This pisses me off every time I see it. It makes Spotify look great and that's why they share it. It completely ignores the fact that they offer a free plan that a large percentage of their users enjoy.
The important figure in my mind is the per stream rate and when I last checked Apple was paying double the rate Spotify does (because Spotify's per stream rate is dragged down due to its free users).
Artists don't have a way to say to Spotify, only show my music to premium users and pay me a higher rate. It's one (of many) ways in which Spotify takes advantage of artists for its own gain. Another being their new policy to not pay artists who get less than 1000 streams on a track in a 12 month period. They just blanket decided they were going to keep that money for themselves.
I mean this should be criminal given their market power:
> their new policy to not pay artists who get less than 1000 streams on a track in a 12 month period
It may not be much to the individual artists (at most a few hundred $ a year in the extreme cases) but it's a nice chunk of change for Spotify to pocket.
> Tens of millions of them have been streamed between 1 and 1,000 times over the past year and, on average, those tracks generated $0.03 per month.
> Because labels and distributors require a minimum amount to withdraw (usually $2-$50 per withdrawal), and banks charge a fee for the transaction (usually $1-$20 per withdrawal), this money often doesn't reach the uploaders. And these small payments are often forgotten about.
> But in aggregate, these small disregarded payments have added up to $40 million per year, which could instead increase the payments to artists who are most dependent on streaming revenue.
> Spotify will not make additional money under this model. There is no change to the size of the music royalty pool being paid out to rights holders from Spotify; we will simply use the tens of millions of dollars annually to increase the payments to all eligible tracks, rather than spreading it out into $0.03 payments.
https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-...
Don't forget that alternatives which pay artists and labels zero are forever lurking in the wings.
First you have to go through the trouble of pirating the music from your computer since you can’t easily do it directly from your phone.
Even if you could, you can’t download music on your phone outside of iTunes and put it into your music library [1]. That means you have to add the music to your iTunes library from your computer and then sync it to your phone.
Or you can just pay for a streaming service. But even since 2003 when you could buy music from iTunes, pirating just wasn’t worth the trouble. That was even more so after the iPhone and being able to buy music directly on your phone in 2007.
[1] there is one ugly hack using GarageBand.
Maybe as a 'former musician' you're a bit out of the loop? But indies don't 'go to Spotify'. You pay $40 to CDBaby or similar distribution services (DistroKid etc) and they distribute your track to pretty much all streaming services and digital music stores. Then they collect the payments for you. Nobody is picking and choosing which music streaming service to be on.
> Apple and Google don't even need to turn a profit on their platforms, and both of them are hurting Spotify directly by taking 30% of their subscription payments. Neither of them even directly report revenue from their services.
This is not true. Spotify hasn’t allowed in app purchases of subscriptions in almost a decade.
That is not true either. Spotify's Android app allows purchasing Premium in-app, with Spotify as a payment provider. I believe it's also the case that Apple Music on Android has in-app purchases, with Apple as the payment provider.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23969690/google-spotify-...
So that’s still not a cause for their financial issues.
Creators or rights holders? There's a huge difference.
What's special about Spotify in this situation? It's also a behemoth with at-least-somewhat-controversial standing in the music community. It's not like it's the little guy fighting the good fight.
Personally, I think YouTube Music is better anyway.
The article says "nearly 70%" in 2023. Like Apple. So they would get to keep $4.2B for themselves. That's quite a lot.
It also matters that Spotify undercut other ways of distributing music, effectively reducing income for artists.
> Meanwhile, TikTok ...
Of course, there's always a worse one.
Does it though? Revenues are off their 90s peaks, but coming back[1], and keep in mind that in the 90s a _huge_ portion (~50%) of that went to the retail store and physical media manufacturing.
[1] https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc
(Which also probably sets some ceiling on streaming prices and digital entertainment more broadly.)
It's also worth noting that a big contributor to the 90s spike was people replacing tapes/records with CDs, which were a far superior medium for most usage. The decline after 2000 was not streaming, since that didn't exist, but the wind-down of the upgrade cycle and the rise of file sharing and 0.99 digital track purchases in lieu of $15-20 album purchases.
I think you mean just Apple there. Spotify on Android has in-app Premium subscriptions using Spotify as the payment provider (at the same price as Premium on the web).
So that’s not the cause of Spotify’s trouble either
If they got into trouble I assume they’d just make all the users do it that way…
that's not some kind of deal, that's just how it works.
The big companies are suffocating entire industries because their scale is so large that they don't even need to profit in many of their businesses. They just enter new markets, snuff out the competition, and add eyeballs to their platforms.
Amazon is a movie studio and a grocery store and a primary healthcare provider.
Google owns every ingress to the web on every pane of glass.
Apple taxes and polices all activity happening on a platform they tightly control and that due to economies of scale you can't launch a competitor. Their duopoly partner in crime is complicit.
When a German citizen listens to German music released by a German record label, Google or Apple takes a cut and transfers it to America.
When a French company advertises on social media to French citizens, Google or Facebook takes a cut and transfers it to America.
When a Swedish citizen installs a mobile app from a Swedish company, Google or Apple takes a cut and transfers it to America.
When a British citizen makes a purchase from a British company, Visa or Mastercard takes a cut and transfers it to America.
When a Danish company buys a PC, Intel/AMD and Microsoft take a cut and transfer it to America.
And when an Italian company needs hosting services, there's a good chance Amazon, Google or Microsoft will be providing them - transferring the money to America.
Have you ever considered that so long as it's an American monopoly, bringing in fistfuls of cash in from abroad, there's no need to break up the goose that lays the golden egg?
Unless you are using Apple Music or buying from iTunes. This isn’t true.
> Have you ever considered that so long as it's an American monopoly, bringing in fistfuls of cash in from abroad, there's no need to break up the goose that lays the golden egg?
And yet the Democrats tried to do exactly that and wondered why BigTech that was supportive of them until as recently as 2020 ran screaming to Trump.
No one outside of the tech bubble put anywhere in their priority stack to “break up BigTech”
Some people among the Democrats said some things. Politicians say a lot of things.
It's actions that count. And in terms of actions, there hasn't been any meaningful antitrust enforcement since the Clinton administration.
Amazon doesn’t wield much power at all in the grocery industry or the movie streaming industry.
Spotify pays out 80% of its money to its creators, but you effectively have large middle men in the way.
Apple and Google don't even need to turn a profit on their platforms, and both of them are hurting Spotify directly by taking 30% of their subscription payments. Neither of them even directly report revenue from their services.
Think about it, Apple or Google make more net profit from Spotify subscriptions than Spotify does.
Meanwhile, TikTok only pays per the number of videos using your music, not the number of times the videos are played. The only worse deal for artists would to not be paid at all...