How Good is Spotify for Indie Musicians? (Not Good)

Re:How Good is Spotify for Indie Musicians? (Not Good) by iamben on Saturday November 05, 2011 @04:07PM (#3200770)

As someone that's done 'the band thing' and been involved with plenty of others who have and are doing 'the band thing' - if I was doing it now, as a smaller artist I would absolutely go to town with distribution by whatever means necessary. I'd get onto spotify, itunes, amazon, whatever. Hell, I'd probably even give the record away for free. For a smaller (indie/indie label) band, getting people through the door was always the biggest problem. Get them through the door, get the fanbase, you can sell them whatever you like.

When I had the numbers, I'd deal with the money. Long and short, I'd rather have 10 thousand people listen to my record and talk/blog/tweet about me / come to shows, than 100 people buy it and 10 people come to my show.

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Re:How Good is Spotify for Indie Musicians? (Not Good) by twainer on Sunday November 06, 2011 @01:47AM (#3201968)

As I have posted elsewhere here, as a fact-on-the-ground 'discovery' is highly over-rated and over-emphasized. It is much easier to connect with 100 people deep enough to get them to come to a show than to connect with 1,000 or 10,000.

This idea that music should and can function like spam email doesn't actually work in the real world.

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Re:How Good is Spotify for Indie Musicians? (Not Good) by bigsassy on Saturday November 05, 2011 @06:12PM (#3201072)

Agreed. Not to mention you can make some seriously sweet profits selling merch at shows ($25 T-shirts, $0.25 stickers, and every price point in between). If you want to pay the rent as a musician, you HAVE to do it by playing a lot of shows and drawing a bunch of fans with you.

speaking from experience

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Re:How Good is Spotify for Indie Musicians? (Not Good) by cclark20 on Saturday November 05, 2011 @07:02PM (#3201189)

Except Spotify isn't for discovery and virality. What your talking about is getting people to discover music. Usually done through blogs, social media, youtube. But when your talking about a service like spotify which is really a one dimensional store for storing, putting music on your mobile device that doesn't drive merch sales or concert tickets or even fans then they should be paying there fair share to artists. Granted maybe with FB open graph integration this is changing. And of course this isn't just a Spotify problem this is a label problem (of course now they're one and the same). Anyways the question isn't whether giving your music away for free or not is a good idea -- The question is why isn't Spotify doing what they say there are there to do?... Pay artists.

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Re:How Good is Spotify for Indie Musicians? (Not Good) by iamben on Sunday November 06, 2011 @09:09AM (#3202682)

I disagree - I've been using Spotify for a couple of years to discover new music. The 'Related artists' panel, and then the 'Top Hits' easily lets you find similar bands/musicians and sample their most popular songs.

I'd prefer someone to discover a song of mine of Youtube, or read about me in a blog or a Twitter post, and spend the day streaming everything I've done - come to my show and singalong. Looking at listings for my local venue, I'll regularly spend the preceding days / week listening to who's coming to play before I go and see them live.

I'm aware my views differ from some, but we're in an age where you can pirate an album in 30 seconds. Those that are going to steal it, will. Similarly, those that want to pay, will. Until you have enough loyal fans/generic TV/radio coverage to buy your single on iTunes, why not just let them hear it wherever and ask them to donate or buy a t-shirt or vinyl?

Answering the question as to why Spotify isn't paying artists - the system may not be perfect at the minute, but it's certainly pushing the boundaries much better (and more legally) than anything previously. Which is a great, great thing, IMO.

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