but everything the company does is actively hostile towards musicians like me and it really sucks to see it paraded around with free marketing.
Look at this shit!
A new threshold of minimum annual streams that a track must meet before it starts to generate royalties. The threshold, according to MBW, will de-monetize tracks that had previously received 0.5% of Spotify’s royalty pool.
Scenario: A musician has paid a distributor to put their music on Spotify. People (subscribed or ad-based) are listening to it - but Spotify has deemed it's not listened to enough for their threshold and therefore will not pay out for streams.
Full stop, Spotify is profiting off that music without paying the artist.
'but it's so easy to listen to any music I want at the push of a button' really fucking screwed us all.
i know it's not immediately achievable for everyone, and not all music is super available this way, but i've stubbornly stuck with my mp3 library through the rise of streaming music and i promise you: once you've built that, it's 100000% more convenient and better. yes, mp3s take up space. yes, you will have to organize them and move them onto new devices manually and stuff. but the space requirements are pretty negligible in the age of the affordable terabyte.
and you know what mp3s don't do? they don't skip when your internet connection is bad. they don't become inaccessible when your dogshit ISP has intermittent service outages for a month. they don't eat up your wireless data. you can listen to them anywhere you fuckin want, no signal required, and no one can just take them away from you if the label throws a hissy fit or an artist (rightfully!!!!) decides that spotify is screwing them. even if you can't make a 100% switch right away, consider building a music library. make it your Little Treat once a month for a while. even if you have to do some extra work ripping CDs and stuff, it's worth it to have a library that YOU control. and there's no monthly fee!! fuck spotify, fuck DRM, fuck streaming media.
