This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
the german tv channel ARD actually published a three-part investigation into Spotify and Eventim middle of 2023 where they spotlighted this issue as well. it's a great watch if you understand german!
it's called Dirty Little Secrets
EDIT: here's episode two, the relevant one where they investigate what they call "ghost musicians"
Pirate the music, use ListenBrainz (which is FOSS) to analyze your listening behavior and make recommendations
So instead of the cents that artists get from streaming you propose they get nothing at all? You can buy from Bandcamp if the artists are on it and use ListenBrainz.
Exactly, they aren't losing anything and there's hope a better system will come along.
Agreed on Bandcamp though. The very few artists who use it get my money through there.
Didnt bandcamp get bought by some big company a little while ago? Sp bandcamp just doesent have the library yet. I do like it though in its current form (until it gets enshittified)
Wow, and they didn't even get into the seperate streaming numbers.
"Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians."
Oh yeah that worked great with movie and television streaming. I really like to pay the same price for just a tenth of the selection..
What's the equivalent for the movie and TV streaming?
I was thinking about the Paramount Decrees and how the repelling lead to the creation of studio owned streaming servies which has exclusive acces to the studio's library like Paramount+, Disney+, Discovery+, apple Tv+, Peacock etc.
I have always been surprised that Spotify was so popular. I used them a while back and was abhorred with how shit the experience was. Stopped and never touched it again.
From the article:
"...journalist Liz Pelly has conducted an in-depth investigation, and published her findings in Harper’s—they are part of her forthcoming book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.
...
"Now she writes:
'What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.'
In other words, Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels."
Once they get maket shared they start extracting...
To normal people this is called enshitification
An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre). How was that even possible?
LOL a couple obvious reasons are that Spotify listeners don't get to vote for grammy awards - only a few thousand people do - and to be eligible for a grammy an album has to be released in the United States. The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality. Jimi Hendrix never won a grammy. Neither did Bob Marley or Diana Ross. There's a lot already wrong with the grammys.
The fake musicians and possibly AI-generated songs are more interesting. If the music industry is trying to eliminate musicians it wouldn't be to avoid paying them - they've already figured out lots of ways to do that - it would be to have complete control over the music.
And Lenin said, “the best way to undermine society is through its music” — Bob Duvall
It’s a fake quote from Lenin, but suitably apt.
I mean they paid Joe Rogan $100 million dollars so they have already wrecked their reputation.
Ngl, I canceled them and haven’t gone back since. Don’t really miss it much, I try to use the same cost as my subscription to buy music every month on CD when I can.
There's a reason why artists have to sell 50$ t-shirts at shows. Back in the days, the label would leech you dry, and now it's Spotify, on top of your label
The last and only truth I needed to know about Spotify was it's 250 million dollar deal with Joe Rogan, who is antivax incel cancer, and that was it for me. No need to learn or know any more about them.
When some employees expressed concerns about this, Spotify managers replied (according to Pelly’s sources) that “listeners wouldn’t know the difference.”
Insulting your users, that always works out so well
Anyone use Deezer? How does the feature set compare? How does it compare to Tidal? I'd love to get off Spotify, just need a good replacement for all the music I listen to.
In my experience, the same fake albums show up on Deezer as Spotify. Frankly, I think the best way is Bandcamp. For for an album, download it forever. Stop paying to listen to the same music over and over and get DRM free tracks you can listen to your way while giving the money to the artists selling their albums directly.
Bandcamp the union busting company that laid off like 75% of its staff over 2023...?
Stopped using it when they arbitrarily removed songs from a rapper cause french prime minister had an issue with his lyrics.
After comparing the sound quality of Amazon, Spotify, Deezer and Tidal, the dynamic range of Tidal really stood out - even in lowest quality. At that time, I read that Tidal had the highest payout to the artists. I also like that the service is partially owned by several artists.
The recommendations and feeds are really top notch, just the right mix of stuff I know and like and nice surprises. The "Daily Discovery" often explores a certain genre or mood. There are so many cool bands I've found - also from genres I don't usually listen to. I can wholeheartedly recommend the service.
I understand that it's a different model that will not work for everyone. But check out Bandcamp's payout model. Find new music via internet radio/MusicBrains (I don't remember RN the name of music exploration based on that)/yt and buy it via the model that is straightforward and at least seems to put the most money in artists' pockets
Bandcamp also has a "discover" feature where you can set which genres you are interested in. I did find some interesting albums this way too
I dumped Spooterfy over a year ago now, moved all my liked song library to Tidal. I moved to AntennaPod for podcasts too. I never really make playlists, Tidals mixes are usually pretty good. The daily discovery is leagues above Spotify's weekly shit that would constantly play songs from artists I had blocked. No Spotify, I do not want to be ear raped by 100 Gecs I told you this!
They pay artists better and it's been a much better experience. My only issue was I couldn't easily like songs from the notification bar, but that was added a while ago in an update. It has started playing the same songs frequently lately, but thats not the worst I guess.
Obviously if you care about supporting your artists, buy thier CDs, vinyls (if you're into that) or buy them digitally on Bandcamp, streaming doesn't pay as much as direct support.
This reads as an ad but I'm genuinely just a satisfied user. Fuck Spotify.
As someone else here mentioned, Pandora is still a viable option too, hell my mom uses Pandora.
