i would stream 500 times but i must stream 500 more
unsigned musicians! Spotify is not for you!
niche genre enthusiasts! Spotify is not for you!
obvious declamations, i know. but if there was any doubt, recent reports of Spotify’s streaming royalty payout plans should have quelled them by now (Billboard, 24 oct).
the first proposal generated the most fuss, for Spotify expects the new 1,000-play minimum annual threshold will reallocate tens of millions of dollars per year from that 0.5% to the other 99.5% of the pool.
to paraphrase one source close to the negotiations between Spotify and the majors: ‘sod unsigned artists! what a waste of time and space… it’s not like they’re getting paid anyway!’
Often, these micro-payments aren’t even reaching human beings; aggregators frequently require a minimum level of [paid-out streaming royalties] before they allow indie artists to withdraw the money.
We’re talking about tracks [whose royalties] aren’t hitting those minimum levels, leaving their Spotify royalty payouts sitting idle in bank accounts.
source: Music Business Worldwide
the news dominated discourse in many popular and niche music crit circles, leading to takes such as this sidebar swipe in a Pitchfork article on disappearing rap microgenres:
Everyone knows the platform already pays most musicians jack shit, and now they’re apparently trying to figure out a way to cough up even less to some artists by creating a number of annual streams that must be hit in order to qualify for royalties. It seems increasingly clear that, for a company like Spotify, any music that isn’t on a major label or a high-profile indie is a waste of space. Is there anything stopping them from taking one more step and wiping away these relatively low-streaming tracks from the platform altogether?
to answer the question: no. Spotify operates the drawbridge and everyone in the 0.5% bracket can be damned if they think their garbage can rise to the top of The Algorithm™. interesting too, that ‘garbage’ to Spotify consists of unsigned and niche level musicians trying their best to scale up their art independently of major label influence, rather than the carbon emissions of remote servers streaming their millions of subscribers’ choices simultaneously. way to reach your net zero target, lads.
sadly, one can no longer throw stones from the safety of the big glass indie house that is Spotify’s non-rivalrous alternative Bandcamp. i wrote about Bandcamp’s sale to Epic Games last year, thinking i could perhaps get away with hanging around on the platform a little longer — maybe 3, 4, 5 years — before new and worsening circumstances forced me to move my lazy bones elsewhere.
turns out those days might have came sooner than i’d have liked.
source: Songtradr
much digital ink was spilt over this by those firmly in the 0.5% camp, my favourite take coming from writer Miranda Reinert in a guest post for the Hell World newsletter, who best echoed the fear many of us have over the fact that our access to niche music genres is entirely at the mercy of unscrupulous tech bro disruptors who have a callous regard of the musical content uploaded to their websites at best.
i should know better. i should know that not everything posted on the internet stays forever. the Myspace memory hole fire of 2019 showed that. so for the 0.5%, considerate curation of niche and rare musics is precious. this is why i commend and / or support the efforts of streaming alternatives such as Resonate, blamscamp, radiofreefedi, and the like for their relatively indiscriminate approach to housing musical artists of all stripes. i’m not saying the 0.5% have a human right to be heard on audio streaming platforms that kowtow to major labels, but it seems as if there is an accelerating trend for the online music industry to splinter into a visibly two-tier system of professional career artists on the one hand and hobbyists on the other. which is a shame. i should know better, but here i am, whining about it to you, dear reader. and perhaps there are more pressing issues in the music industry right now, like how to revive the careers of defunct bands using ai. but i would be surprised if you thought that any of what is happening will be for the best.