Spotify is a shit company. Pays artists by far the lowest in the industry (especially if you take into account their scummy minimums, catches, and terms for smaller musicians), injects shitty AI songs into Spotify-made playlists so they won't have to pay the artists the little they do, gives "donations" to fascists, and heavily invests in fucking war companies including partnering one who is essentially trying to make "the dark night" tracking machine to pair with AI assassination drones.

(Also side note, have you noticed all of these scummy surveillance companies making their names into very well-known references to pop culture so that all news stories on them are essentially lost to the pop culture void when searching for them? Palantir, helsing, etc...)

[–] torrentialgrain@lemm.ee 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, multiple people have pointed this out already and I’ve agreed with them. However I work in the music industry and Spotify is definitely not paying by far the lowest. By sheer volume they’re paying most of the share a song is earning nowadays and even on a per play basis they are fairly similar to their competitors, maybe slightly lower.

We can make the argument that revenue on a per stream basis is much too low in general and I would agree, but then we also have to rethink the entire pricing model.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

OK, true Pandora pays the least, but Spotify is down there.

Spotify pays 0.3¢ per stream.

Tidal pays 1.3¢ per stream, 400% more

Qobuz is around 4¢ per stream, 300% more. Some regions can apparently go down to as little as 1¢ per stream, still much more.

Hell, apple music pays over double what Spotify does at 0.8¢

Yes it pay around what shitty US companies pay per stream, but the whole point of this point is that it is a bad standard. PLUS, these other services don't have the "shit on small artists" policies like Spotify.

Let's take a small artist that has 10k streams on Spotify and qobuz:

on qobuz they earn more than 100 euros
on Spotify they earn 0 euros

and anything above their minimum, does not earn the total, but the total - the minimum

A small artist that has 20k streams on the same two, and assume the Spotify stream minimum is 10k (IIRC it is a bit higher)

on qobuz, they earn more than 200€
on spotify, they earn about 30€

Plus this isn't even addressing the making of shitty AI music and injecting it in playlists to steal even more revenue from artists.