Spotify are allegedly planning to fuck over obscure artists and musicians by radically changing its royalties payment model in 2024.
It would seem that massive corporations cannot help themselves but get hung up on asinine greed, with Spotify allegedly recording over 220 Million “Premium” subscribers as of the second quarter of this year, however they seemingly wish to nickel-and-dime low level artists whose music is featured on the platform.
According to Music Business Worldwide (MBW), Spotify will now fine music distributors and labels if they were to detect fraudulent activity with their musical tracks, such at botting leading to artificial hikes in popularity and the more likely that the music in question would be noticeable and featured on the platform.
Not so much a worry considering how essentially every large scale social hub / platform is awash with bots, specifically bots favoring leftist freaks on Twitter, boosting their tweets or spamming nonsensical replies to those who’ve offended someone in particular.
The second change Spotify intend to make is to raise the minimum length of playtime for non-musical noise tracks, so think of white noise, static, etc. At this point in time any track that garners over 30 seconds of playtime is generating royalties, of which Spotify clearly doesn’t want to pay out for individuals constantly streaming and cycling between white noise generators.
Besides the fact that many white noise creators are gaining the Spotify system by essentially filling their library with very short tracks to garner as much revenue as possible.
However the actual issue with these proposed changes for 2024 is the increase of minimum annual streams for a musical track required to actually start generating royalties in the first place, this is an immensely big blow to smaller artists who would more than likely fall below the new annual threshold and effectively be providing their tracks on Spotify for absolutely free.
Spotify aim to shift $1 Billion dollars from royalties over the next five years toward “legitimate” artists and rightsholders, by taking advantage of smaller, lesser known indie musicians and grifters gaining the system via white noise tracks and effectively giving a larger slice of the pie to prominent names and figureheads in the music industry.
In this situation, a track would need to achieve a monthly earning of 5 cents or approximately 200 streams per year to be compensated. Many independent tracks fail to reach this threshold, causing the nominal earnings these artists would have received to be redirected to Spotify’s collective “streamshare” pool.
While it might not seem like a substantial sum, an undisclosed source informed MBW that when this action is applied across the multitude of low-play tracks on the streaming platform, it would amount to tens of millions of dollars. This, in turn, would be allocated to more prominent artists, allowing them to receive a more significant portion of revenue.
That’s just the nature of business when it reaches a point where they believe they can simply get away with skimming off the top by introducing higher and higher minimum requirements and levies for indie artists to start generating their own revenue from the service, YouTube for instance doesn’t allow channels to generate its own ad revenue until they’ve met several criteria including accumulating over 1000 subscribers and several thousand hours worth of watch time on their videos.
It’s all articulated and coordinated, eliminating much more individuals who are at the bottom of the pyramid so that there’s much more money to go around for those who have some form of brand name recognition, which in turn more money towards named artists would more than likely lead to more individuals scamming themselves into buying a Spotify Premium license despite the fact the program can be easily pirated.
If you’re an indie musician who wishes not to have their rights and content ruthlessly violated by a tyrannical corporate entity you’d be wise to get your shit off the Spotify platform immediately, go anywhere else, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, it’s better to get little for your efforts than to get nothing at all because to Spotify you’re worthless now, they’d rather give those ten cents you were going to make to Taylor Swift instead, clearly she deserves it more than you do.
