When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
I feel so bad for artists. They deserve to get paid for their hard work. Unfortunately, it’s been so hard for me to convince friends to move away from these predatory streaming platforms. A lot of people don’t want to lose having an unlimited catalogue at their fingertips.
Maybe I’m going to sound like a boomer here, but I don’t get why people need an unlimited catalogue at all. What’s wrong with paying artists directly to get their vinyls and CDs? What happened to curating your music library? What happened to the days where you’d buy CDs and listen to them over and over again, front to back? What happened to the days where playlists were manually curated for yourself, or even better, for your friends? Some of my fondest memories are music related, of my best friends painstakingly selecting a playlist of songs for me and burning them onto a CD for me to enjoy. What happened to the days where we didn’t need a constant stream of music pushed to us by an impersonal AI? What happened to developing your own unique and interesting personal taste?
I get that these streaming platforms are convenient, but it feels to me that we’re losing the ability to actively listen to music, to truly appreciate it, to understand the labor of love that it was for the artists, all for the sake of convenience. I don’t want music to be convenient, music is a fucking gift. I don’t want to be pushed AI generated recs, or AI generated music.
I’m rambling, lost my train of thought, and probably sound like a Luddite, but I have such strong feelings related to music and just hate these streaming platforms so much. I refuse to use them.
tldr please please please support your favorite artists by buying from them directly
The music world that er have today cannot be compared.
If we just had CDs 99.99999% of artists would just never be put in a store. There would just not be shelf space.
Say what your will about streaming but the internet has allowed a lot more people to make music and to get heard.
I realize I kept saying CDs, but I also include buying digital version in what I meant, edited my original post to say that. My main gripe is that we do have these services in which musicians can put their work out there and get paid fairly for it, but people don’t use them. Buying digital album is cheaper than monthly streaming price for Spotify too. These services that people value for convenience are hurting artists. We even have musicians commenting so here.
There is also so much great music being put out for free officially
Nothing. Because that was never really a thing. What you’re describing was/is just a hobby. And, like most hobbies, it’s small and niche relative to the industry as a whole. Most people were listening to music for free through radio since forever. Then TV was added into the mix. Paying for music, unless it’s a concert, is just not really a concept humanity is familiar with.
I agree that many people listened to music for free via radio but I’m skeptical that it was just a hobby? What about the Zune/iPod days? People went through more efforts to curate a library, no? Whether it was with music downloaded illegally, or actually paid for via iTunes…
It was rarely curated. You just listen to the radio, hear some cool tunes, buy the albums of the artists, the end.
That’s what I meant by curated! Taking the effort to buy some cool songs/albums you liked. Is there a connotation to “curation” that I don’t know about?
I think curation implies more depth and selectivity to the collection and perhaps a certain amount of active effort to obtain and maintain it. You’re talking about hearing a song you like on the radio and clicking “buy,” where the sort of person who would talk about their curated library would spend their weekends digging through crates looking for the final LP released on some random record label in 1985 they need to complete their collection of what is, to them, the pinnacle of early house music as released in Yugoslavia prior to the fall of the USSR. Even if it’s not as hyper-specific as that example, I would expect them to at least have things meticulously tagged and organized.
That’s fair. But then what is the word for what I am talking of? Just simply “collecting”? But could that also have a connotation of a person who’s into collecting music as a hobby, like what you’re saying for “curated”?
I think people who care about music make some false assumptions about people that kind of don’t. It’s like the xkcd about quartz: https://xkcd.com/2501/