Can't even seek through songs.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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https://medium.com/brain-labs/why-spotify-struggles-to-make-money-from-music-streaming-ba940fc56ebd
For anyone wanting to rage at Spotify, I'd remind you that Spotify has never actually turned a profit. They lose money on every single paid user, and even more on free users. Tl;dr of the article (sorry for the account-wall) is that Spotify is contractually obligated to give around 70% of every dollar it makes to the labels, who then eat most of it and give a few crumbs to the artists. If you want to support artists, buy their merch, their physical albums, and go to their shows. If they're independent, they may actually see some non-trivial revenue from streaming as well.
Spotify may also be contractually restricted in what level of access they can offer for free - licensing can be very messy - and they also do need to create enough incentive to actually make the paid tier worth it. Given that a month of access to essentially all music ever costs about as much as a single CD did back in the day, it feels like pretty incredible value to me, personally. Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all. If the cost of streaming or buying music is genuinely a burden, I wouldn't blame you that much for pirating, but if you can afford it, I do think the value really is there, if only to avoid the sheer hassle of pirating and managing a local library. And if you really think that streaming is just uniquely corrupt and terrible, CDs haven't gone anywhere.
But if you can easily afford to pay for music and you still refuse to, at least have the honesty to just admit that you want to get things for free and you don't care about anyone involved in creating it getting paid for it, without dressing it up as some kind of morally righteous anti-capitalist crusade. It's normal to be annoyed about having to pay for things; we all are, and we all want to get things for free. Just admit that instead of pretending your true motivation is anything deeper.
This is bunk. If people pirated the record labels out of business we would have less music sure, but there will always be people who make music for the love of the craft, rather than just to line an executive's pocket.
I'm all for directly supporting artists (and I buy albums and merch directly from the band wherever possible), but let's not pretend like the people pulling the strings aren't also responsible for the shitty situation they're in.
Fuck the recording industry and how they treat artists. And I say that as a premium streaming service customer.
The amount of it would still be dramatically reduced. Those people who are making music solely for the love of it already exist today and people are perfectly welcome to listen to them; nothing is stopping them at all.
I think it's probably safe to say that the vast majority of music that is listened to today would not exist if the artists couldn't financially support themselves from it. Do you really disagree with that?
Of course not, and I clearly called out that there would be less music if there wasn't an monetary incentive to do so. But at the same time, record industry titans falling would leave a massive vacuum that would be filled by more independent artists and labels. In the end, there would be less music overall, but there would still be some way for artists to get their cut.
Industry titans aren't music, they're merely the middlemen who craft what they think the public wants to hear and leech money from artists. Them falling would be a boon to the smaller and more niche acts who don't get the chance to explode because they don't have the weight of a major label to push them into the spotlight.