We need a users controlled streaming platform. First we have to get rid of those disgusting capitist rats, then we can work on a revenu model. People are willing to pay a small amount to access content, that’ proven now, we just need to give the control to the users.
Convenience and consumption mechanism matter. The current entrenchment of the top services provide this and user centric mechanisms usually fall flat.
Isnt Lemmy proving otherwise? But yeah, keep paying Spotify because “convenience” and I’ll keep buying albums on bandcamp because it’s the only current fair option.
Isnt Lemmy proving otherwise?
We are an extremely small bubble, comparable in size to your average 2008 internet forum.
So what? It’s a user controlled platform that is convenient, proving it’s possible.
Let’s hope that bandcamp stays like that for a while, I’ve been worrying for it’s future since it was bought by Epic Games
DW, you can just pirate releases and throw money towards your preferred artist after the fact, that’s arguably more fair than bandcamp anyway.
Epic actually sold Bandcamp to another corporation last year. I’m also quite worry, but they added a few nice features and didn’t change the revenu model , so far so good.
Small fee boatloads of content or small fee per music small music selection. You do you, but the masses don’t align with your approach.
I use bandcamp because I like helping the artists I enjoy. Since its a small niche I prefer that most of my spending goes directly to them. Otherwise with the profits being so small they would stop making music. Sadly as you said the masses don’t care about that.
On the other hand Iappreciated that the streaming services as Spotify have helped reach more audience and made accessible to people that otherwise would have never heard of them unless maybe pirating.
I’ve followed a few artists on bandcamp as well and am grateful for the platform. On the flip side as you say reach is extensive via the other mechanisms.
I’d like to point out that in some cases it’s less a matter of preference and sometimes a budgetary constraint as to which services people gravitate toward, especially if your tastes are broad.
Yeah because the masses are brainwashed into the believing they too can be billionaire, lol. I’ll keep doing me, you and “the masses” can keep enabling Joe Rogan.
Yes, keep doing you. As I said. Not sure why you’re taking this so personally.
Lol, I don’t take it personally, I just don’t get what you’re doing here with that kind of resigned capitalist enabling discourse. You would be better on facebook or twitter. People like you like consumption, not music.
Understood, you’re not here for discourse you’re here to proselytize and grandstand. Best of luck.
There’s this streaming co-op that me and my friend joined a few months ago. It’s still in the building stages but hopefully it gains some traction. It’s called jam.coop
This looks awesome.
I’m more concerned that streaming platform algorithms prioritise passive listening (maybe not more concerned… I’m not sure how concern is quantified). It goes against their business model to risk serving users music that might actually push, and thus potentially expand, their taste. Music that is challenging may cause a user to stop listening. Better for the auto play algorithm to serve up safe bets, homogenising the general popular music gene pool. Like serving endless Big Macs incase tom yum is too spicy or lamb shoulder is too rich. As a result, the way to find success in the era of streaming platforms is to play G-D-Em-C and sing about the boy/girl you like/liked. This causes a feedback loop where bland music leads to bland tastes, which leads to bland music…
btw, if you want to broaden your taste in music, go listen to an entire album with a few or just one song you like from a particular artist a couple of times.
You like one album they’ve done, go listen to the other work they’ve made. Trust me, it’s very worthwhile.
You could tell how good the album was by where they placed the banger. If it was the last song on Side A, then you knew the album was going to be solid. If they put the hit song on A1, that meant it was probably going to be trash because they don’t trust you to make it through 3-4 more songs before getting to the one you bought the album for. There are always notable exceptions – they put the hit song on the end of Record 2 side B and then it wasn’t even credited on the album (Train in Vain). But that album is 2 records of excellent songs with the possible exception of Jimmy Jazz.
Yeah I almost exclusively listen to full albums. Definitely helps give context to the music and understand the artist better. I also agree that you should give it a few listens. Some great albums need you to dial in before you really fall in love with them. It’s a more active process than just listening to an unending algorithmic recommendation stream, but the effort is rewarded!
Sometimes it takes decades. I bought Stiff Little Fingers “Nobody’s Heros” back in the early 80’s and only listened to it a couple of times. When I was digitizing my vinyl collection some 20 or 30 years later, I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t one of my favorite albums. Pretty quickly bought everything in the catalog and am still listening to their new records.
the flow between songs is sometimes better than the individual songs. Bonus points for artists that use transitory tracks between the main ones. Those are always weird.
A personal example of mine was morcheeba, had listened to their early albums, never the later ones, got a hold of a discog, that band is one of my top favorites now.
Ah Morcheba! Now that’s a band I’ve not heard in a while!
Another album feature I enjoy is the “bonus” track at the end after an absurd length of silence. 1977 by Ash comes to mind. Nothing like going to sleep with an album on to be suddenly woken up by drunk people puking.
As well as transitional tracks, I love it when tracks genuinely feel like they exist as part of something larger. Whether through transitions within the tracks (Nonegon Infinity by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard takes this to the extreme) or by essentially turning the album into one long almost operatic piece (like Colours by Between the Buried and Me).
massive attack i believe, has a track that has a “hidden track” which is just like 8 minutes of ambient noise. After an immediate banger as well, so it just gaslights you. It’s great.
i’ve always been intrigued by bands and artists that meld songs between the album, it’s an interesting experience. Boards of canada does it somewhat. It’s pretty hard to distinguish which makes it really interesting to listen to. It’s all one thing, but a collection of many different things also. Very interesting.
This was how it worked until about 15 years ago. I got far more deeply into music and artists back then than now. I always feel I’m skating the surface with streaming, and the suggestions bore me.
idk about you, but i almost always have some of artist thats teetering on the edge of my hypothetical taste. Usually a song or two. If you have any just go listen to their collective works. Otherwise, try and explore genres you like, specifically ones with lots of variety, electronic music in particular is highly variable. Which is one of the reasons i really like it.
One thing i find that helps bring more music to the forefront is weird/abstract media. A lot of times people working on visual art, will back something with music they enjoy, especially if it’s something more niche, the music is very likely to be a reflection of their personal taste, which is always a good strat. Sometimes that’s movie soundtracks, other times it’s just weird shit like an ARG that throws boards of canada in there for no reason.
Survive?
uh cool trick, they don’t.
Turns out small artists who pay middle men (publishers, who rake in billions a year) money to host their music on platforms like spotify, who then makes zero money because they run an unprofitable business (damn, if only there was a way to make money from this) and the listeners, who earn them, on average, 0 dollars, from a stream. Which means they lose money.
Pirating your favorite bands music is going to make you more likely to buy an actual physical release, or digital. Thus paying them more in that one interaction than they have potentially ever been paid in your lifetime of listening to them on a streaming service.
Btw, just have a think about the fact that artists, and spotify make ZERO money, more than likely negative money. Only to have a middle man raking in literally BILLIONS of dollars a year. Capitalism truly is something isn’t it? Oh and i haven’t even mentioned money laundering on spotify either, that’s a whole other thing.
You piqued my interest and holy shit, Spotify money laundering is wild.
it sure is. Benn jordan has a good video on it as of recent.
Please mention money laundering on Spotify. My friend wants to learn how to… Fight… This behavior in his detective work.
Yes, that’s it.
something something, you build a gang, and you recruit young people who are below the age of being prosecuted, have them make music, music bot the music, and then you proceed to collect royalties on money you never made. All while actively washing drug money or something. Something something.
To be clear, you in no way shape or form are intending for your comment to be an implication against Cash Money Records. while Cash Money Records aknowledges that behavior may be common in the industry, CMR 100℅ has never and will never engage in this behavior.
Oh, you weren’t accusing us directly. We didn’t need to make this statement… Fuck.
They aren’t. The fees are supposed to benefit the streaming companies.
I hope the bill discussed in the article helps rectify that.
homie the only thing streaming benefits right now is music publishers, spotify and the artists are losing money like it’s oil being produced during the industrialization.
The last update that I saw was that Spotify would be in the green if it didn’t have to give severance pay to a large number of employees, and also some real estate expenses that seem pretty unusual for a streaming service to have…? They should just ask Wisconsin to build them a place for free, those idiots will do anything for industry.
they would be in the green if they didn’t outsource music publishing, ironically.
This is why more people need to move away from Spotify. They artists way too little.
0 . 0 0 3
Give me two years, and your dinner will be free
Gas station champagne is on me
Edgar cannot pay rent for me … 🎶
I thought deezer paid a LOT better
This was a deciding factor in why I use Tidal.
That figure is potentially misleading. You want to know how much of your subscription or ad revenue is paid out. The per stream royalty is diluted by non-paying users, or by users paying lower rates (in poorer countries, etc). If you move your subscription to a service that pays out a lower share, then you pay musicians less, even if the average payout per stream is higher.
If ads don’t make enough money to pay artists, then Spotify shouldn’t offer a free tier. Don’t support a company that is hurting artists.
This is the kind of thinking that usually gets mocked on lemmy.
Having a musical idea, and recording it, expressing it the way that you thought it… That required a lot of effort, from a lot of engineers, at a studio, with a lot of expensive equipment… As recently as the mid 90s.
Now we’ve got Jacob Collier, winning Grammys from his bedroom.
To assume you can live off streams today would be like a journalist thinking they could survive off of tweets 3 years ago. Getting well edited thoughts out to the masses via the press required a lot of effort from a lot of engineers, at a studio using lots of expensive equipment.
sure, but why platforms get to be rich and the actual artists dont?
Because they have all the customers.
If you don’t like the rate the current major platforms give, you could choose to use one of the many alternatives that (presumably) exist.
And if they really don’t, I could build you one in a couple of weekends with all the open source resources and federation protocols available today.
But none of that matters because all the paying customers are on those major platforms. And until you convince users to move off those platforms, you’re basically their bitch. They’ll pay you whatever they happen to feel like paying you.
Actually while typing that out I thought more about the technical architecture of such distributed alternative streaming service that pays artists fairly, and it does sound like it could be fun to build.
But everyone in the fediverse already knows how difficult/impossible it is to get the average person to switch to open source software. It would most likely be a waste of time.
Here’s a person who knows way more about the music industry than all of us in this thread out together. And he’s thought a lot about this, too
Not so much the fediverse side of it, but the legal, and financial/jobs side of things.
You are right.
You get paid jack shit for streaming. You also got paid jack shit for radio play. The flip side to all this is It has never been easier for an artist to manage their own career.
Not that long ago if you didnt sign onto the multi-billion dollar a year label who took an obscene amount of the money (google a 360 deal if you want to get real mad) nobody heard your shit ever. But you can also form your own label, make your own merch, do your own socials, promo yourself and keep 100% of what you make.
i mean, TBF, you could just rent studio time, so it’s not like it would’ve been a significant thing in the way of your goal.
Studio time is not expensive today.
It was cost prohibitive in the 69s, 70s, 80s, early 90s.
i mean, how cost prohibitive though. Instruments cost money, people still produce music with instruments these days.
Shit costs money. That’s just the name of the game.
Paper costs money, pens cost money
You’re thinking with yesterday’s figures.
i mean you’re speaking in absolutes here, im assuming you have data to back it up.
Try Google. Not going to entertain this with my time because it’s on a level of dumb that —
Try Google homie.
i mean i could. I’m not the one making the claim that it was prohibitive though.
This is a moot argument. You’re saying the system doesn’t support artists and that artists shouldn’t expect it to. Why not? Why can’t the system be changed? Streams should not be equivalent to tweets and it’s dumb to think they should be.
It’s not entirely moot because it means competition is increased many fold.
It doesn’t mitigate how Spotify behaves, but the market dynamic was changed by tech putting a serviceable studio is everyone’s bedroom.
Easy.
The average middle class income in Canada is $70,000. All I have to do is get 40.5 million streams per year to afford a small home 2 hours away from the city where I play music.
Honestly, you can be a full-time musician or you can have a comfortable life. You can’t have both.
You’re probably still right but the comparison to a job doesn’t make sense because the labor component isn’t continuous for streaming. The job would be live touring, streaming would be additional income on top.
I would agree, but shows on the road habitually pay close to nothing because musician compensation hasn’t really increased in the last half century. So generally you make money off of album sales and merch sales at shows, not really money to live off of either.
Less avocado toast.
Those goddamn machiatos.
You heard that new song by Avocado Toast and the Macchiatos?
Oh yeah, their seminal EP “I’ll never afford a house at this rate” sure is a banger.
Commercial radio stations pay about 12 cents per play, while college stations pay about 6 cents per play. Half of the money goes to the publisher and half goes to the songwriter or songwriters.
It’s always been a crap shoot for musicians. They make more money touring which is why even really successful musicians tour well into their twilight years.
Record sales are also a crapshoot. Someone else posted the numbers for those in this thread. Streaming allows more access by more people to more music. But that access results in a cost. The cost is less pay per listen. The entire industry is broken.
https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/926850/-/comment/5918633
I feel like people are starting themselves blind on per-stream revenue in a bad way - no one is actually paying per stream. Not the customers, not the streaming companies, not the labels. This is the deal when it comes to streaming platforms - you get to listen to as much as you want for a fixed amount of money per month.
It’s a little bit like saying someone who bought a CD in the 90s for $10 and listened to every song 100 times is a 10 times worse customer than someone who bought the same CD and listened to every song just 10 times. Yes, the person who listened to the CD 100 times paid 10 times less on a per-song listen basis, but that’s quite simply not relevant.
they’re exactly the same customer, the difference between those two is actually negligible, ignoring the new middle man and VC funded tech company in the way.
Both someone who streams, and someone who buys the CD are paying the same amount of money, the difference is that the person streaming gets a MUCH broader wealth of music, and much more music to listen to, for the same amount of money. Which means, on average, you would expect someone who uses streaming to pay less than someone who buys physical media.
I think the latest issue now is how Spotify for example is changing their revenue sharing model in a way that big artists (i.e. Taylor Swift) get a bigger chunk from the pie and smaller artists get close to nothing in % from streaming income. So the value of a single stream for a song is different depending on who you’re listening to.
What change is this in reference to? I’m not familiar with it.
This article can probably explain it better than I can: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2024/01/06/spotify-royalty-model-ramifications/
They don’t need money to survive, they just need exposure which is what Spotify provides them. Musicians can survive indefinitely on nothing but praise cocaine and exposure.
/J
By making really short songs.
noise artists ahead of the curve putting 500 songs on a cd
that got nerfed after a band put a 30 second white noise song on their page and asked fans to play it while they slept
Meanwhile… Last year, Taylor Swift received over $100 million for streaming from Spotify alone, making her a billionaire.
Clearly, (some) musicians are doing better than ever. And, judging by this dishonest, manipulative screed, they are determined to do better still.
Record companies have been stealing artist record sales for 70 years. This is nothing new to musical artists. The motivation to get on a streaming service is so sell tickets to your tour shows. Inflated album prices of the 90s made very few artists any money.
Streaming was never going to be profitable, it was the only option the music industry had to make any kind of money over piracy.
Most artists are happy to be making nothing on streaming, because giving access to your recorded music sells tickets. Tour tickets sales and merch has been the bread and butter for the musical artist for decades and remains the primary source of income.
How many minor artists are doing big tours?
Most artists are happy to be making nothing on streaming
Which artists have said they’re happy with no income on streaming?
