This article explores the challenges faced by musicians in the current streaming landscape, highlighting Spotify's dominance and its impact on artist compensation. It contrasts Spotify's soaring profits and CEO's wealth with the struggles of many artists, particularly independent ones, to earn a living from their music.
Like considerably fewer people, I still buy a lot of CDs, records, and cassettes, mostly by independent artists, which is to say that I have a great deal of sympathy for how this immense reorganization in how we consume music has complicated the lives of artists trying to survive our on-demand, hyper-abundant present. Spotify divvies out some share of subscriber fees as royalties in proportion to an artist’s popularity on the platform.
The service recently instituted a policy in which a track that registers fewer than a thousand streams in a twelve-month span earns no royalties at all. Some estimate that this applies to approximately two-thirds of its catalogue, or about sixty million songs. Meanwhile, during a twelve-month stretch from 2023 to 2024, Spotify announced new revenue highs, with estimates that the company is worth more than Universal and Warner combined. During the same period, its C.E.O., Daniel Ek, cashed out three hundred and forty million dollars in stock; his net worth, which fluctuates but is well into the billions, is thought to make him richer than any musician in history. Music has always been a perilous, impractical pursuit, and even sympathetic fans hope for the best value for their dollar. But if you think too deeply about what you’re paying for, and who benefits, the streaming economy can seem awfully crooked. Although artists such as Taylor Swift and Neil Young have temporarily removed their music from Spotify—Swift pressed the company over its paltry royalty rates, while Young was protesting its nine-figure deal with the divisive podcaster Joe Rogan—defying the streamer comes with enormous risks. Spotify is a library, but it’s also a recommendation service, and its growth is fuelled by this second function, and by the company’s strategies for soundtracking the entirety of our days and nights. As a former Spotify employee once observed, the platform’s only real competitor is silenc
SPOTIFY ROYALTIES STREAMING MUSIC INDUSTRY ARTIST COMPENSATION
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