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
the simple answer, imo, is to normalise sharing music links that offer users a direct line of purchase. bandcamp, faircamp, generic neocities page with a stripe checkout, mailing a cheque, etc. if you like something by an artist, find where you can directly give them money and share that. if you see an artist's stuff appear on your timeline, share it. you don't know who on your follows might be looking for some happy hardcore, some basement crustpunk, some otamatone jazz, or some field recordings of trains running over pennies
spotify's power is twofold - its low cost of entry for listeners, and its discoverability engine. the cost is a trap of convenience that i have no real answer for, but we as a greater internet community beyond the cozy walls of eggbug have the capability to create a web of passionate music listeners that can help others find the cool music they need and how they can support the smaller voices that make the stuff too uncool for spotify playlists
in the 00s, i followed dozens of music blogs, all of which had particular niches they served with mp3 copies of albums you could grab from mediafire or rapidshare or wherever else. stonerrobixx was the cool motherfucker who had all the mezcal-soaked psychedelic stoner desert rock, holyfuckingshit40000 originated from 4chan but were all clearly far too good for that place with the sheer breadthe of unique artists they covered, toxicplasmosis (i may be misremembering this one, it was re-branded a few times over its course) was the place to pick up quality midwest emo, grungy shoegaze, and non-nazi black metal, and that's only naming a scant few. i visited each daily for updates
they all opened me up to genres and musical styles i never even dreamed of, all without some shitty algorithm to game. i dream of a return to this, an emphasis on sharing genuine and inspired works. there are a couple out there still, like foxy digitalis (disclaimer: brad has covered my work before, but i've been a fan of his for a long time prior to that) but if more people took some time to highlight and shoutout works, that could be a huge step towards liberating the music community from the mercy of the spotify game
my thoughts on this are scattered and somewhat ambivalent, so these are not as fully formed thoughts as they could be; also, a disclaimer is required that like 15 years of my life and livelihood are/were tied up in writing about music, so I am not approaching and cannot approach this objectively.
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As someone who was also around for music blogs, I feel like there is a lot of overly rosy revisionist history around the era. There were absolutely (scare quotes) algorithms to game -- both general search engine optimization tactics and the behemoth in the field, The Hype Machine, which seems to have been... totally forgotten about? (as in, by everyone!) all of this absolutely resulted in homogenization, which was absolutely pointed out at the time (unfortunately, the "Music Is Math" talk referenced here no longer exists online).
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And then PR agencies still existed and had clout -- possibly more clout -- such that a lot of blogs were essentially just funnels for whatever they got from publicists in their inbox. really, a lot of things that get called "algorithms" are ultimately fueled by what people get from publicists in their inbox, and/or from good old-fashioned payola.
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I've told this story before but I used to curate a playlist for one of the streaming services (not Spotify) a while back. The playlist hewed pretty closely to what was already popular on radio, but I tried to throw in some songs that were not. And people hated them. Their metrics, in particular their skip rates, were awful. I don't think this is entirely due to me being bad at that job; there is extensive research suggesting that people just prefer familiar music, in an example of the exposure effect. I don't know what to do with that information besides try to deny it. I don't think anyone does.
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As far as my own music discovery, I am currently in a place where I have managed to manicure the Spotify recommended algorithm associated with a couple playlists I've made in a way where it regularly turns up songs with fewer than 1,000 listeners, often from non-Western artists and almost always from artists I am not receiving 3 PR emails about per month. I could probably have discovered these artists with manual effort on my part -- I mean, that's how the manicuring happened -- but most likely not at the same volume. These recommendations are excellent and vibrant (if generally in the same basic genre). A lot of my Worldwide Music Wednesday posts come from it. I am literally listening to an album I found there right now.
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Meanwhile, I've also been trying to actually catch up on the hundreds of emails from publicists in my inbox, and have created a playlist on Spotify for the ones that I wouldn't mind relistening to. It also has a recommendation section beneath it. Those recommendations are very boring and composed entirely of the artists I didn't add to that playlist for a reason, and the artists I knew existed but hadn't gotten around listening to. (The same goes for Release Radar -- albeit skewed more toward the latter so at least it has some use.)
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This is probably my Music Tumblr nostalgia coming out, but I wish Cohost had... not more music discussion exactly, the #music tag is a bit of a firehose, but more consolidated discussion? But that just leads eventually to the discoverability discourse and I would rather not at the moment.
