this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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No, it's as indicated, that is, to have artists paid fairly for their creative talents. Trickle down economics exemplified. It is akin to you working your job through an agency but the agency paying you far less than minimal wage. Like a lottery, only a few will make real money.
But according to the article 70% of the money they make from music is already going to record labels and publishers, so what exactly is Spotify supposed to do here to give more money to the artists?
iirc spotify has some weird revenue sharing thing where that 70% is split between all artists in a very non-linear way. You don't get money based on how many of your songs get sold you get a slice of the total pie based on some weird formula. The result is that top artists get paid for more than their own songs sales and everyone elses gets less than their own songs sales to provide that extra cut to the top performers.
That's not just Spotify though. Everyone uses a similar algorithm. Deezer and Tidal have talked about implementing user-centric payments but have not done so.
IIRC Tidal gives 10% of the subscription to the most listened-to artist. Not a lot exactly, but still miles ahead of Spotify who gives functionally zero.
That was part of their "direct artist payouts" that they discontinued earlier this year.
Ah thanks for clarifying. What a bummer!
Yeah, it's really unfortunate. Their argument was that it took too many resources to implement for the little it was giving to the artists. They replaced it with "Tidal Rising" but it really doesn't fix the problem. When I look up the artists featured on RISING and I see that they have 1 million+ Spotify listeners while the average band I listen to is closer to 50k with some under 100 listeners I feel like they missed the mark.
I love Tidal + Plex as a solution for supplementing my music library so I'm not going to cancel it, but I try to buy an album per month from a band I listen to in addition to my subscription to tidal.
I like the idea of buying an album/month in lieu of a subscription service. Putting it that way makes be realize I'd have ~50 albums or so by now!
Yeah I listen to too much music to have it replace Tidal completely, but it's more that the $10 is my "convenience fee" for easily accessing albums and my album purchases are for actually supporting the artists.