Jump to content
IGNORED

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says working musicians can no longer release music only “once every three to four years.” Spotify's stock value hit all-time highs of $50 billion this summer.


ignatius

Recommended Posts

1 hour ago, Diurn said:

but anyway what has this to do with artist revenues?

my bad, that was supposed to go in the surveillance capitalism thread :facepalm:

but there is a connection - something that've noticed here in australia during this pandemic: everybody here is streaming.

with most music venues & music stores closed, ppl are getting hooked into the convenience & disposability of streaming; kids w. YT autotune rap, 'wholistic' peeps w. apple+ tibetan new age relaxation playlists, cafes w. commercial jingles & 80's pop sets interrupted by ads for the streaming platforms, etc.

generalising, i'd say streaming is the new radio, & p much everybody seems 2b fine with that; fine with artists getting paid f all, fine with cookies all up in their digital devices, fine w. AI logarithms deciding what their pre-robotic lives will listen to. @ $13 per month, direct debit. it's a no-brainer, simply requiring a lack of effort, consideration & care on the part of those streaming. & so v few streamers seem 2b developing any taste, or sense for music in this process, & next 2 no one is handling physical formats of music - streamed audio is becoming the backdrop wallpaper airdrop o.s.t. norm 2 conformity; chewing gum for the ears, a non event for the soul.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

IMHO Spotify is pretty convenient. I hate the idea of artists getting the shaft on streaming royalties, and all the algorithms tend to make the industry even more of a manufactured business/corporate vibe in the releases. Like one of my fav derpsterp artists is Gjones, if you go to his artist radio or a radio from a playlist with his music, you're pretty much guaranteed to get Wakaan artists like LSDream, Champagne Drip, Liquid Stranger. Which I don't personally enjoy those artists, but skipping those tracks never stops the artist from showing up. Also kind of like what's already been mentioned, those lo-fi study playlists are pretty annoying. Or Vaporwave artists who release 15 albums with 20 tracks each and out of all 300 tracks there's maybe 3 compelling ones, which kind of saturates the market.

But there's some appeal to it as well. I can't help but wish labels like Analogical Force had their music on Spotify. It's a lot more convenient to play music than BC or SC or YT, especially while driving. Bandcamp should really focus on ease of use features if they want to compete. Like for example, maybe people could make a playlist from their collection? Which also helps artists promote their music by having it grouped with artists. For example I remember in like 2008 I was discovering music from Chino Moreno from Deftones making playlists on some site that doesn't exist anymore. Here's a link to a forum thread I found where they have a list of the playlists he made - from him I discovered M83 (when it was cool to listen to them) and Abstrackt Keal Agram.

Also there are some up-and-coming type beatmaker labels like Partica Music Group which is kind of similar to Wakaan, or Spicy Bois (a smaller group of dubstep producers that got pretty popular last year) - These labels or brands establish a community on Discord, SC and FB and then have a playlist of different tracks from their artists on Spotify. So there's like 40 tracks mostly all from different artists except for a couple extra from the fan favorites, and it gets updated weekly and rotates out different songs. So I can instantly discover 10 new artists while listening and make my own playlist so I don't forget them when they update the list. Also having everything readily available on Spotify makes accessing older music like Beatles or Black Sabbath's entire discography easy for the next generation. But I have a secret fear of those types of tracks having some kind of brain washing subliminal messages mixed in the normalized remaster. Kind of like the IDM artists do! Aphex Twin was on MTV after all - at the same time as Daft Punk. :rhubear2:

And you don't have to worry as much about managing as many downloaded music files. Which for most people is a good thing, but for audiophiles, we like keeping a database of music on hand just in case the apocalypse comes and the internet is shut down, we can still listen. 

But most of the time I'm broke and can't afford to be spending all the money it would cost to consume every song I listen to. I would have no problem buying a few digital only releases per month for like 7-10$ each, plus a shirt, but "the man" isn't exactly funding music listeners. I really do try to buy at least one album, especially physical, if it's an artist I want to support.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Was waiting until this thread was 10 pages deep to say:

lol @ 10 pages of discussion about a product that nobody is forcing anybody to use

Ya'll stalled out at 8 pages for a while and I thought you wouldn't deliver but you did!

  • Haha 1
  • Burger 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, hijexx said:

Was waiting until this thread was 10 pages deep to say:

lol @ 10 pages of discussion about a product that nobody is forcing anybody to use

Ya'll stalled out at 8 pages for a while and I thought you wouldn't deliver but you did!

i get the sentiment but this is liberal individualism which ignores systemic network effects and the consolidation of capital, as well as surveillance capitalism which this still definitely is through allowing offline model building of peoples' musical interests which no doubt is being used by record labels for signing artists.  its completely detrimental and worth complaining about especially on a music forum.  very relevant thread worthy of more than 10 pages

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

i get the sentiment but this is liberal individualism which ignores systemic network effects and the consolidation of capital, as well as surveillance capitalism which this still definitely is through allowing offline model building of peoples' musical interests which no doubt is being used by record labels for signing artists.  its completely detrimental and worth complaining about especially on a music forum.  very relevant thread worthy of more than 10 pages

I concur - I've discussed Spotify and YouTube with the younger generation of DJs and music enthusiasts a lot, because it needs to be understood that streaming services are without a doubt giving people the impression that music is best consumed in bulk and that it has to be as cheap as possible for the consumer, as if it was an inalienable right. I definitely understand the value of the services as a tool to find new music by association and recommendations, but it really grinds my gears that e.g. Spotify is now integrated with Recordbox and people can DJ without a personal music collection and no respect whatsoever towards the artists and labels making it possible. I know I'm a cretaceous fossil because I'm saying that out loud, but as a long-time DJ, music enthusiast and collector I couldn't imagine life without buying records - physical or digital. I'll blatantly refer to myself earlier in this thread. 

 

Edited by dcom
  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 9/27/2020 at 3:10 PM, dingformung said:

Nothing. They don't deserve better imo

Way to chop off the explanation for what I said..

But anyways, would you say it's unfair if I can't make enough money to live on just from selling bottles of my piss through the internet? Oh no I'm being underpaid I deserve to be able to do *whatever* I want and receive a good income for it !!!

  • Facepalm 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think there's some dissonance there as to what people actually get paid.. I'd say 40% of people in USA make 14$ an hour or less. Pretty sure they pay about 15-16$ an hour for a 12 hour shift entry tier amazon warehouse box stamping job. And fire for low numbers. 11$ for a fast food supervisor job. That's after you prove yourself to be responsible and get raised from 9$ an hour. and in that hour they are taking orders that cost past their wage consistently through the hour. You are literally mountain dew piss as you feed a greater part of society and get nothing in return. There's a reason the US postal service is currently under fire. And the "producers" outside the restaurant are buying beats online and calling them theirs. That's what I think is the most twisted things is the DJs who want to hide their track list. They play a GJones or Excision "bootleg" which is basically the original track with slight alterations, then saying they produced/remixed it. Then scream into the mic "THIS IS MY COLLAB TRACK WITH DJ ALTER VERSES!!!!" Unless it's an unreleased track by the person who produced it, as a DJ part of the gig is to be sharing music and creating a wave of culture. And without the live setting, the value of the moment hearing an unreleased track at a concert is lost. Spotify is probably locked at a certain bitrate just like SC. Money is all just a capitalist game, and when the game has the rules minimized and gouged at the same time the solution becomes to question the choices of the consumers and not the distributors. Look at Britney Spears case for instance. Supposedly she's legally locked in some kind of bad contract. At that point it becomes the iHeartRadio vibes, fake awards, manufactured personalities. At some point it has its place, but it's usually not the consumers fault if they cant afford a 30$ vinyl, or enough releases to keep up with the output from musicians. The scary thing for me is A.I. taking the wheel at producing music that's more profound than any human created. It's like being a cashier and then self check out rolls in. It's not quite the same experience, but in some ways it's a lot better. 

Edited by rstark
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/2/2020 at 6:56 AM, vkxwz said:

Way to chop off the explanation for what I said..

But anyways, would you say it's unfair if I can't make enough money to live on just from selling bottles of my piss through the internet? Oh no I'm being underpaid I deserve to be able to do *whatever* I want and receive a good income for it !!!

Do you think it's fair to pay a musician only a fraction of a cent for playing you a song?

It's always problematic when a single company or group becomes large enough to own all or nearly all of the market (goods, supplies, commodities, infrastructure, and assets) for a particular type of product or service. This privileged position on the market can then be used to dictate the rules under which all market participants have to operate, which can lead to wage dumping and other forms of exploitation and basically is the reason why poorly regulated free market capitalism doesn't lead to a liberal and egalitarian society as libertarians and neolibs like to claim. If anything it leads to more solidification of (not democratically legitimised) power and an intensification of an unfair market situation. The power dynamics are more complex than to blame the individual market participant for simply not being good/clever enough to get a better deal for their work.

Spotify could be a platform where artists can distribute their music and consumers can decide which artist to support, and based on that the artist gets paid but in a fair way. In such a scenario your piss comparison might make some more sense.

Edited by dingformung
  • Like 2
  • Sad 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Honestly, I use spotify and bandcamp. I have a box of used cd's in my car. I don't want a bigass record collection. It would be a burden. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

i only want music to be made which was made freely for fun and enjoyment and a love of the art.  how do you get that? by eliminating the economic incentive to create music for money and eliminating the requirement to make money from music if they want to spend all of their time doing it without needing a job.  how do you get that? communism

Edited by cyanobacteria
  • Like 1
  • Farnsworth 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Been comparing artist popularity on Spotify today for shits 'n' giggles.  Was surprised to discover Guns n' Roses are more popular than the Beatles, Metallica is almost as popular as either, and U2 is half as popular as Metallica.  Also Tame Impala is way more popular than I thought, more so than Fleet Foxes by quite some stretch, who I thought would be at the top of the indie heap.  Aphex Twin's more popular than the rest of the featured artists on here combined, but Skrillex destroys him more than tenfold.  Even if you tossed all Phil Collin's followers onto Richard's stats, he still wouldn't make it halfway to Skrillex.

  • Thanks 2
  • Farnsworth 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/3/2020 at 12:03 AM, dingformung said:

Do you think it's fair to pay a musician only a fraction of a cent for playing you a song?

It's always problematic when a single company or group becomes large enough to own all or nearly all of the market (goods, supplies, commodities, infrastructure, and assets) for a particular type of product or service. This privileged position on the market can then be used to dictate the rules under which all market participants have to operate, which can lead to wage dumping and other forms of exploitation and basically is the reason why poorly regulated free market capitalism doesn't lead to a liberal and egalitarian society as libertarians and neolibs like to claim. If anything it leads to more solidification of (not democratically legitimised) power and an intensification of an unfair market situation. The power dynamics are more complex than to blame the individual market participant for simply not being good/clever enough to get a better deal for their work.

Spotify could be a platform where artists can distribute their music and consumers can decide which artist to support, and based on that the artist gets paid but in a fair way. In such a scenario your piss comparison might make some more sense.

I guess my main point is that people can move to another field if they can't support themselves with music, it wouldn't be fair to only pay artists a fraction of the money if they were being forced to make music for a living. I have to ask this though, if there was no Spotify, how would an artist sell their music to begin with? Are the days of having a small chance of getting signed to a label really what you prefer over anyone being able to get their music out there cheaply which is possible now? That fantasy version of Spotify you just explained really does sound great though, I do agree.

Also the other issue which I believe is happening is people pay less attention / value less / don't try as hard to appreciate the music they do listen to these days just because of how cheap it is and how much of it they have access to. There seems to be no more playing a cd / record to death and really getting to know it because it's the only one you've been able to afford this month. This might also be partly a side effect of social media switching everyones brains to a mode where they just skim over information and pick up the general idea rather than critically thinking and really thinking about what they're absorbing.

Funny you bring up me seeming frustrated, because from my perspective this is a thread of amateur musicians complaining they can't make a living out of what they love doing because of the big bad system.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

i wish artists would just drop a crypto address.  id rather pirate everything and give them my money directly with no label cut.  i encourage paying for music in inverse proportion to how popular they are and how much you like it.  obscure artists should get more money. thats how i do it at least

Edited by cyanobacteria
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

28 minutes ago, vkxwz said:

This might also be partly a side effect of social media switching everyones brains to a mode where they just skim over information and pick up the general idea rather than critically thinking and really thinking about what they're absorbing.

^+1. a clickbait attention span, w. byte size info storage capacity permeates not olny music appreciation & listening behaviour, but both individual & cultural perceptions across the bored. 'our' understandings of visual art, history, movies, language, relationships, business, media, education - are all affected by the context of 'social' media, cloud storage, big data. 

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, cyanobacteria said:

i wish artists would just drop a crypto address.  id rather pirate everything and give them my money directly with no label cut.  i encourage paying for music in inverse proportion to how popular they are and how much you like it.  obscure artists should get more money. thats how i do it at least

i just had an invention expanding on this.  its the "independent musicians union" (IMU) or even just the "independent artists union" (IAU).  this is a worldwide union of musicians with a somewhat centralized structure, whose entire existence is solely for the validation of cryptographic signing keys owned by artists.  every artist would have a PGP key and they'd register it with the IAU.  then, we'd create a new mp3 metadata tag called iau-artist or something which contains a cryptographically signed message, signed with a cryptographic key which can be verified as being legitimate by the root IAU signing key.  this lets them put their own crypto addresses into the music itself so that if you torrent some random artist's music you can just get the IAU data to find out how to pay them, and since it's signed by the IAU root key you know it's legitimate even if you downloaded the music off some random torrent.  this is a complete bypass of the music distribution industry that lets the decentralized nature of the internet take over and we can just freely distribute everything over (redacted) and torrents and in fact distributing music freely will be considered good because you're giving that artist's music's embeeded iau-artist information a higher chance of being noticed by someone and donated to

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just wait for ageing to catch up guys, I promise once you can't keep up anymore it will feel just like old times: select a few records and play those to death while everything else passes you by.

 

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just wait for ageing to catch up guys, I promise once you can't keep up anymore it will feel just like old times: select a few records and play those to death while everything else passes you by.
 
who has to wait? i already feel this way. other than some gems here and there i discover on bandcamp.. some thanks to this here forum.. and some thanks to friends and social media... i more or less am still exploring the massive amount of GB of albums i already own. 

Edit: a while ago my nephew referred to some trap/mumble sing rap song as being “wavy as fuck” and I didn’t even bother asking what that meant. Just said to myself “oh it’s already happening”. My nephew is in his 20s.
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 9/25/2020 at 11:48 PM, ignatius said:

"do it for the exposure"

I tried to pay my landlord with exposure, but somehow I ended up homeless. 

  • Haha 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
52 minutes ago, hijexx said:

 

that was very informative. thanks for sharing. lot's of good points that he makes. especially the changing nature of spotify as a media conglomerate giving joe rogan $100 million for exclusive rights for his podcasts. craziness. it makes it pretty clear who is paying for such deals. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.