this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Well technically it is the record labels' jobs. I think most big artists don't interact directly with Spotify but through a label that signed them when they were small and takes 90% of the income from their songs.
Exactly. When you see someone whingeing about how little they earned from x amount of streams, go look up what spotify pays per stream, do the maths, it never adds up.
It's because they signed a shitty publishing / label deal. I've got plenty of music on spotify and tbh have earned more in royalties from streams than I ever did via labels in this day and age (though there was a 'golden age' where digital downloads paid very well, assuming the label manager wasn't on the fiddle). Spotify could prob pay a little more per stream at this point though.
Spotify pays like 0.003 per stream the fuck are you talking about? Either you are racking up millions of plays or you are straight talking out your ass. Granted taking a shitty label deal is not something to promote, but don't act like Spotify actually pays shit, because it does not....
Selling 20 albums at $10 would net around $200, getting 20 people to listen to your album on Spotify nets maybe 80 cents.....
You don't own songs on spotify, you merely license the temporary right to listen to them. Therefore the proper comparison is not album sales, it's radio plays.
Now I don't know the average rate for radio licensing, but I'm willing to bet big money that it's absolutely nowhere near $200 for 20 people listening.
Maybe radio is not as cheap as spotify, maybe not, but famously spotify is not profitable so the labels are still to blame regardless.
I worked at labels for years... that's not the way it works
If an artist is enough of a dummy to blow their entire advance unwisely quitting their job, spend months in the studio, and get an elaborate tour bus: the label will pay for it but those expenditures are weighed against your royalties. Scummy labels exist, sure, but often the artist went on a spending spree with what anointed to a loan the label was paying them.
Spotify also pays absolute garbage and fucks bands harder than most labels were ever able to
How about unsigned artists?
They get fractions of a penny per play, you are better off streaming it once on SoundCloud for them then listening a hundred times on Spotify. All the dick riding here is from people who do not understand the business model of streaming services and how they steal all profit from those creators bringing content to their platform. Ad monetization does not fucking work it creates businesses with massive losses so data brokers can eventually scoop up the data from the ashes of the service and feed it to marketing departments at other companies for a fee, and no artists do not get a cent from those sales it's a joke. Buy directly from the artist on band camp or donate via patreon if they have it.