very annoying to see a link to a song on socials media only to discover it's a spotify link. we get it—you pay 11 dollars a month to a company who most likely doesn't pay the artist anything for their work, which the company needs to get your 11 dollars
as a musician, my research to find the best service to promote shows that Spotify is bad and pretty much all streaming is bad, but for example YT Music and iTunes actual payout is worse
i do not know anyone with a Tidal account, and there is evidence that Tidal will screw over smaller artists even though their standard payout is greater than the other services
Ampled closed up shop at the end of last year, so there goes the most accessible indie option
the founder of Spotify funds literal military AI, i think that is probably a bigger ethical concern - but so does YT/Google/Alphabet and Apple they're just usually more discrete about it - not to whatabout but it does not seem to me that there is an ethical source for streaming music
but i basically do not see anyone running this campaign against YT, people are happy to get YT links to music, the same ones who are (rightfully!) unhappy with Spotify
i do not make money from any of them anyway, but Spotify has the greatest potential of contributing to discovery, so unless someone has better info and a better alternative i am not clear how this stance is productive for musicians
i do want more info on this, this is a data-driven decision and not an ideological one, i will be thrilled for a better, more fair, and more ethical option out there
to be honest i wasn't trying to be productive, i'm just a broke indie artist feeling bitter about the state of the music industry & the general culture of Content Consumption
but i guess if i were to try and be a little less of a blackpilled hater and try to come up with something productive to say, well... yeah i agree with you, there is no ethical streaming platform. it's all bad. it is literally better for musicians to put their work on Soulseek than Spotify imho. or Apple Music or Tidal or Deezer or whatever
if reach is what you're concerned about, putting stuff out there for free is better than behind a paywall. not everyone has a Spotify account after all
if getting money for the work is more the issue then, idk. Bandcamp is fantastic but i worry about the future of it, what with the new ownership. personally i'm thinking about hosting mp3s on my own website and figuring out the best way for people to pay what they want for the downloads. itch.io comes to mind as well, i've seen people sell their music there
it's just kind of hard for someone completely independent to get people to pay for their music these days. because of, well, Spotify partially. it's basically the face of the streaming era so more people are vocally mad about them than the other corporate actors also ruining the industry
i wish i had better answers. it's not all doom & gloom though. art will survive well beyond the lifespan of capitalism. music still matters and always will
I will add that there are two main reasons why I link to youtube given the fact that it's not a great revenue source for artists, as someone's who's long but begrudgingly accepted that music cannot ever be a financially sustainable form of labor for me.
- It is very easy to link to and share youtube videos, even more so than spotify, etc.
- With tools like yt-dlp it is also incredibly easy to pirate music from youtube
If anything I'm at a point where I've chosen a self-hosting option because I don't see any point in making people pay for it when the audience would be smaller than the file sizes. It doesn't make sense for me not to just go ahead and make it free in the first place, especially when so much of it was designed with anti-commercial motivations.
