.
You cannot listen to music losslessly with AirPods Max, cabled or not.
From Apple’s own site: “The Lightning to 3.5 mm Audio Cable was designed to allow AirPods Max to connect to analog sources for listening to movies and music. AirPods Max can be connected to devices playing Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless recordings with exceptional audio quality. However, given the analog-to-digital conversion in the cable, the playback will not be completely lossless.”
If someone thinks AirPods Max sound amazing, they’re agreeing how good compressed audio can sound, whether they realise it or not.
If someone thinks AirPods Max sound amazing, they’re agreeing how good compressed audio can sound, whether they realize it or not.
Yes! (Kinda) I’m not saying lossless music is the end all be all, and honestly in normal life I prefer non-lossless, because its SOO much less data, and you can hardly tell the difference in normal listening anyway. What I was trying to express was how bad badly done compression can sound. Good compression exists, and it can sound nearly identical anecdotally, but there is a limit to how low you can go before you start hearing it, and I’m trying to say that I think Spotify has chosen a rate below that level by default. I switched to a higher profile and the problem is mostly gone.
There may be other factors at play, Apple quite likes to compress stream data between their own devices, even on “standard” protocols (just look at their monitor collaboration with LG where they did the same thing to exceed the max resolution of an existing display signal). Regardless, there is a difference, and it is not a small one. It was immediately obvious to me after listening to a single song. Something about the pipeline is crunching audio to the level where it’s obviously degraded. This isn’t audiophile grade splitting hairs and “I think it sounds ever so slightly better with these gold cables” it was like the difference between 480p and 1080p video to me, enough to be actually annoying during normal listening, even if I was actively trying to forget about it.
Ok it sounds like what you experienced was caused by something completely different than detecting an audible difference between Spotify’s 320 kbps AAC encoding and lossless encoding, encoded over a 256 kbps AAC BT codec, but if you actually want to do a true A/B blind test of 320 kbps vs. lossless on your setup, here’s the place to do it:
https://abx.digitalfeed.net/ (select the first link - “The statistically valid Tidal test to make”)
I’m not trained in anything useful but I had a similar experience. It was like upgrading from a 720 screen to a 4k screen.
as a young 20 year old i doubt those services have new music. Spotify has albums SAME day
im sure that works great for oldies like blink182 tho
They do
Profit can be distorted based on how much you’re paying your employees.
In this case royalties paid out to imaginary property holders means spotify is functioning exactly how it should. Those people are profiting, spotify’s employees are being paid. Everyone directly involved has more money than they need.
except tht artists, which is more the fault of the rights holders in this case really…
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I will be ready to pay for Spotify again if they bring that.
Honnestly Deezer Student has “HIFI” file on in so it’s great for me But I’m quite certain when Spotify HIFI will be launched I’ll already pass on to Quobuz because I wont be a student anymore
Poor Spotify. Here’s a Link to a documentary about the dark side of Spotify, by Slightly Sociable. Their illegal business, extortion of artists and support for scamming.
They just want your personal and behavioral data to sell to third parties for shady purposes. After all, AI’s don’t feed themselves
How does me listening to “I’m Blue” on repeat help, especially in case of AI? I fail to see the connection.
Still not paying for it.
Amen! Ownership counts!
I mostly listen to smaller bands and buy their stuff on Bandcamp. It sucks that Bandcamp was sold (twice now) and will probably go down the shitter, but that seemed like a more sustainable model. Also buying music is nicer than renting it for me.
Team Bandcamp as well. I’ll be sad if it degrades. My hope is it survives long enough to be discovered by everyone as they get sick of the shit music streams on Spotify, Pandora and their ilk
ok. they should get a job then. pull themselves up by their bootstraps
This is why I thought some of their recent actions that hurt the lowest played artists was strange, you want to encourage artists to NOT use the big publishers to help break their triopoly.
I think the most recent changes are fine in practice, but the optics are not great which probably matters a lot.
Even the smallest artists are making more than 1000 streams yearly. The only ones they are hurting are AI generated songs.
FYI it’s 1000 per track per year, not per artist.
I agree though, I went through my instrumental playlist which has loads of indi stuff and the smallest I found had 10,000 plays
Edit - looks like I got a notification for this 4 days late…
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I believe Spotify is largely responsible for its own financial struggles. Knowing that 2/3 of their revenue goes to the greedy labels, they should consider scaling back on operational costs and excessive investments in advertising and celebrity podcast deals.
In a way, it serves them right. Spotify plays a significant role in transforming music into a product akin to fast food, prioritizing mass consumption over artistic value. This approach not only impacts their profitability but also contributes to a broader devaluation of music as an art form.
So fuck Spotify.
Spotify plays a significant role in transforming music into a product akin to fast food, prioritizing mass consumption over artistic value.
Have you never heard of Top 40 before?
Absolutely, I’m aware of the Top 40, but my point is about how services like Spotify are amplifying the dominance of this type of quickly digestible music. While the Top 40 has always reflected popular tastes, Spotify intensifies the focus on ephemeral hits rather than promoting a diverse range of music and independent artists. Additionally, the technology behind Spotify, where artists or labels aren’t compensated if a track is skipped within the first 30 seconds, further influences this trend. It shapes not only what we listen to but also how we value music.
I don’t agree with that at all. I’ve started listening to 10x more small artists via Spotify than I ever had through any other medium. They’ll never be on the radio or anything like that. Spotify has recommended these artists based on what I listen to, I haven’t sought them out.
I don’t believe radio pays artists anything do they?
My experience has been different. Even without Spotify, I’ve found a large number of new bands over the years through websites, reviews, and music videos on YouTube. This shows that there are multiple ways to discover diverse music.
My main concern is about the broader impact of streaming on the music industry. While Spotify can be a fantastic tool for discovering music, it’s important to consider how its business model and algorithms might influence musical production and consumption patterns. Yes, artists do receive royalties from radio plays, but the system is different from streaming. My worry is that the streaming model, especially in terms of payment structures and engagement strategies, might inadvertently prioritize certain types of music, potentially overshadowing the rich diversity in the music world.
I think you’re twenty years too late on that worry. Most artists didn’t make any money once iTunes came out and singles became popular.
