this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Technology

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Spotify made £56m profit, but has decided not to pay smaller artists like me. We need you to make some noise | Damon Krukowski (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Masimatutu@mander.xyz to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] blazera@kbin.social 35 points 11 months ago (28 children)

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.

So if my maths are right, this means people not getting paid...are people that would make less than 3 dollars in a whole year?

[–] spwyll@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Your math assumes those people only have one track on Spotify. I currently have 25 tracks on Spotify. Without advertising or promotion of any kind, I earned about $12 this year. The big problems are:

  1. New rules apply per song, so if ALL my songs got 999 streams, that would be $75 they wouldn't pay me--if ONE song hit the magic 1000 streams they would pay me $3 and I still wouldn't get the other $72
  2. They are still making money off my streams, they are just coming up with ways not to pay me for it while still claiming to be "artist focused"
  3. They claim the "small payments" usually don't get claimed anyway so they don't see the need to make them--this is ideologically "paying with exposure"
  4. By your logic, since $33,975 annual income is the federal poverty level, anyone making less than that should not complain about not getting paid at all--you can obviously insert any arbitrary amount here to support the "logic" of "that's not much so nothing at all is just as good"

I have no delusions about ever making a living off Spotify (or my extremely niche music in general), but the idea that a corporation should be able to monetize my work and not have to pay me anything for it is sort of distasteful

[–] blazera@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago

you dont have to let them monetize anything. host it yourself, or sell your music on other sites.

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