I have never really seen the attraction of Spotify. Music is accessible so easily in so many ways. I own thousands of CDs, listen to the radio all the time, and have at least 100gig of music files to make playlists from, much of it music by people I know. I play and listen to live music regularly. What could spotify possibly offer me that I can’t access in a more ethical and recogniseable way?
After several of my favorite songs disappeared from Spotify, I’ve adopted a different approach to music.
If I see on on a band show merch stand, I buy a cassette. It’s more of a novelty item and a way to slightly support the band. While I do have a portable tape player, I only rarely take it out. I switched from LPs to tapes because of the costs and huge effort associated with playing or storing them (that is, if you do it right are are not OK with fucking up your LPs), but tapes are cool and don’t have that many storage or playing problems.
Other than that, I’ve stopped paying for any kind of streaming services, and save the 10$ per month to just buy one or two (new or old) albums from my favourite artists on Bandcamp, that I’ve spend the last month listening to the most. The albums I buy I add to my NAS library, which usually replaces stolen copies of said albums that I’ve previously got from Redacted.
This allows me to keep a pretty expansive library, by just stealing what I need, but with a promise that I’ll eventually buy the album (using the money I saved on streaming services), if it’s something that I’ve listened to extensively. I’m also not at mercy of streaming services, that can take away my music whenever they decide to.
So far I’ve been doing this for a few years, and even increased my budget for just buying albums if I can’t immediately find them on Redacted.
I don’t know what to do honestly. I’m fully aware of the situation. Artists deserve better then the shit they’re always getting, I’m not disagreeing. But here’s the thing, buying music is nice and all, but one: Bandcamp is going to shit. And two, I just can’t afford it.
I’m poor and I listen to a lot of things. Buying all that isn’t possible for me. Right now, I’m using Deezer, because they offered 3 months for free. And you know what? Just the 10 bucks a month that I’m saving is making a huge difference in my life.
Not to mention that discovering music without streaming services is quite hard. I left Spotify a long time ago, when the home page started recommending me more Podcasts then music. I tried a lot of things and I came to the conclusion that I hate all music streaming platform but they’re still, by far, the best way for me to listen to and discover music.
If I love an album, I’ll still buy if I can afford it (which I often can’t).
I’m poor and I listen to a lot of things. Buying all that isn’t possible for me.
So basically: you can’t afford the volume of product you want to consume at a price that’s sustainable for artists, but want the product anyway and you see that as some unsolvable dilemma? Have I got that right?
Look, it sucks that you’re in that financial situation. Not here to downplay that struggle. I’ve lived like that and it fuckin sucks.
But maybe the answer is to value the effort of musicians and either pay them for their work or consume less?
But maybe the answer is to value the effort of musicians and either pay them for their work or consume less?
What benefit would that decision have? Artists would still receive the same amount of royalties. @Plume would still spend the same amount of money. What benefit is there to artificially limit his music listening hobby because of copyright law?
This isn’t a utilitarian argument. It’s a moral one.
They want to believe there’s some moral dilemma here and they’re, by gosh, trying their best to navigate it.
But the reality is: they want music, but they can’t afford to pay artists in a way that’s sustainable, so they’re just taking it however they can get it and paying a pittance to make themselves feel a bit better.
So quit pretending. They’ve made their choice. Their priorities are clear.
My argument isn’t simply utilitarian either. It would be utilitarian to say, “It’s moral to pirate music as long as your enjoyment exceeds the harm caused to the artist.” But I’m saying that there is no harm caused by OP pirating in this situation. Don’t most moral arguments involve some kind of measure of harm? (Honest and sincere question)
It’s been a while since I studied philosophy, but for my own knowledge, do you know if there is some distinction between this sort of argument (e.g. “no victim = no crime”) and plain old utilitarianism?
In other words, what ethical theory is your moral argument based on?
By your definition of harm, no artist creating non-material goods (books, movies, music, etc) could ever experience harm due to any one individual’s actions. “I was never going to pay, so taking it without paying is a victim less crime,” etc, etc.
The problem is this is clearly harmful in aggregate.
There are countless actions that, on an individual level are relatively harmless that we deem immoral because they’d be harmful if everyone did them: e.g. polluting.
But setting aside issues of harm–which is absolutely utilitarian–there are also many actions for which no objective “harm” can be identified but which we still deem inherently immoral. For example, if someone cheats on their spouse, and the spouse never finds out, most people I know would say that action is immoral irrespective of the lack of direct harm.
By your definition of harm, no artist creating non-material goods (books, movies, music, etc) could ever experience harm due to any one individual’s actions. “I was never going to pay, so taking it without paying is a victim less crime,” etc, etc.
False. I acknowledge that there could be harm if a consumer would otherwise be able to afford to pay for all of the music they listen to. The distinction here is that if a consumer is already spending as much as they can truly afford then artists aren’t going to get any more money out of this consumer, regardless of whether or not they pay for it.
In other words: if you pirate because you must = no harm; if you pirate because you can = some harm.
That’s an interesting thought experiment about the cheating spouse, though. Thank you for the interesting perspective! This makes me want to re-visit my philosophy notes.
For the record, I pay for Spotify and also support artists through Bandcamp, merch, vinyl, and live concerts. I also pirate music which isn’t otherwise available through Spotify and/or Bandcamp (e.g. The Grey Album by Danger Mouse, and up until recently The Flamingo Trigger by Foxy Shazam) and don’t feel guilty about those instances.
The artists put their music on streaming platform as well. There is no such thing as ethical consumption under Capitalism. Everything is fucking exploitative as fuck, everything is awful. There is A LOT of things that I refuse to watch, play, listen to, pay for, consume, for ethical reasons.
Again: I AM NOT PIRATING! I’m using a legal way to access the music I listen to, Deezer. And buying albums that I really love when I can afford it on the side.
I think I understand how I ended up believing you were pirating even though you weren’t: @zaphod makes it seem like you’re doing something remotely unethical when you not only use a legitimate subscription service but also support the artists through other ways! I’m not sure what more an artist could ask from a patron such as yourself.
You’re acting like I’m pirating the music, here. I’m not. I said that I’m using Deezer right now, a legal and paid for way to listen to music.
I use Deezer and like I said, when I like an album, I still try to buy music from the artists that I love when I can. Which pays them much more then millions of stream.
Honestly, 56 million profit is really not much. How many artists are getting next to nothing? 100,000? Splitting that profit between them leaves each with 560 per year. There’s even less when you include more.
And if Spotify raises the prices to pay more per play people will leave, leaving Spotify with less money to hand out. Having asshats like Rogan getting millions or the deals huge artists, who are already filthy rich like Taylor Swift, make with Spotify are what’s hurting small artists. I think Spotify has the same issue as the rest of the world. There is enough for everyone, it’s just not equally distributed.
If you want to do the maths, the maximum one can possibly earn in Spotify royalties is $0.003 a stream. It doesn’t add up to a living wage for most artists.
And now, to make matters far worse, starting in 2024 Spotify will stop paying anything at all for roughly two-thirds of tracks on the platform. That is any track receiving fewer than 1,000 streams over the period of a year.
Honestly, does the 1k floor matter much? Based on the above text, the most that such a track can possibly make is $3/year. It’s a safe bet that most aren’t sitting right at 999 views and the maximum revenue per track; most are probably well below that. I have a hard time seeing someone caring much about that.
I’m not saying that there isn’t possibly some kind of business model for which a track making $1/year or something this might make sense (massive numbers of cheap machine-generated tracks targeting very specific tastes, that all get a few views each). But for conventionally-produced music, I think that if you’re making a song that’s generating 50 cents or 10 cents a year or something, it’s basically not on your radar financially.
I have some questions about the royalties and the collective bargaining:
Are the payments from streaming in addition to payment for being a songwriter via ASCAP or whatever royalty facilitator is used?
If you have not signed to a label, or had a previous contract, is there anything stopping that person from collective bargaining? It seems to me if there is no contract, then they are not a supplier unless they want to be.
I don’t use Spotify or any paid service, they rarely have the music I listen to anyway. I do give donations to SOMA FM for groove salad, but I imagine they too are paying the bare minimum - a radio type royalty. But I also tend to buy physical music from the musicians I like and I do go out to see performances. By the way, although I don’t know Galaxie 500, I do recognize the Ornette Coleman reference; I do listen to Ornette live music from time to time.
There are a lot of issues here. I think you should have the right to own the company (streaming service) if you could be allowed to collectively get musicians to create a co-op or something like that. On the other hand I find it confusing when compared to my own work, where the company owns the code I write. I do not get paid every time it runs for the rest of my life, so why should you? But I get that the music industry corporations are ruthless, exploitive and chew up talent and spit them out, and are using the streaming services for their own benefit.
Some people might say what are you complaining about? You have a platform that is freely advertising your music, it is up to you to convert that to money. Other people might say that without your music, there would not be a platform. So once again, it seems the only way out is to have your own musician ran platform. So I support that, thanks for the shout out to the issues you face in collective bargaining, and the current legislation in the US.
I do not get paid every time it runs for the rest of my life, so why should you?
Sorry if I misunderstood you, but this feels rather easy to answer: because you are being paid to write the code. Spotify doesn’t pay anyone to write music (well maybe they technically do for some ads or something, but it’s definitely not how they acquire more music to add to the library), they just pay for streaming rights on music that was somehow already independently produced. And tiny unknown musicians have no leverage to negotiate better terms than what Spotify offers.
They have money to pay Joe Rogan an absolutely obscene amount of money which could have made hundreds of artists life awesome apparently (which feels more like a bribe). So it is clear, they have the cash to pay others too. They just choose not to
I hate the company but I haven’t found another streaming service with a similar amount of music, sound quality and algorithm. I have a jellyfin instance, but it lacks the choice and algorithm.
Edit: I am currently in the process of switching to Tidal. It has pretty much all the niche artists that I usually listen to, the algo is pretty good (at least thats what other ppl say), the audio quality is very good and it has a really nice UI. Also, it pays Artists twice as much as Spotify.
It doesn’t have a native App for Linux, but there is github.com/Mastermindzh/tidal-hifi, which is an electron wrapper for the web-ui that is also available via Flatpak and works well so far.
Tried tidal and didn’t work well for me with Android auto. You can actually use something like tune my music to copy your playlists to every main service for testing.
I used apple music. I don’t like Apple in particular, but they pay artists, and don’t pay Joe rogan
I actually found the music suggestions were way better than Spotify which mostly just repeated stuff I heard
You know what, this makes me feel a lot better about using an ad-blocker when using their site. Although, I would prefer if the artists I listen to didn’t exclusively use Spotify for some reason.
I’m all for ad blockers. But this doesn’t solve the creators’ issue with not getting paid. The internet is a severely underutilized resource. Creators should be able to sell their content directly to us without middlemen like these.
I agree with that and some of the artists I listen to actually do use platforms where you can purchase their music directly but unfortunately buying the music directly just really isn’t viable for me. Platforms that use ads for monetization are really the only way that’s viable but the artists I listen to only use Spotify, or if they do use other platforms, they just use them for demos and other promotional stuff.
I don’t even like using Spotify or Pandora, it’s full of ads and I can’t play what I want to play. I just go to YouTube or download what I want. Their structure sucks.
Spotify doesn’t really have ads. Only the horrible free plan does and you are obviously not supposed to use it. It’s designed to be as bad as possible to make people switch.
While YouTube is alright for music it’s very inconvenient compared to Spotify. The same multiplied by 100x applies to downloading all your music.
I’m not into too much music, but whenever I do want to listen to some, I open a YouTube music client which is more than enough for my needs. they don’t require subscription, or are ads-riddled.
like, at the moment, I’m using vimusic
I know, but so far, it’s still the best way to give money to the creators. It’s basically 9:1 in favor of the artists when you buy an album… Hopefully a fair alternative will come up in a near future. Funkwhale is slowly getting better . Anyway, anything is better than Spotify.
As a fellow Bandcamp enjoyer I am quite sad about its enshittification. Someone made Faircamp as an alternative. I hope that Funkwhale will fill the soundcloud/bandcamp niche.
One important thing the centralized sites like Bandcamp enable, is discovery of new music and artists. I’m afraid that this is such a big deal that Faircamp won’t be able to take off until that problem is addressed and solved somehow.
The justification for this is demonetizing white-noise tracks or other work without creative effort that supposedly costs spotify too much. I’m not a fan of the direction this is going because one of the best things about the platform was it’s selection of underground music. This just buries it deeper and doesn’t help artists that are trying to break through. It just shovels the profits to the top earners who are already doing quite well. There aren’t many alternatives and bancamp has been passed down from epic games to songtradr and isn’t anywhere near a real alternative yet.
Why are you not moving to a different distribution model where you’ll get what you’re worth? I’ll go where the music is. If you keep putting it on Spotify then I’ll play it on Spotify.
There are plenty of better ways to obtain music, such as actually buying the music instead of streaming it. And, hey, that’s like saying you’d stay on Reddit because that’s where the content is. Ethics should come before easy entertainment.
Just so I’m clear here - are you doubting the existence of websites where you can buy and download music? I have a feeling that is not what you mean but I also can’t really figure out another way to interpret this.
I checked a couple of songs on my playlist and didn’t find places that were obviously better than Spotify. Is Bandcamp better? How about Beatport? Being able to buy and download music is not a guarantee that the artist is getting paid fairly.
As a side note I’m growing weary of having to keep track as a consumer of the revenue streams and ethics of every brand out there. There’s a lot on my plate already. I wish that if musicians didn’t want me to buy things for a certain price or at a certain place, that they just wouldn’t offer it to me in that way. Or, if they were being coerced into it, that they would push for regulation to prevent that. But I have a suspicion that the principle of supply and demand dictates that selling music online just won’t be as profitable as they (naively) expect it to be. Too many musicians, too few ears.
There’s a lot on my plate already. I wish that if musicians didn’t want me to buy things for a certain price or at a certain place, that they just wouldn’t offer it to me in that way.
This is the Amazon / Valve / [Insert dominant company] problem. It’s not musicians’ fault. A ton of small companies hate Amazon but if they don’t have a presence on Amazon, 90% easily are missing out on too much marketshare to survive. Same with Valve - if you are PC game and you choose not to publish on Steam, you are cutting yourself off from a massive revenue stream as Valve controls ~75% - which is absolutely staggering - of the market.
So this goes for Spotify now as well. If you aren’t on spotify, your ability to gain an audience plummets. You hobble yourself like crazy.
Yes Bandcamp and Beatport are viable. CD’s which you can rip are also readily available still. Ditching Spotify means ditching some convenience, that’s the cost ultimately (outside of the dollars and cents). You either care enough to do it or you don’t. It’s your call and no judgment here. But those are the answers ultimately.
I recently swapped to Proton Mail/Drive/Calendar from Gmail et al. I pay some extra money annually and sacrificed a few QoL things because decoupling from google was more important to me. I don’t expect everyone to follow suit and again no judgment, but I had to accept I wasn’t going to get those google QoL elements to the same degree when I made the swap. That’s just how it is.
The sites won’t say “we rip off our artists and they’re very unhappy about it”. In fact as far as I can tell from visiting spotify.com, Spotify is just fine. So this is apparently not a sufficient method for finding out if a site is a good way of buying music.
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