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.
there's plenty of alternatives to spotify and losing your playlists or spotify weekly or whatever the fuck is not worth supporting a service this repeatedly hostile towards musicians
As a music industry friend of mine (Played in a band in the 90's you probably know about) tells me, the music industry now is basically all about licensing deals rather than music sales. Getting paid on spotify is about getting onto playlists via recommendation algorithms, so every song on a "chill vibes" playlist basically sounds identical. I once heard a cover of Nirvana's "Come As You Are" but specifically copied the "chill gen z vibes" sound, and was one of the worst covers I ever heard.
