Recent news revealed that Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek has been investing heavily in military tech companies, which adds another ethical layer to a platform already criticized for how little it pays musicians !
Spotify only pays artists about $3–5 per 1,000 streams, using a pro-rata model that directs most money toward major stars… By contrast, Qobuz (≈$18–20 per 1,000 streams) and Tidal (≈$12–13) pay far more fairly!
However Tidal is far from ethical. Most of its revenue is controlled by private investors and founders and small artists still earn very little…
More fair-minded platforms like Bandcamp, Resonate, Ampled, or SoundCloud’s fan-powered royalties prioritize musicians over investors.
With these more ethical alternatives available, why do we keep using Spotify?
Pirate and pay creators directly.
Pirating is the objectively best, most private and future proof user experience you’re gonna get.
That just sounds like buying CDs but without the offline backup and booklet
How does that even work?
Personally I do this by buying merch. If I buy a shirt from a band than not only do I get a cool shirt but the band also gets paid more in that single transaction than if I listened to their music 5000 times on spotify.
Sure, but that doesn’t give you rights to pirate their music, does it? There is also the problem who gets paid what when you buy their merch.
Ask any artist: they make most of their money from merch and ticket sales (depending on venue).
I assume that depends on the contract they have with their label, but usually it’s a way for them to earn more.
Are most artists still aligned with labels these days? I was under the impression that there’s been a massive shift to going independent.
Its standard across the industry. Artists get paid very little in per unit sales of media.
The bulk of money they earn comes from tours (which they cover the bill for, and cut some of the profits from), and merch (which they take the largest cut from).
That’s the standard, yes. And the solution is to pirate their music instead? But seriously, why do they even bother with labels then? Don’t get me wrong, I’d like for them to be better paid and for streaming services to allocate bigger cut to them, however, piracy doesn’t help with this at all. Usually it’s just an average Joe excuse to not pay anything at all.
Almost all of my collection was pirated in college (it didn’t help that someone stole my 96 CD binder from my car). Once I was making OK money and paid downloads became a thing, I slowly rectified that. It was hard to find electronic music any other way in the '90s.
Labels provide the upfront capital for things like recording studios, distribution (traditionally, less so nowadays when there’s not a physical product to distribute), publicity, marketing, live shows, etc in exchange for a percentage and usually with a contract that the artist will make X many albums with them.
Although things are slowly changing, you are unlikely to be doing huge tours at sold out venues and getting your songs played on the radio unless you have the substantial money to do so in the first place.
I’m not really worried about whether a label or corporation deems me to have the “right” to listen to their music. The only thing I’m concerned with outside of consuming the art is the artist who made it. I highly doubt any artist would genuinely care if someone pirated their music but still payed them through other means (like buying merch, tickets, etc).
I think the argument of who gets paid what when you buy merch is irrelevant when you consider the alternative being the artist gets virtually nothing. I would have to listen to an artist 200 times for them to maybe get a singular dollar from spotify. If whoever is handling their merch store is giving them less than that for each sale of a shirt then it’s the artists fault at that point for still working with them.
That’s literally what happened with Napster. Metallica were rather pissed, and Napster shut down, leading to the fun P2P days of Whac-a-Mole.
“This is Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Metallica. This month he was planning to install a gold plated shark tank bar beside his pool, but thanks to people like you downloading his music, he must now wait a few months before he can afford it.”
My late 20s partner has no idea what Napster is and it breaks my heart.
Fuuuuuuuuck Metallica of course it was one of the grotesquely wealthy ones that tried to kill sharing. Maybe the entire industry eat itself and collapse !
go to their gigs
Contact them, ask for ways to donate. Until they publicly provide that info.
You realize that bands have by their choice a contract with a label which in turn provides services to them (bands without a label don’t count since they would sell their music themselves)? If the band sells their music directly is one thing, but what you’re suggesting is simply wrong. Also donations are not meant as a mean of purchasing stuff. 🤷♂️
Yes, it is well known that Band merely contract out the business of distribution and they are not being exploited by this arrangement. Lars Ulrich told me that.
However, I still think all intellectual property should be abolished and all art should be paid in full before production starts and I will pirate everything until then. I may send donations with my own terms to certain artists as I see fit, I do agree this is not “purchasing” I do not “purchase” art, I take it and do not recognize any need or right for compensation.
But I do like giving them money regardless, I sent 1500$USD last year to various small artists I like to motivate them, make of that what you will. This is the only arrangement that I find acceptable.
Focusing on one part of your response that really rubs me the wrong way, you believe artists don’t need to be compensated for their work?
I think their point is that in an economy that isn’t profit-driven, artists (just like everyone else) would not rely on their art/labor for survival.
Artists generally prefer this model as well, since they don’t have to tailor their art to anyone else’s tastes. We already see models moving towards this, like Patreon, where you pay the artist to produce whatever art they want, rather than buying a completed work. The next step is this being UBI (which is essentially a public patronage system), not private patrons.
No, it is an artefact of a heinous economic system that they are made to “art for money” which is gross. I rather there be no art until the economic system perishes.
“I think that something has to be cheaper or have a different business model” doesn’t give me rights to steal it.
Stealing means change of ownership.
You are not stealing music.
Call it whatever you want, you don’t have rights to get it unless its through a legal way.
It is legal to download music from P2P networks where I live. Whether it’s ethical has always been a different argument, but it really only has to be MORE ethical than using Spotify.
OK, so fix the tax code to the extent that corporations are actually the main funder of the government (since they’re the only constituents with any power) and pay me a living wage, and I’ll … oh, no, wait. The vast majority of my purchase doesn’t go to the artist?
“Rights” are for the rich.
It’s not theft obviously, information can be duplicated infinitely at no cost.
Also I don’t think you understand, I want it to actively stop existing.
I pirate stuff, that I’m not even going to watch or listen to out of principle.
I want intellectual property abolished AND made illegal, not merely “change the business model” what kind of weak sauce is that, I want it flattened by bulldozers and erased from history books, it’s perpetrators treated as criminals.
Yes it is cheaply duplicated, but you have no rights to duplicate it when this is not allowed. Do you think artists are not entitled to a wage though? Should the live by the mercy of fans?
Please understand, I am saying the Intellectual Property regime should be ABOLISHED, I don’t recognizes ANYONE’s right to limit the propagation of human expression in any form. I find this heinous enclosure of culture absolutely intolerable, I think it corrupts art, creates monetary incentive to create art which are always impure and a defilement of the sanctity of art.
I’m not proposing an alternative, I’m not giving you any kind of solution either.
Artists are not “entitled to wages”, the artists should be paid for in advance, in fact all humans should have the essentials of life provided at no cost. I find it obscene that distributors finance and profit art like they do. The financialization of art has been its downfall. This is why our intellectual world is filled with garish slop, pumped full of “integrated artvertising”.
I’m sorry this demolishes the “business model of art” in this corrupt economic system.
But I want you to you, I hate it, I HATE IT ALL !!!