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Spotify re-invented the radio
(lemmy.world)
Can't even seek through songs.
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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I have the family premium plan and honestly love it. I haven’t downloaded an mp3 in years because Spotify is so convenient. As far as subscription services go, this one is top tier for me.
Now when we look at movie streaming.. well that’s what the music streaming could have been like. What an absolute mess.
Now if only they'd pay the musicians worth a shit. Maybe they should strike next.
Full disclosure I am on Spotify family plan and I love it because
It would be nice if companies didn't slash features and would offer music for free with features beyond that of broadcast radio.
It would be nice if we didn't have the mechanisms demanding infinite growth from companies because sometimes that's just not possible or even necessary.
Imagine if Spotify could just be like ok, yeah we're good no need to make major changes, everyone is happy, life is good thanks. Versus: oh shit we need to boost the quarterly numbers who can we fuck over to get there? I know, customers and musicians both! Yay!
afaik that's mainly the fault of the music labels, they charge quite good money, but they don't give it to the artists: https://blog.groover.co/en/tips/loud-clear-spotify-2/
That article, while not necessarily wrong, is blatant propaganda and overlooks the most important issues until the final paragraph, and even then it only touches on it once.
As someone with expansive knowledge and experience in the indie music industry, with a lot of experience dealing with streaming services and Spotify in particular the biggest problem is not the % of value created paid out, it's what the actual value is. They don't touch anywhere on how much you get paid per play, how the value is created, how the money flows once it's in Spotify's hands, etc.
As said in the article, artists and indie labels/distributors have basically no ways to reach Spotify to negotiate a price, but Spotify itself paid literal millions to license a few major labels in the beginning. The 'value' of a play is extremely skewed, where you'd need upwards of 10.000 plays to equal a single play on a nightly radio show for a big broadcaster like the BBC or at a festival with 500 people. On top of that, if you work hard, network properly and prepare your release you can get quite good exposure through radio, dj and other live plays, whereas with Spotify you have to be lucky that they put your pitch towards the right 'tastemakers', they are actively working against user (influencer)-playlists, have piss poor customer service, blatantly favour major label tracks in their algorithms and don't actual care about their listeners.
On top of that we've got the obvious subscription enshittification, classic outlandish manager/director salaries and bonuses, the need to have an ever-rising share price and more.
Thanks for the insights. No holy among the capitalist companies...
It’s also not a new or Spotify-centric problem, either. Labels have been screwing over the artists for decades.
Yeah I work at a label we pay our artists about 30% of what we make off them, but that isn't actually that bad considering the amount of overhead there is at a record label and the amount of services we provide for them. Just advertising alone makes up about 1/3 of a big label and we will spend more on advertising, distributing and actually allowing them to make music than we actually pay them, so in terms of end value it's probably closer to 60 or 70%
In this case, it's a good thing that Spotify is an European and not an US company. Less incentive for enshittification. At the same time, the main reason they fuck over musicians so much is not so much Spotify but because of record labels and ads themselves. The record labels are the ones with the financial power, holding the copyrights. It's not that Spotify doesn't pay labels, they do, then in turn the labels keep most of the money and fuck over the artists. At the same time, the record labels came last to the streaming game. Blinded on the madness that was the Napster and peak P2P era, a war they lost, they didn't want to even sell digital copies. Many awards and labels didn't considered digital sales, legitimate sales. An many rogue artists sold or gave their digital albums for free to protest this. So they were always behind the curve. When Apple forced the labels to sit at the table for iTunes, they had no bargain leverage and were forced to accept shit terms in exchange for the hope that streaming would stop piracy. As a result, the tech giants got to keep most of the revenue bag and that's been the status quo ever since.
On the other hand, adverts don't pay. We tend to forget this because the likes of Google and Facebook are so massive. But the only reason they make any money is because of how massive they're. Adverts are a shit form of payment. Too expensive and no one wants to advertise with you, too cheap and you can't cover even the platform maintenance, it's a delicate balance. The result is you need millions of eyes to make any significant amount of money from an advert. There's a reason cable and open air TV has devolved into 15 minutes of advertisement per every 20 minutes of entertainment.
Spotify pays a fraction of a cent for every play. It takes 150 plays of a song to make a dollar from advertisement, and most of that dollar is gonna stay with the record label. This is significantly worse for indie and small up and coming artists. They simply can't make a living out of Spotify unless they are already big and have a massive following. This hurts the whole industry as it becomes harder and harder to nurture new talent.
The up side is that, although they are getting shafted by Spotify and the labels, a subscription play is worth more than a free play. Up to ten times more than a free user play. So your subscription does help pay artists more. The down side is that less than 25% of Spotify users pay for a subscription.
It's actually "oh shit we're lighting hundreds of millions on fire every quarter and not even making enough to come close to covering our costs"
As someone who was once a small artist on Spotify, they do actually pay really well. Better than most places.
Looking forward to when you wake up and realize that you're just emptily shilling for a company that would happily take your money while refusing features.
Deep.
Why would you talk about how great the features that you pay when we're talking about how they're slashing free features then? I'm sure you love paying the same price to rent your music, the same price as just buying it, but that's not what the conversation is about.
The amount of different genres I listen to means that the cost of the subscription is nowhere near what I would have to pay if I had to buy it.
It's also complete bollocks. Family plan is £3 a month, let's say an album costs £10. So in a year I could listen to basically all music for £36, or buy 3.6 albums. Maybe if I live to be a billion then it'll cost the same price to buy the music rather than renting it, but for us mortals the subscription service is the better deal. It's fine to not like people shilling for a profit-seeking company, but don't make up nonsense to try and prove it's not a good deal.
This is as of 2021, where are you getting that it's £3 a month? That's £203.88 a year.
Where are you buying your albums? How is it that they're all new releases, are you not recognizing that most of your music is not a release? How often do you listen to a full, new album? You likely don't listen to more than 20 new songs a month anyways, unless you're discovering a new genre. However, again, that's not what this post is about, it's about lowering the quality of the free features.
A family plan is shared between 6 accounts, I pay 1/6 of the cost. I probably listen to hundreds of new songs every month.
Not sure how this is emptily shilling though. Am I paying for a service? Yes. Will I stop paying for a service if they start “refusing features?” Also yes.
Like I said in another comment, I was happy with Netflix back in the day, but now, nope. I have self hosted alternatives.
If a service is not worth it for me, I stop paying. Different people have that line at different levels, and for me, today’s Spotify Premium is worth it. In the future it may not be.
No need to be so hostile.
We are all here on Lemmy because we see the value in self hosting and free & open source software.
However even here, people have the need to antagonize each other and call each other corporate shills.
Maybe a peek behind the curtain of human nature.
deleted by creator
Well, to be fair, sometimes the "people" here are corporate shills.
Are bots actually prevalent here? I love me some Lemmy, but boy are they scraping the bottom of the barrel by targeting us and not reddit.
Well first off, a shill could be a person, and not a bot.
To your question, yeah, they're here, they're also on Reddit.
They go wherever the people are at, so they can train, inflate user population, and influence opinions.
It costs them almost nothing to be at multiple places, at the end of the day it's all text to be parsed and people to manipulate.
Actually, usually when I see someone questioning if bots exist I think of that as an actual bot trying influence people away from thinking about bots, considering that bots are all over the place at this point, it's weird to see someone deny/question that.
/Iam14andThisisDeep
Perhaps, and this may be a crazy thought, there is some middle ground to be found between a company actively hemorrhaging money and it demanding infinite profit.
Now, I'm sure you do your job for no pay just out of the goodness of your heart, and that you even put your own money into it because you just love it so much. And that's very very good of you. But I just don't think I can really make the same demand of everyone, though I assure you, we all are looking up to you as an example, truly the absolute paragon of morality.
I been paying for it and I don’t really see how I’m suddenly getting half the product for twice the cost.
Spotify is a sweet fucking deal for me. I listen to it for like 2500+ hours a year. It’s worth it to pay to not have to listen to ads alone.
What’s really crazy is how you dudes are quick to call people shills and corporate apologists and all this dumb shit when they just get value for the money. If you don’t like it don’t buy it. If you’re so upset about the free version then use something else. Nobody gives a fuck, we aren’t getting a commission here.
Music is a fucked industry. You want to support a band you go their shows and buy some merch same as always.
There is no erosion of services dude. Why are you typing up essays on a premise that is faulty? If you pay for no ads you’re still getting no ads. It sounds like you’re bitching about free services changing which is wild.
If we all stand together we can bully them into providing top tier free services. That’s what you’re trying to say?
Yea twitter you got me.
What features are paid users losing with Spotify? If you think you’re entitled to a robust set of features for free then make them and distribute them freely.
Or you could keep whining on forums thinking you’re fighting the good fight I guess.
“See how they down vote you.
Let me try to give a voice to the people down voting.
I hope that in the future they make a separate subscription model for each of these services.
$2/month I get the pause feature.
$5/week I get to control my own volume.
$4/month I don't have to loudly shout the brand name of the commercial to go back to my podcast.
This is how websites keep the lights on and you shouldn't be so ungrateful. We all know the pursuit of infinite profits means all these companies will continue to find more ways to squeeze customers. So I'll go down with this ship even though just 5 years ago it was crazy to see a 2 minute unskippable ad but now there's 3 of them and you're an asshole for wanting to remove that.
What would the internet look like if we got rid of how companies advertise to us.
In the future you should consider what you're saying before speaking out against enshitificatin and encroachment of mass marketing into our lives. It feeds. It never stops feeding and I am meat.“
This was your opening statement. Nobody is hot dude and you still have nothing to say about what service is being eroded. You’re popping off with the buzzword of the week and the shit don’t even apply here.
I’ll ask again, what features are paid users losing with Spotify?
Aka “I’m just bitching about not getting everything I want for free.”
I know, how dare someone like something? What a loser.
Convenient that its on the post about how free features are going away, isn't it?
I've never paid for any streaming music plan and I love it. I never have to pay to listen to music because I already have MP3s of all the good music
To each their own. For me, I really like the Discover Weekly/Daily features to discover new music and I can’t see how I would ever “already have MP3s of all the good music” since that’s an ever changing set. Heck, I still have a ton of old mp3s I used to rip and/or download, but I haven’t listened to them in a while.
I would gladly pay for a similar AYCE movie subscription, but I refuse to sign up for a ton of different services and play the “which service is that movie on again?” game. Instead it’s a very different approach for me.
I used to think the same, but these days it seems like most songs from my favorites/liked list are no longer on Spotify, as I hear the same 10 or 20 songs over and over again when I have it on random play, and when I manually try to go through my list it'll skip over songs and not let me select them.
I guess the competition with the other music delivery companies is coming down to certain companies have exclusives for certain songs and artists.