That article, while not necessarily wrong, is blatant propaganda and overlooks the most important issues until the final paragraph, and even then it only touches on it once.
As someone with expansive knowledge and experience in the indie music industry, with a lot of experience dealing with streaming services and Spotify in particular the biggest problem is not the % of value created paid out, it’s what the actual value is. They don’t touch anywhere on how much you get paid per play, how the value is created, how the money flows once it’s in Spotify’s hands, etc.
As said in the article, artists and indie labels/distributors have basically no ways to reach Spotify to negotiate a price, but Spotify itself paid literal millions to license a few major labels in the beginning. The ‘value’ of a play is extremely skewed, where you’d need upwards of 10.000 plays to equal a single play on a nightly radio show for a big broadcaster like the BBC or at a festival with 500 people. On top of that, if you work hard, network properly and prepare your release you can get quite good exposure through radio, dj and other live plays, whereas with Spotify you have to be lucky that they put your pitch towards the right ‘tastemakers’, they are actively working against user (influencer)-playlists, have piss poor customer service, blatantly favour major label tracks in their algorithms and don’t actual care about their listeners.
On top of that we’ve got the obvious subscription enshittification, classic outlandish manager/director salaries and bonuses, the need to have an ever-rising share price and more.
That article, while not necessarily wrong, is blatant propaganda and overlooks the most important issues until the final paragraph, and even then it only touches on it once.
As someone with expansive knowledge and experience in the indie music industry, with a lot of experience dealing with streaming services and Spotify in particular the biggest problem is not the % of value created paid out, it’s what the actual value is. They don’t touch anywhere on how much you get paid per play, how the value is created, how the money flows once it’s in Spotify’s hands, etc.
As said in the article, artists and indie labels/distributors have basically no ways to reach Spotify to negotiate a price, but Spotify itself paid literal millions to license a few major labels in the beginning. The ‘value’ of a play is extremely skewed, where you’d need upwards of 10.000 plays to equal a single play on a nightly radio show for a big broadcaster like the BBC or at a festival with 500 people. On top of that, if you work hard, network properly and prepare your release you can get quite good exposure through radio, dj and other live plays, whereas with Spotify you have to be lucky that they put your pitch towards the right ‘tastemakers’, they are actively working against user (influencer)-playlists, have piss poor customer service, blatantly favour major label tracks in their algorithms and don’t actual care about their listeners.
On top of that we’ve got the obvious subscription enshittification, classic outlandish manager/director salaries and bonuses, the need to have an ever-rising share price and more.