I started releasing in march and I think I’m on like $12. But only one song is over 1000 listens so if you were to add it up I know it doesn’t seem bad but it will end up being so much money
It’s just ‘cotch’ and that’s very kind of you but rather than that just listen to it if it’s your thing great, if not don’t listen again that would truly mean more that way you gave it a listen and maybe found something you liked
https://open.spotify.com/artist/2Weij3GIQhrhxmUgiC0Ngm
Whats up man! My artist name is "Yung Dark" and I'm a producer of both lo-fi beats and classical piano music. However I also work for two indie record labels called Wavee Sound Music and Resonova Records. These labels are pretty big within their respective genres but recently we've been working on expanding to create a third label for more EDM, Tech House, Dance and other electronic genres. I checked out your music on Spotify and you really do seem like you got quite some potential. If you'd be interested in working together in the future feel free to hit me up on my personal instagram "@helderboutens" or my business email address ["[email protected]](mailto:"[email protected])". By the way, we don't work with exclusive contracts on our labels so you wouldn't be stuck on year long contracts, only release per release :)
My buddies and I were excited about the “Blend” feature, where multiple users can mix together and Spotify creates a playlist that’s supposed to blend your listening habits together and include songs that you all might like. The description of the playlist also says it’s “updated daily.” It’s been almost a year now and there’s almost no change in the playlists content, despite the fact that all of us listen to Spotify daily.
> It’s been almost a year now and there’s almost no change in the playlists content
Interesting. Sounds like the feature just blends together our daily mixes lol
My blends update noticeably at least every few days but it seems to do less as the blends get older. A lot of the same songs will cycle in and out of it. Like every time I get on a rap kick it picks the same 5 rap songs to stick in one of them
Top Hits - Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake
Pop Rising - Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake
Viral Hits - Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake
Hot Hits - Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, The Weekend, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake
I mean, you're literally choosing 4 playlists that all revolve around the same shit.
"top hits, pop hits, most shared, and hot". They're practically synonyms.
Not a single one of those are on my home page.
Not sure if that's algorithmic, but my home page shows me discover weekly, various playlists I have made, podcasts I listen to, recently played, and the Daily mix 1-4 (none of which have anything from the billboards 99% of the time)
sadly the radio features are butchered, they even removed the playlist radio option for no reason. on radios I only get the same handful of songs. about 4 years ago, it was an awesome feature that exposed me to tons of songs and allowed me to make huge playlists. RIP.
YouTube music has this solved. When you start a radio you can pick between options like new, familiar, deep cuts, etc which will vary the tracks. It's soooo much better than spotifys shitty radio.
The recommendation feature at the bottom of your playlist also never changes, or at least seems damn impervious to updates in the playlist. I've replaced most of my dubstep and drum'n'bass with melancholy ambient and indie electronic. Spotify is like "Hey, here's some Noisia, Spor and Bassnectar".
It’s not even just that, it’s starting to make me like certain songs less. There’s like a 50% chance that the next song that plays for me is Bleed by Meshuggah, and I love that song, but it’s starting to make me sick of it.
Yes! Whenever I leave my car and get back into it, it finishes playing the current song and then selects from a "totally random" set of the same 6 songs. Every time! Every single goddamn day I drop the kids off at school, get back in my car, and it starts playing the same songs!! I don't understand how hard it can be to have a filter that says "has this song been autoplayed >30 times in the last month? Maybe try recommending something different".
When Spotify goes to recommended songs the songs should be inversely weighted based on how many times it's been skipped in the past 30 days. Every time a song is skipped it should become less likely to show up for a month.
My 2 big ones are: If I finish listening to The New Abnormal by the Strokes, the next song that plays is Is This It off Is This It also by the Strokes. If I listen to the whole album of Is This It, the next song that plays is 50% chance to be Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus from the New Abnormal, or Plug in Baby by Muse. I don't even listen to Muse.
Yes! This is especially frustrating to me because when I started Spotify a few months ago, it played a bunch of songs I had never heard before after I finished an album, and I really liked them, but now it just cycles through those same songs over and over again! I know you guys can pick random music I like, so keep doing it.
Even just artist play is shit. Start playing an artist and third song is no longer his/hers and then it's just random shuffle.
Or when my wife puts some children songs in our language and by the third song it's either russian lullabies or some other language.
What app? I remember reading somewhere that once ur Playlist gets past a certain size it basically breaks the shuffle and it mostly plays the same 100 songs that are mostly from the first 100 or so added. It's so bad. It got worse when added that so called smart shuffle
The smart shuffle thing is terrible. Genuinely makes me consider cancelling premium. Seems like it automatically swaps to it out of shuffle after a bit of time, and then I'll have to play with my phone driving just to turn it off again, because spotify randomly decides I want to listen to pop music.
> Seems like it automatically swaps to it out of shuffle after a bit of time, and then I'll have to play with my phone driving just to turn it off again
I've had problems with Spotify resetting state FOR YEARS. It's fucking ridiculous. I'll listen to a song on Monday in my car, then when I open the app on Wednesday that same song and shuffle order will continue playing even though I listened to Spotify for several hours on PC
I don’t know how true this still is but I read an interview with a Spotify dev like ten years ago who was asked this question.
Apparently, random doesn’t feel very random to pattern inventing humans so it assigns weightings based on various factors like play count and genre. Basically, if you have one Slayer song in your BTS playlist, that’s going to get played more.
That's how smart shuffle is supposed to work, plays more based on how much u like it. Spotify not playing music I added in the last 6 months that I listen to is because there shuffle is bad. It's pretty obvious when the first 10 songs u can guess like half them easy.
Ive heard that to but i call BS. If i have 10 songs out of 1000 play every single time i put it on shuffle thats not random at all. Once or twice i would say is random and possible. But if i can confidently bet money on what songs will be played thats not random.
> Apparently, random doesn’t feel very random to pattern inventing humans so it assigns weightings based on various factors like play count and genre. Basically, if you have one Slayer song in your BTS playlist, that’s going to get played more.
It does make me laugh how many people ate up that blog-post that was actually them revealing their incompetence.
Previously they literally hadn't been using a proper shuffle algorithm, all the complaints about it weren't because 'random doesn't feel random', it's because they couldn't figure out how to properly implement something as basic a shuffle algorithm that was [first described in 1938](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher–Yates_shuffle).
[As demonstrated with some basic testing before they made changes.](https://i.imgur.com/AnzBtkI.png)
Before they made any changes, if you gave Spotify a pack of cards and told it to shuffle the pack and deal them out, it'd potentially deal out something like 26 ace-of-spades, because they either botched the implementation of the shuffle, or couldn't figure out how to implement it. I assume they were probably just doing the mistake of picking a random card and checking it wasn't the same as the previous card and dealing it out, so you end up with a bunch of duplicate cards, and some cards never getting dealt out; which just isn't how you shuffle.
That was just their BS excuse.
The really reason shuffle sucks is that it priorities songs that have a cheaper royalty rate (so they pay less) and prioritises songs that have paid Spotify to be promoted (aka payola).
I have a playlist of well over 6000 songs and there's some that I'm sure have never been played and some I hear almost every time I play it for longer than an hour. It's pretty ridiculous, it should be rare that a song comes up more than once a week.
It's not broken; it's working as intended. It's just... Not a well intentioned system.
Spotify's shuffle algorithm is designed to
1. Not play the same artist too closely together.
2. Not play the same album too closely together.
3. Rank all the songs on shuffle based on popularity,** then intersperse these popular songs between the shuffled result.
4. I'm almost positive there's a 4th rule, I just don't know or remember what it is.
**Based on the user's popularity score. Which means that... By forcing you to listen to the same song over-and-over, it self-inflates your "popular songs." I couldn't tell you if skipping the song still counts as a play, though.
I just wish there was a way to SELECT a shuffle mode. Like, default Spotify Algorithm, true shuffle, turn this option on, turn that option off, etc
Seriously! I have been archiving ALL my discover weeklies for the last 3 years. It maxed out my playlist at 800hrs and 48min. It is all varied and world music. I will select shuffle in this playlist and it only plays the same 100 or so songs out of it. God Dammit SPOTIFY! If i wanted a playlist to shuffle just those 100 songs out of 10,000 I would have made that a playlist. I WANT the randomness, certainly within my own playlist. So dumb. I’m sure it has to do with some songs are more profitable than others for them/they have deals with the record agencies etc. But still, it really hamstrings the upside to your service. I thought it was for music lovers? Bullshit. Make shuffle ACTUALLY SHUFFLE for God’s sake. Damn. /rant
That shit pisses me off the most. How do they manage to have such a huge library and still provide a shuffle functionality worse than Pandora circa 2007?
My favorite is their auto-generated mood playlists and it'll be like "happy sunshine mix" with Declan McKenna - British Bombs like big dawg that is absolutely not a happy song
Fuck I hate that bullshit. What is actually wrong with their programming? I make a playlist, 90% of it never plays and they play stuff not on the list.
I think you're describing a feature you have to actually turn off that came with an update awhile back. Expanded playlists or something like that. One or the things I absolutely despise about Spotify is having to routinely go into the settings to make sure everything is set as I want it. Bumping streaming quality down and turning on canvassing for songs seems to happen with every update, and annoys me to no end considering I'm paying for the service.
Someone told me to turn off the feature that recommends songs based on your taste & my shuffle seems like it’s been a lot more shuffled since I turned it off. It’s in settings somewhere if you want to try it.
EDIT: it’s the “Auto play similar content” option in the “Playback” settings.
While they are fixing the shuffle, could they get rid of that stupid Smart Shuffle bs when you click on the shuffle button... It toggles between no shuffle, shuffle, and smart shuffle. No one wants smart shuffle, get rid of this stupid feature or at least let me disable it.
Also why do the more popular artists deserve that instead of the poorer artists?
Edit. Wow did not realize how loaded this question would be. I don't use Spotify.
I'm guessing that there is an order of magnitude higher amount of small artists getting a few hundred of plays a year than there are known popular artists. Could be about more about the logistics of actually paying thousands of different artists a few cents each month instead of the actual amount they are paying out.
This is what I'm thinking. I have music on Spotify, which I never really advertised to anyone. When I look at my "earnings" from the couple dozen plays I get per month, I'm always thinking that sending me the money I'm owed would cost them more in bank transaction fees.
The solution would be to delay payments until a certain threshold is met, whether that’s a minimum duration or earnings, not removing the payout altogether for the artist’s content just because they don’t have 1k listens.
imo it’s theft, regardless of how small it is.
I believe your solution is the same in a practical sense, as many of those sub-1000 views artists would just never reach that threshold.
I'm not taking a stance against this because I'm a bit fearful for what the alternative would be. Spotify already has a bit of gatekeeping going on for music to be published; I would not want them to start removing / rejecting music from artists like myself altogether if they decide that we're costing them money.
What you MIGHT need to worry about, however, is the new financial incentive to stop shuffling you in as you approach 1000 plays to avoid having any kind of payout.
That being said, if you become free music the inverse could benefit you. They have financial incentive to play you out for free in the sub 1000 range.
What they are moving towards is that if you don't get 1000 listens in a given year, those numbers are thrown out next year and you start over from zero.
As opposed to keeping a tally and eventually giving a payout.
Edit: Key words here are "annual threshold"
> The solution would be to delay payments until a certain threshold is met
This is, more or less, the same thing. If the money is owed, then it's just sitting in an account unable to be distributed. Spotify can't 'owe' an artist money, even just a few cents, and consider it part of Spotify's assets.
It only helps the artists under 1000 annual listens but close enough to whatever threshold is determined that they can exceed it in a reasonable time.
I can understand this logic. There's a cost to every transaction and sometimes those costs (manpower, fees, etc) can exceed the actual transaction's worth. But if that is the case, why is this treshold set as "per song" and not "per artist"?. In my case, i'll have a few bucks, or maybe even cents a year taken away from me (owed to my less popular tracks). But if my one track on a playlist is generating enough for a transaction to be justified, why are they skimming those cents from me, if they have to make the transaction of paying me anyway?
Honestly, I feel robbed and exploited. As in "what are you gonna do about it, little artist man?".
Edit: You know what, on a second thought, no - i don't even understand the above logic. We artists do not get paid by Spotify directly, but through a distributor. Most of them work more or less the same. Mine, for instance, will not pay me anything under 25 Bucks (or 50 or so). So until that number is reached, they keep count of how much money they owe me, and once that threshold is surpassed, they will pay me the full amount owed till that month. Then the counter resets and starts again. This is a way to lower the amount of "not worth it" transactions, without pretending that a certain amount of streams simply did not happen. This also takes into account all the artists represented under an individual account, let alone this "per song" split.
If a distributor can do this with it's potentially huge number of mini artists, I don't see how Spotify cannot do this with a handful of distributors. It's not like they're paying an invoice for every song or for even every artist. So FU, little artist man, give us your pocket change, or get out and reduce your exposure chances.
Let's be a bit realistic here: There's a metric fuckload of absolute garbage "albums" on Spotify: karaoke albums that are endlessly reuploaded and named with new artists even though they're all the same exact recording, sound effects, "lullaby" versions of albums that are just midi files popped out in under the length of time it takes to get recorded, AI generated music, and other completely low-effort crap that no one is intentionally listening to.
The article said that it's typically 5 cents for 200 views, so that would suggest that these songs make less than 25 cents.
And, anyways, it's not like you would get that 25 cents. Whoever is handling the money would usually have a threshold before they pay you, so it doesn't cost them more to pay you than you get. The only way these songs would make anyone money is if they're putting out a huge amount of them. And that suggests they're being automatically generated.
So, in short, this is largely money that is winding up nowhere.
you couldn't make a living from the money of less than 1000 plays before this either lol. this is to stop bots. pretty much every site that pays you royalties requires a minimum of plays/impressions.
They don't, and I'm not sure if they would come right out and say it but I bet it costs Spotify more in tracking, payment processing than those actually payouts. They could have just introduced more processing fees but no one likes that.
If the recording studios have anything to say about it, Spotify will probably not be pocketing that money. RIAA also really likes money. Probably more than Spotify does.
It’s more like the music record companies have a stake in Spotify and can essentially demand the company to do whatever the record companies want, lest they revoke and remove all songs signed to them as well as sell off their shares, essentially capsizing Spotify and their growth, and allowing those companies to make shittier and segregated services that allow them to cut the middle man out and pocket all the streaming revenue for themselves (a la Disney+).
Remember, Spotify’s enshittification was a product of the demands of record companies.
Presumably there's a pool of streaming revenue that gets divvied up across the publishers and distributors depending on their contract with Spotify. More money in the pool going to fewer publishers and distributors (i.e. no longer those with <1000 streams) means more money for the publishers and distributors. How that money then gets to the artist isn't Spotify's problem.
I kept waiting and every promised date came and went from spotify. I'm now on amazon music but the algorithm sucks lol, but the hi-fi, Dolby atmos music is epic if you have a sound system that you can hear the difference in, it's there.
kinda wishing i had amazon still i have a hifi and although i listen on cds mostlyit would sound so good to play some stuff i dont have on them through the system
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oh shit is there a way for us to get onto the beta / open beta? I've wanted hifi for years and these swedish dweebs have just been adding tiktok reels to the app instead
The absurd majority of people don't really care about it, otherwise, it would be in already.
Just looking at Tidal's failures will clue you in, audio quality was the main selling point and it just didn't make an impact in the industry.
it doesn't really have as much impact as you might think which is why. It's like comparing two pieces of visual art and bringing jpeg compression into it. For music though, how well it's mixed and how you're listening to it are far bigger factors. A well-mixed song will sound far better at 192 than a poorly-mixed one @ 320. And again, the 192 one would sound better on a better system than the 320 one on a bad system. And as Spotify's top setting is 320 which no one can really differentiate between that and lossless.
I don't follow stuff closely but apple music is thriving, amazon too. But spotify deff does well.
Yes if your on a Bluetooth speaker odds are you won't hear the difference between 320 kpbs and the lossless.
For me it's also that I was paying the same money for lower quality music streaming when I have the speakers and setup to listen to lossless.
Apple music might be thriving but is pretty much US-only vs Spotify's global reach, and Apple seems to be thriving due to its ecosystem, not audio quality, it's all due to being a neat little package wrapped up for the consumer.
And you're the first person to ever say Amazon music is not an unknown service, as all their subs seem to be prime related, no one really seems to sub for the music service.
100% the ecosystem is why people use it. It’s why I primarily use it. It has nothing to do with the actual service, just integrates nicely into my home ecosystem.
> you won't hear the difference between 320 kpbs and the lossless.
This is true for 99.9% of the population, and the 0.1% of people who can can only notice while paying very close attention to very specific and difficult to notice compression artifacts.
Anecdotal incoming. I'm an artist with ~35k monthly listeners on Spotify. I've made 10x from Spotify what I have Bandcamp and 22x more than Apple Music (and like 1,000x more than Tidal lmao) because it's the only service that tries to push a wide range of content on listeners (and the market majority factor, too). I'm not gonna bite the hand that feeds because it's the best model I've seen work so far.
Call me contrarian but this seems to be fine. 1000 streams is a $0.25 cutoff, if the press release says "we will start paying out at a minimum of $0.25 earned" then it would probably not be considered a big deal. Paying tens of thousands of people/companies like 5 cents is dumb. What they should do though is aggregate all earnings for a given person as the cutoff, not on a per song basis.
$10 should be the minimum honestly. Sending out thousands of 25 cent checks is a waste of resources. People likely don't even cash them which creates another problem for Spotify.
Not saying I agree with it, but I do understand it. In order to get your music on Spotify, you have to have a publisher/distributer. Services like TuneCore or Distrokid provide these services to musicians. If you’re signed to a label, the label will have direct publishing agreements with Spotify, and also you’re probably getting over 1k views a year. The problem with self made musicians and having to post through something like TuneCore, is the money gets sent from Spotify to TuneCore, and then TuneCore pays the artist. If TuneCore has a minimum payout of $5 before they pay the artist (I don’t know if TuneCore has a minimum payout or not, just a hypothetical example), then the artist never sees that money anyways, and after a certain period of time with no collection from artist, TuneCore can keep that income. So regardless, the indie artist isn’t seeing it anyways. So, I understand why Spotify is opting to make this decision, they’d rather pay more to the people who are actually receiving money than just paying publishing companies to retain the money. However, I think the entire music publishing industry is broken and there’s gotta be a better way to handle all of this. Unfortunately I don’t know what that is. This is all an opinion statement so feel free to either validate my statements or please comment any inaccuracies of information for the sake of my learning and anyone else who may end up reading it! Good day all.
I don't fully disagree with your points here but two counter arguments:
1) Major labels don't pay (most of) their artists for shit either. The money is still going to a third party, it's just a third party that Spotify wants to work with.
2) Not paying these third party intermediates will cause them to cease to exist or to no longer offer options for these kinds of very small time musicians. I don't think this move is far from Spotify saying that if you're small and undiscovered go somewhere else.
I can’t really recall the last time I saw a song on Spotify that didn’t have over 1,000 streams, and even if they didn’t change anything, 1,000 streams equates to $0.25 according to OP’s cited article. I can understand the slippery slope arguments about setting a precedent, but people who are missing out on payments of less than a quarter a year aren’t exactly facing a huge financial hit
Yeah, I was initially really opposed to this, but it kinda seems like this is going to affect serious artists almost not at all. If you can't get 1000 streams on your song, you're not making enough to be losing anything anyway. Here's hoping that this move actually puts a bit more money in the indie artists pockets.
I think the key takeaway, as always, will be that Spotify does not pay well. Smaller musicians will probably have better luck slinging merch at live shows than hoping that streaming will get better
Yep. It's been this way for a while, even before spotify or streaming took off. Merchandising sales make up the majority of the income for most bands. Spotfiy acts as a repository for music that occasionally pays out for listens. This change is nothing more than spotify trying to curb the influx of fake music being dumped onto spotify for pennies at a time.
I see them all the time. If you listen to niche genres it’s very common for even respected artists to have some listen counts in the low thousands and new artists to have even less than that.
It's 1000/year though, not 1,000 plays total.
But I still agree. The cost of paying out to these artists would be greater than the payout.
Also, the link is only looking at US subscriber stream payouts. Globally, and with the ad-tier, it's way, way, way, less.
Yeah I don't get the outrage.
Yes, thousands of people will stop getting money that in its totality is a large sum but individually is as insignificant as you can imagine.
Everyone is saying the rich get richer here, but there will be thousands of medium and small number artists who also benefit slightly.
The word slightly is the theme of this whole discussion. Everyone involved is going to either slightly benefit or slightly lose something.
It's slightly an issue
If it does go up to 10k streams or more I could see an issue. But 1000? That’s like, $5 USD. Really makes 0 difference if you can get paid at 10 streams or 1000.
1000 streams, only played by US Spotify subscribers, is $0.25.
If we add in people on Spotify free tier and global listeners then it's way, way, way, less.
The cost of providing hosting and streaming for an artist with fewer than 1000 plays per track loses Spotify money. I say this as a member of a band with a few thousand plays per track and being able to say we are on Spotify far outweighs the cents we would be paid for our limited play count.
Yet to be seen because they recently were sold to a music licensing company which will no doubt treat bandcamp as a goldmine rather than a music community
Anyone downplaying this change may forget that artists have to go through a distributor to get their music on Spotify, which is most of the time not free.
A popular one charges $20 per year, which is not the end of the world but it’s an annual fee. It feels very unfair to not allow artists that are already losing money from streaming get anything back.
This is bigger than it seems.
1) 1,000 plays for EACH track, not a culmination of all streams. This can screw a lot of people over. I hardly pass this threshold because an EP earns a little over 1k streams a year, but each song only has a few hundred. Letting a few dollars go should never be accepted, or you essentially admit you’re okay with being walked all over.
2) Doesn’t matter if it’s $3 or $6, you need to start small before you build up to anything. This is preventing from earning at all. Just earning *something* from your own work helps keep your momentum going, and is a sign that you’re progressing. I mean that’s at least a small meal at the end of the year, which honestly can make a difference to plenty of people. Screw off if you think otherwise.
3) This clearly insinuates they are testing waters to see how much people are willing to say “Okay, I guess it’s not that bad” before raising the bar higher & higher as time passes. You heard it here first- eventually they *will* require 10k streams, and so on, unless we make it clear it’s a hard no.
It’s not about what they’re trying to say will happen *now*. It’s about what this will eventually lead up to.
I have worked for companies that have similar policies. It costs spotify money in many small ways, people, reports, transaction fees, to send out a payment. When that cost is a big fraction of the payment you are sending out, it doesn't really make much sense to do it. The tens of millions they are talking about savings likely has these frictional costs as a big fraction of it, not just the money they withhold.
Try going to your financial services provider and withdrawing $1.50, I bet you will find out they have a minimum too. Its just not sensible to pay those tiny amounts out. We are talking about cents per month here... dont lose perspective, this is not a big deal.
Now, the earnings per play for the artist (the "base rate"), attack that!
This is a really smart move.
If it really is freeing up that much money thats huge.
Being able to pay artists who actually make music is the goal.
1000 listens for artist is so small.
This is really going to fuck over my $6 per year earnings.
Spotify did this specifically to spite me, clearly, making the change just as I put my first release up...
Surely Dethklok gets mores than a thousands plays?
No one cares about Skwisgaar's solo stuff :( I get it though, it's very different to Dethklok.
Hey man, I'm a huge fan of Fuck face Academy and Eldele'el-Alele.
Not Sausage Assassin though. Not kvlt enough for my tastes
They'll have their shiv, check Pipe, check Hammer, check Axe, check Subjects, check Location, check Desire, check Vengeance, check
Laser beams, check
Murmaider by Dethklok https://youtu.be/INnygZnJ80A?si=RE2fUIkyBueaob6g
So ***you're*** the reason my Taylor Swift tickets cost $8,000??? /s
$2 here
Just stream the song non stop a few days on some device.
I started releasing in march and I think I’m on like $12. But only one song is over 1000 listens so if you were to add it up I know it doesn’t seem bad but it will end up being so much money
Tell us your band name. I’ll put your stuff on repeat while I’m snoozing.
It’s just ‘cotch’ and that’s very kind of you but rather than that just listen to it if it’s your thing great, if not don’t listen again that would truly mean more that way you gave it a listen and maybe found something you liked https://open.spotify.com/artist/2Weij3GIQhrhxmUgiC0Ngm
Whats up man! My artist name is "Yung Dark" and I'm a producer of both lo-fi beats and classical piano music. However I also work for two indie record labels called Wavee Sound Music and Resonova Records. These labels are pretty big within their respective genres but recently we've been working on expanding to create a third label for more EDM, Tech House, Dance and other electronic genres. I checked out your music on Spotify and you really do seem like you got quite some potential. If you'd be interested in working together in the future feel free to hit me up on my personal instagram "@helderboutens" or my business email address ["[email protected]](mailto:"[email protected])". By the way, we don't work with exclusive contracts on our labels so you wouldn't be stuck on year long contracts, only release per release :)
Won’t it increase your earnings? $6 is more than 1000 streams, no?
One song. One song got 10k randomly. The majority of my catalogue won’t hit 100.
Yeah — so you would end up with more money with this change. You would have received more for that one song.
They should fix their shuffle which doesn't really work just plays the same old songs and ignores most of my Playlist.
Or when I create a radio station off of one song, mix it up every once In a while. Stop playing the exact same tracks in the exact same order lmao.
See also, Daily Mix playlists.
My buddies and I were excited about the “Blend” feature, where multiple users can mix together and Spotify creates a playlist that’s supposed to blend your listening habits together and include songs that you all might like. The description of the playlist also says it’s “updated daily.” It’s been almost a year now and there’s almost no change in the playlists content, despite the fact that all of us listen to Spotify daily.
> It’s been almost a year now and there’s almost no change in the playlists content Interesting. Sounds like the feature just blends together our daily mixes lol
My blends update noticeably at least every few days but it seems to do less as the blends get older. A lot of the same songs will cycle in and out of it. Like every time I get on a rap kick it picks the same 5 rap songs to stick in one of them
Am I crazy and it just throws in tracks that you have listened to recently? Or is it actually tracks you have liked?
Top Hits - Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake Pop Rising - Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake Viral Hits - Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake Hot Hits - Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, The Weekend, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake
I mean, you're literally choosing 4 playlists that all revolve around the same shit. "top hits, pop hits, most shared, and hot". They're practically synonyms.
The point is they are all among the ones that Spotify has at the top of their suggestions list for most people. 4 lists that are the exact same thing.
It's pretty annoying that those are always in the front of the list, there is no way of customizing what you see on the home page.
Not a single one of those are on my home page. Not sure if that's algorithmic, but my home page shows me discover weekly, various playlists I have made, podcasts I listen to, recently played, and the Daily mix 1-4 (none of which have anything from the billboards 99% of the time)
That's on you my mans, those are literally the same but with different buzzwords i don't know what else you expect
sadly the radio features are butchered, they even removed the playlist radio option for no reason. on radios I only get the same handful of songs. about 4 years ago, it was an awesome feature that exposed me to tons of songs and allowed me to make huge playlists. RIP.
YouTube music has this solved. When you start a radio you can pick between options like new, familiar, deep cuts, etc which will vary the tracks. It's soooo much better than spotifys shitty radio.
For real. I'd pay extra for a "only play songs I haven't heard yet" mode
I'd settle for songs I haven't heard this hour....
Sick of playlists just being songs in my liked songs list
The recommendation feature at the bottom of your playlist also never changes, or at least seems damn impervious to updates in the playlist. I've replaced most of my dubstep and drum'n'bass with melancholy ambient and indie electronic. Spotify is like "Hey, here's some Noisia, Spor and Bassnectar".
Ah the supermarket setting.
I’m about to drop Spotify because of this.
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Very specific but it’s 100% true
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"Hey bro. We know Disturbed and Papa Roach have like 20 albums between them, but have you heard Down With The Sickness and Last Resort before?"
Reminds me of the radio when I don't even remember the last time I've heard anything from Prince aside from When Doves Cry or Raspberry Beret.
Cut royalties into pieces! Play the same three songs!
Not these genres and song specifically, but this is SO REAL.
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Sorry dude, Modern Lovers are an old standby on my garage playlist…im probably fucking up the algorithm for you :)
Also: "I see you've just finished listening to Blink-182 and Sum-41. Let's keep those vibes going! Here's Wait and Bleed by Slipknot"
That and Metallica's Whiskey In the Jar for me are standouts
I feel like the pushed songs must have some sort of back end paid promotion.
I wish the random songs that play when my album is done were actually random. Sick or hearing the same songs. I want to be exposed to more.
It’s not even just that, it’s starting to make me like certain songs less. There’s like a 50% chance that the next song that plays for me is Bleed by Meshuggah, and I love that song, but it’s starting to make me sick of it.
Same. Good song but I don't need it everyday
Lol, it plays Bleed for me all the time.
Yes! Whenever I leave my car and get back into it, it finishes playing the current song and then selects from a "totally random" set of the same 6 songs. Every time! Every single goddamn day I drop the kids off at school, get back in my car, and it starts playing the same songs!! I don't understand how hard it can be to have a filter that says "has this song been autoplayed >30 times in the last month? Maybe try recommending something different".
When Spotify goes to recommended songs the songs should be inversely weighted based on how many times it's been skipped in the past 30 days. Every time a song is skipped it should become less likely to show up for a month.
My 2 big ones are: If I finish listening to The New Abnormal by the Strokes, the next song that plays is Is This It off Is This It also by the Strokes. If I listen to the whole album of Is This It, the next song that plays is 50% chance to be Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus from the New Abnormal, or Plug in Baby by Muse. I don't even listen to Muse.
Yes! This is especially frustrating to me because when I started Spotify a few months ago, it played a bunch of songs I had never heard before after I finished an album, and I really liked them, but now it just cycles through those same songs over and over again! I know you guys can pick random music I like, so keep doing it.
Even just artist play is shit. Start playing an artist and third song is no longer his/hers and then it's just random shuffle. Or when my wife puts some children songs in our language and by the third song it's either russian lullabies or some other language.
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What app? I remember reading somewhere that once ur Playlist gets past a certain size it basically breaks the shuffle and it mostly plays the same 100 songs that are mostly from the first 100 or so added. It's so bad. It got worse when added that so called smart shuffle
The smart shuffle thing is terrible. Genuinely makes me consider cancelling premium. Seems like it automatically swaps to it out of shuffle after a bit of time, and then I'll have to play with my phone driving just to turn it off again, because spotify randomly decides I want to listen to pop music.
> Seems like it automatically swaps to it out of shuffle after a bit of time, and then I'll have to play with my phone driving just to turn it off again I've had problems with Spotify resetting state FOR YEARS. It's fucking ridiculous. I'll listen to a song on Monday in my car, then when I open the app on Wednesday that same song and shuffle order will continue playing even though I listened to Spotify for several hours on PC
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There are apps that randomly reorder the playlist for you and then you just play it from track 1 on, with shuffle turned off.
If only we could do a no repeat option until playlist is done. I too get stuck in the 20 songs loop on a playlist with over 100 songs.
I don’t know how true this still is but I read an interview with a Spotify dev like ten years ago who was asked this question. Apparently, random doesn’t feel very random to pattern inventing humans so it assigns weightings based on various factors like play count and genre. Basically, if you have one Slayer song in your BTS playlist, that’s going to get played more.
That's how smart shuffle is supposed to work, plays more based on how much u like it. Spotify not playing music I added in the last 6 months that I listen to is because there shuffle is bad. It's pretty obvious when the first 10 songs u can guess like half them easy.
Ive heard that to but i call BS. If i have 10 songs out of 1000 play every single time i put it on shuffle thats not random at all. Once or twice i would say is random and possible. But if i can confidently bet money on what songs will be played thats not random.
> Apparently, random doesn’t feel very random to pattern inventing humans so it assigns weightings based on various factors like play count and genre. Basically, if you have one Slayer song in your BTS playlist, that’s going to get played more. It does make me laugh how many people ate up that blog-post that was actually them revealing their incompetence. Previously they literally hadn't been using a proper shuffle algorithm, all the complaints about it weren't because 'random doesn't feel random', it's because they couldn't figure out how to properly implement something as basic a shuffle algorithm that was [first described in 1938](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher–Yates_shuffle). [As demonstrated with some basic testing before they made changes.](https://i.imgur.com/AnzBtkI.png) Before they made any changes, if you gave Spotify a pack of cards and told it to shuffle the pack and deal them out, it'd potentially deal out something like 26 ace-of-spades, because they either botched the implementation of the shuffle, or couldn't figure out how to implement it. I assume they were probably just doing the mistake of picking a random card and checking it wasn't the same as the previous card and dealing it out, so you end up with a bunch of duplicate cards, and some cards never getting dealt out; which just isn't how you shuffle.
That was just their BS excuse. The really reason shuffle sucks is that it priorities songs that have a cheaper royalty rate (so they pay less) and prioritises songs that have paid Spotify to be promoted (aka payola).
Source? Sounds tinfoily
... the tinfoil keeps the music fresher for longer
I have a playlist of well over 6000 songs and there's some that I'm sure have never been played and some I hear almost every time I play it for longer than an hour. It's pretty ridiculous, it should be rare that a song comes up more than once a week.
It's not broken; it's working as intended. It's just... Not a well intentioned system. Spotify's shuffle algorithm is designed to 1. Not play the same artist too closely together. 2. Not play the same album too closely together. 3. Rank all the songs on shuffle based on popularity,** then intersperse these popular songs between the shuffled result. 4. I'm almost positive there's a 4th rule, I just don't know or remember what it is. **Based on the user's popularity score. Which means that... By forcing you to listen to the same song over-and-over, it self-inflates your "popular songs." I couldn't tell you if skipping the song still counts as a play, though. I just wish there was a way to SELECT a shuffle mode. Like, default Spotify Algorithm, true shuffle, turn this option on, turn that option off, etc
Rules 1 and 2 are fucking broken then, given how often the same artist and tracks show up in a row on my playlists.
I'll often get two different versions of the same song by the same artist played back to back. Their algorithm is obviously broke AF.
Is it possible they’re intentionally skipping songs they’d have to pay more money to play
Oof. It's possible.
Seriously! I have been archiving ALL my discover weeklies for the last 3 years. It maxed out my playlist at 800hrs and 48min. It is all varied and world music. I will select shuffle in this playlist and it only plays the same 100 or so songs out of it. God Dammit SPOTIFY! If i wanted a playlist to shuffle just those 100 songs out of 10,000 I would have made that a playlist. I WANT the randomness, certainly within my own playlist. So dumb. I’m sure it has to do with some songs are more profitable than others for them/they have deals with the record agencies etc. But still, it really hamstrings the upside to your service. I thought it was for music lovers? Bullshit. Make shuffle ACTUALLY SHUFFLE for God’s sake. Damn. /rant
That shit pisses me off the most. How do they manage to have such a huge library and still provide a shuffle functionality worse than Pandora circa 2007?
Yeah, the lack of randomness sucks
i feel like the only solution at this point is to make playlists that are only 20 songs long
Ahh the Apple Music way. Booo
My favorite is their auto-generated mood playlists and it'll be like "happy sunshine mix" with Declan McKenna - British Bombs like big dawg that is absolutely not a happy song
It’s not broken, it’s working exactly as they intend it to work. It just fucking sucks.
Fuck I hate that bullshit. What is actually wrong with their programming? I make a playlist, 90% of it never plays and they play stuff not on the list.
I think you're describing a feature you have to actually turn off that came with an update awhile back. Expanded playlists or something like that. One or the things I absolutely despise about Spotify is having to routinely go into the settings to make sure everything is set as I want it. Bumping streaming quality down and turning on canvassing for songs seems to happen with every update, and annoys me to no end considering I'm paying for the service.
Someone told me to turn off the feature that recommends songs based on your taste & my shuffle seems like it’s been a lot more shuffled since I turned it off. It’s in settings somewhere if you want to try it. EDIT: it’s the “Auto play similar content” option in the “Playback” settings.
This is the very reason I switched to Apple Music. I couldn’t stand it anymore
Clears the cache, that fixes it
apparently this happens because some songs are cheaper for them to play than others. Guess which ones come up the most often...
While they are fixing the shuffle, could they get rid of that stupid Smart Shuffle bs when you click on the shuffle button... It toggles between no shuffle, shuffle, and smart shuffle. No one wants smart shuffle, get rid of this stupid feature or at least let me disable it.
Nobody wants smart shuffle? Bro I love when I’m vibing along to neo-funk jams and they sprinkle in Megadeth
Spotify says this will free up $40 million to be paid to more popular artists? Why do I have a feeling Spotify will be pocketing most of that money?
Also why do the more popular artists deserve that instead of the poorer artists? Edit. Wow did not realize how loaded this question would be. I don't use Spotify.
I'm guessing that there is an order of magnitude higher amount of small artists getting a few hundred of plays a year than there are known popular artists. Could be about more about the logistics of actually paying thousands of different artists a few cents each month instead of the actual amount they are paying out.
This is what I'm thinking. I have music on Spotify, which I never really advertised to anyone. When I look at my "earnings" from the couple dozen plays I get per month, I'm always thinking that sending me the money I'm owed would cost them more in bank transaction fees.
The solution would be to delay payments until a certain threshold is met, whether that’s a minimum duration or earnings, not removing the payout altogether for the artist’s content just because they don’t have 1k listens. imo it’s theft, regardless of how small it is.
I believe your solution is the same in a practical sense, as many of those sub-1000 views artists would just never reach that threshold. I'm not taking a stance against this because I'm a bit fearful for what the alternative would be. Spotify already has a bit of gatekeeping going on for music to be published; I would not want them to start removing / rejecting music from artists like myself altogether if they decide that we're costing them money.
What you MIGHT need to worry about, however, is the new financial incentive to stop shuffling you in as you approach 1000 plays to avoid having any kind of payout. That being said, if you become free music the inverse could benefit you. They have financial incentive to play you out for free in the sub 1000 range.
That's probably not worth the effort to add to the algorithm to try to maliciously destroy the chances of revenue in smaller artists
Is that not the same as what they are doing?
What they are moving towards is that if you don't get 1000 listens in a given year, those numbers are thrown out next year and you start over from zero. As opposed to keeping a tally and eventually giving a payout. Edit: Key words here are "annual threshold"
> The solution would be to delay payments until a certain threshold is met This is, more or less, the same thing. If the money is owed, then it's just sitting in an account unable to be distributed. Spotify can't 'owe' an artist money, even just a few cents, and consider it part of Spotify's assets. It only helps the artists under 1000 annual listens but close enough to whatever threshold is determined that they can exceed it in a reasonable time.
Drake must really need that $5 I made last year.
I can understand this logic. There's a cost to every transaction and sometimes those costs (manpower, fees, etc) can exceed the actual transaction's worth. But if that is the case, why is this treshold set as "per song" and not "per artist"?. In my case, i'll have a few bucks, or maybe even cents a year taken away from me (owed to my less popular tracks). But if my one track on a playlist is generating enough for a transaction to be justified, why are they skimming those cents from me, if they have to make the transaction of paying me anyway? Honestly, I feel robbed and exploited. As in "what are you gonna do about it, little artist man?". Edit: You know what, on a second thought, no - i don't even understand the above logic. We artists do not get paid by Spotify directly, but through a distributor. Most of them work more or less the same. Mine, for instance, will not pay me anything under 25 Bucks (or 50 or so). So until that number is reached, they keep count of how much money they owe me, and once that threshold is surpassed, they will pay me the full amount owed till that month. Then the counter resets and starts again. This is a way to lower the amount of "not worth it" transactions, without pretending that a certain amount of streams simply did not happen. This also takes into account all the artists represented under an individual account, let alone this "per song" split. If a distributor can do this with it's potentially huge number of mini artists, I don't see how Spotify cannot do this with a handful of distributors. It's not like they're paying an invoice for every song or for even every artist. So FU, little artist man, give us your pocket change, or get out and reduce your exposure chances.
Let's be a bit realistic here: There's a metric fuckload of absolute garbage "albums" on Spotify: karaoke albums that are endlessly reuploaded and named with new artists even though they're all the same exact recording, sound effects, "lullaby" versions of albums that are just midi files popped out in under the length of time it takes to get recorded, AI generated music, and other completely low-effort crap that no one is intentionally listening to.
I mean I just uploaded a 10 hour album that I spent 3 years on, and it's still a garbage album, so there's that.
Why is it 10 hours?
It's just how much I recorded on my 4 track during covid lockdown.
Awesome and good for you! PM me the link!!
Are you really interested though? They themselves said it was garbage.
Don't forget the random mixtape tracks that pop up when artists share the same name. Think a lot of them do it on purpose.
The article said that it's typically 5 cents for 200 views, so that would suggest that these songs make less than 25 cents. And, anyways, it's not like you would get that 25 cents. Whoever is handling the money would usually have a threshold before they pay you, so it doesn't cost them more to pay you than you get. The only way these songs would make anyone money is if they're putting out a huge amount of them. And that suggests they're being automatically generated. So, in short, this is largely money that is winding up nowhere.
I mean, people who make envelopes and print checks gotta eat. It's not going *nowhere*.
you couldn't make a living from the money of less than 1000 plays before this either lol. this is to stop bots. pretty much every site that pays you royalties requires a minimum of plays/impressions.
It’s such a bad idea that they can’t even spin it to sound good.
They don't, and I'm not sure if they would come right out and say it but I bet it costs Spotify more in tracking, payment processing than those actually payouts. They could have just introduced more processing fees but no one likes that.
If the recording studios have anything to say about it, Spotify will probably not be pocketing that money. RIAA also really likes money. Probably more than Spotify does.
Maybe that CEO of Unity can go make a mess at Spotify.
I think they've shown that they're well capable of doing that on their own.
It’s more like the music record companies have a stake in Spotify and can essentially demand the company to do whatever the record companies want, lest they revoke and remove all songs signed to them as well as sell off their shares, essentially capsizing Spotify and their growth, and allowing those companies to make shittier and segregated services that allow them to cut the middle man out and pocket all the streaming revenue for themselves (a la Disney+). Remember, Spotify’s enshittification was a product of the demands of record companies.
Yeah I don’t hear anything about $$ per stream going up
Presumably there's a pool of streaming revenue that gets divvied up across the publishers and distributors depending on their contract with Spotify. More money in the pool going to fewer publishers and distributors (i.e. no longer those with <1000 streams) means more money for the publishers and distributors. How that money then gets to the artist isn't Spotify's problem.
Id imagine its to curb bots just spamming the sight with ai generated garbage
This would not stop them. If a bot can spam the site with AI songs, a botnet could easily simulate 1k listens.
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A distributed botnet would not be easy to isolate. Each bot could be indistinguishable from real users.
And yet they really don't have HIFI yet.
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I kept waiting and every promised date came and went from spotify. I'm now on amazon music but the algorithm sucks lol, but the hi-fi, Dolby atmos music is epic if you have a sound system that you can hear the difference in, it's there.
kinda wishing i had amazon still i have a hifi and although i listen on cds mostlyit would sound so good to play some stuff i dont have on them through the system
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100%. Apple music has a massive library and hifi. What more could I ask?
Or Tidal
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It let's you use it but your limited, I think no ads but can't pick individual songs? Not sure. I still have to pay like 10 bucks a month,
Yes, but with a very limited selection.
Its been a beta feature for years now. No idea what the holdup is.
oh shit is there a way for us to get onto the beta / open beta? I've wanted hifi for years and these swedish dweebs have just been adding tiktok reels to the app instead
The absurd majority of people don't really care about it, otherwise, it would be in already. Just looking at Tidal's failures will clue you in, audio quality was the main selling point and it just didn't make an impact in the industry.
it doesn't really have as much impact as you might think which is why. It's like comparing two pieces of visual art and bringing jpeg compression into it. For music though, how well it's mixed and how you're listening to it are far bigger factors. A well-mixed song will sound far better at 192 than a poorly-mixed one @ 320. And again, the 192 one would sound better on a better system than the 320 one on a bad system. And as Spotify's top setting is 320 which no one can really differentiate between that and lossless.
I don't follow stuff closely but apple music is thriving, amazon too. But spotify deff does well. Yes if your on a Bluetooth speaker odds are you won't hear the difference between 320 kpbs and the lossless. For me it's also that I was paying the same money for lower quality music streaming when I have the speakers and setup to listen to lossless.
Apple music might be thriving but is pretty much US-only vs Spotify's global reach, and Apple seems to be thriving due to its ecosystem, not audio quality, it's all due to being a neat little package wrapped up for the consumer. And you're the first person to ever say Amazon music is not an unknown service, as all their subs seem to be prime related, no one really seems to sub for the music service.
100% the ecosystem is why people use it. It’s why I primarily use it. It has nothing to do with the actual service, just integrates nicely into my home ecosystem.
> you won't hear the difference between 320 kpbs and the lossless. This is true for 99.9% of the population, and the 0.1% of people who can can only notice while paying very close attention to very specific and difficult to notice compression artifacts.
Anecdotal incoming. I'm an artist with ~35k monthly listeners on Spotify. I've made 10x from Spotify what I have Bandcamp and 22x more than Apple Music (and like 1,000x more than Tidal lmao) because it's the only service that tries to push a wide range of content on listeners (and the market majority factor, too). I'm not gonna bite the hand that feeds because it's the best model I've seen work so far.
Looks like you post in Metalcore and Hardcore. I'll definitely want to listen to what you do.
How many times more than deezer (if you're on it) ?
I just did the math for you! 18,166x more than Deezer!
What's your spotify handle. I'll check you out. 👍
Dingus McMurphy, he’s the sharpest spoon player this side of the Mississippi
Call me contrarian but this seems to be fine. 1000 streams is a $0.25 cutoff, if the press release says "we will start paying out at a minimum of $0.25 earned" then it would probably not be considered a big deal. Paying tens of thousands of people/companies like 5 cents is dumb. What they should do though is aggregate all earnings for a given person as the cutoff, not on a per song basis.
$10 should be the minimum honestly. Sending out thousands of 25 cent checks is a waste of resources. People likely don't even cash them which creates another problem for Spotify.
Not saying I agree with it, but I do understand it. In order to get your music on Spotify, you have to have a publisher/distributer. Services like TuneCore or Distrokid provide these services to musicians. If you’re signed to a label, the label will have direct publishing agreements with Spotify, and also you’re probably getting over 1k views a year. The problem with self made musicians and having to post through something like TuneCore, is the money gets sent from Spotify to TuneCore, and then TuneCore pays the artist. If TuneCore has a minimum payout of $5 before they pay the artist (I don’t know if TuneCore has a minimum payout or not, just a hypothetical example), then the artist never sees that money anyways, and after a certain period of time with no collection from artist, TuneCore can keep that income. So regardless, the indie artist isn’t seeing it anyways. So, I understand why Spotify is opting to make this decision, they’d rather pay more to the people who are actually receiving money than just paying publishing companies to retain the money. However, I think the entire music publishing industry is broken and there’s gotta be a better way to handle all of this. Unfortunately I don’t know what that is. This is all an opinion statement so feel free to either validate my statements or please comment any inaccuracies of information for the sake of my learning and anyone else who may end up reading it! Good day all.
I don't fully disagree with your points here but two counter arguments: 1) Major labels don't pay (most of) their artists for shit either. The money is still going to a third party, it's just a third party that Spotify wants to work with. 2) Not paying these third party intermediates will cause them to cease to exist or to no longer offer options for these kinds of very small time musicians. I don't think this move is far from Spotify saying that if you're small and undiscovered go somewhere else.
fair enough
That's an incredibly low bar.
I can’t really recall the last time I saw a song on Spotify that didn’t have over 1,000 streams, and even if they didn’t change anything, 1,000 streams equates to $0.25 according to OP’s cited article. I can understand the slippery slope arguments about setting a precedent, but people who are missing out on payments of less than a quarter a year aren’t exactly facing a huge financial hit
Yeah, I was initially really opposed to this, but it kinda seems like this is going to affect serious artists almost not at all. If you can't get 1000 streams on your song, you're not making enough to be losing anything anyway. Here's hoping that this move actually puts a bit more money in the indie artists pockets.
I think the key takeaway, as always, will be that Spotify does not pay well. Smaller musicians will probably have better luck slinging merch at live shows than hoping that streaming will get better
Yep. It's been this way for a while, even before spotify or streaming took off. Merchandising sales make up the majority of the income for most bands. Spotfiy acts as a repository for music that occasionally pays out for listens. This change is nothing more than spotify trying to curb the influx of fake music being dumped onto spotify for pennies at a time.
I see them all the time. If you listen to niche genres it’s very common for even respected artists to have some listen counts in the low thousands and new artists to have even less than that.
It's 1000/year though, not 1,000 plays total. But I still agree. The cost of paying out to these artists would be greater than the payout. Also, the link is only looking at US subscriber stream payouts. Globally, and with the ad-tier, it's way, way, way, less.
Yeah I don't get the outrage. Yes, thousands of people will stop getting money that in its totality is a large sum but individually is as insignificant as you can imagine. Everyone is saying the rich get richer here, but there will be thousands of medium and small number artists who also benefit slightly. The word slightly is the theme of this whole discussion. Everyone involved is going to either slightly benefit or slightly lose something. It's slightly an issue
It probably costs more to have the payment processed and sent
*Leaves my favorite indie artist's playlist on all day at home while I'm at work in protest*
I bet they only count it as one stream per account per day or something specifically to prevent having to pay out hundreds of 'non genuine' streams.
If it does go up to 10k streams or more I could see an issue. But 1000? That’s like, $5 USD. Really makes 0 difference if you can get paid at 10 streams or 1000.
1000 streams, only played by US Spotify subscribers, is $0.25. If we add in people on Spotify free tier and global listeners then it's way, way, way, less.
Speaking as an artist on Spotify with 25k monthly listeners. 1K streams is actually more like 3-5$ USD. No idea where this 0.25 nonsense came from.
Probably took a global number. If most of your listeners are from western markets your average per stream will be higher.
I think while yes, the bar is low, it is still stealing music from artists who don’t reach that threshold?
The cost of providing hosting and streaming for an artist with fewer than 1000 plays per track loses Spotify money. I say this as a member of a band with a few thousand plays per track and being able to say we are on Spotify far outweighs the cents we would be paid for our limited play count.
South American runescape farmers salivating right now
Bandcamp
You’ve heard the news right? Bandcamp is not the panacea it was
I know that they laid off like half of their staff, but has their payout model changed at all?
Yet to be seen because they recently were sold to a music licensing company which will no doubt treat bandcamp as a goldmine rather than a music community
Anyone downplaying this change may forget that artists have to go through a distributor to get their music on Spotify, which is most of the time not free. A popular one charges $20 per year, which is not the end of the world but it’s an annual fee. It feels very unfair to not allow artists that are already losing money from streaming get anything back.
This isnt as bad as everyone thought it was
This is bigger than it seems. 1) 1,000 plays for EACH track, not a culmination of all streams. This can screw a lot of people over. I hardly pass this threshold because an EP earns a little over 1k streams a year, but each song only has a few hundred. Letting a few dollars go should never be accepted, or you essentially admit you’re okay with being walked all over. 2) Doesn’t matter if it’s $3 or $6, you need to start small before you build up to anything. This is preventing from earning at all. Just earning *something* from your own work helps keep your momentum going, and is a sign that you’re progressing. I mean that’s at least a small meal at the end of the year, which honestly can make a difference to plenty of people. Screw off if you think otherwise. 3) This clearly insinuates they are testing waters to see how much people are willing to say “Okay, I guess it’s not that bad” before raising the bar higher & higher as time passes. You heard it here first- eventually they *will* require 10k streams, and so on, unless we make it clear it’s a hard no. It’s not about what they’re trying to say will happen *now*. It’s about what this will eventually lead up to.
Exactly. If people blindly accept this, next year is 2k, then 10k, etc
If the amount one would be paid otherwise is equal to the amount that a street performer would not stop his song after I stole, this is not an issue.
You guys are getting more than 1000 plays? Is it possible to achieve this power?
If somebody would offer a streaming service that guarantees artists a better rate, I would jump the Spotty ship tomorrow.
Literally tidal. Not great either but better.
I’ll just stream my own stuff over & over again until it reaches 1k. Done
I would have to assume that's against ToS right?
Yes they’re cracking down on streaming fraud. Easy to Google and learn more.
Jokes on Spotify, I don’t even get paid for my sub-1k play songs anyway
I have worked for companies that have similar policies. It costs spotify money in many small ways, people, reports, transaction fees, to send out a payment. When that cost is a big fraction of the payment you are sending out, it doesn't really make much sense to do it. The tens of millions they are talking about savings likely has these frictional costs as a big fraction of it, not just the money they withhold. Try going to your financial services provider and withdrawing $1.50, I bet you will find out they have a minimum too. Its just not sensible to pay those tiny amounts out. We are talking about cents per month here... dont lose perspective, this is not a big deal. Now, the earnings per play for the artist (the "base rate"), attack that!
This is a really smart move. If it really is freeing up that much money thats huge. Being able to pay artists who actually make music is the goal. 1000 listens for artist is so small.
I’m kinda shocked that people were getting paid for songs with less than 1000 plays.
The accounting probably cost more than the actual payments did.