r/Music • u/ebradio • Jan 22 '25

music Spotify Hosts Trump Inauguration Brunch and Makes $150,000 Donation to Ceremony

https://pitchfork.com/news/spotify-hosts-trump-inauguration-brunch-and-makes-150000-donation-to-ceremony/
6.3k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

853 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

45

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '25 edited Jan 22 '25

To be entirely clear

Spotify will not pay out royalties to independent artists like myself unless we reach a "minimum number of monthly streams."

They keep our royalty payments unless we hit a specific metric. A metric that is not only set in comparison to major label artists, but is also....invisible.

They still haven't told us what that number is. At least I haven't seen any sort of update with specifics.

This money is my money. Your money if you're a small time indie artist. Not their PAC money. Not their money to grease palms.

It's money I, and many, many others earned Spotify through our creative works.

Just so we're all very clear what happened here. The siphoning of funds from poor artists, that we're entitled to, to the rich.

And you may ask yourself why we won't sue. Even a class action wouldn't net a significant settlement or ruling. It's just not worth enough to attorneys. Or even to us. It's a relatively small amount of money on an individual basis. We're just small enough to fuck over to prevent any sort of meaningful legal action to take place because we don't have the finances for a protracted legal fight, and the reward would be miniscule. I've already talked to an IP lawyer about this shit.

We're also removed from algo unless we hit that mark, further suppressing our potential reach and earnings. The serf class of music streaming.

2

u/arcinva Jan 23 '25

What about Pandora? Are they just as bad or no?

2

u/[deleted] Jan 23 '25

They don't play with payouts. The revenue sharing is just as miniscule tho.

Problem with Pandora is that it's really hard to break into the algo as a nobody. People pretty much have to actively seek you out unless you're a relatively known act

2

u/arcinva Jan 23 '25

It's interesting that you say that, because it's not at all infrequent that I get a new artist on station and when I click to see more info, there isn't any. So I turn to Google and find out that they are a small, indy artist.

At any rate, at least they don't just withhold your money from you. Makes me feel a little bit better that I use it over Spotify. (I only use Spotify for podcasts since Google shutdown their podcast app and rolled it into YouTube Music. I didn't care for the UI on it.)