We all know the music industry isn’t in a good place right now. Sales are down and artist are not happy. So it made me think? Why don’t the Big 3 (Universal, Warner & Sony) just come together and make their own streaming service with all their music, instead of sharing profits with Spotify and Apple Music? I don’t get it.
Film/TV industries have their own dedicated services like Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, etc. They don’t have a middle man taking a cut like Cable. Obviously, the Big 3 would need to come together to make this happen. Having 1 music service strictly for just 1 of them is a bad idea.
I just think Spotify & Apple are benefitting from this way more than the labels. And with Spotify paying HUGE amounts to the likes of Joe Rogan 😒. It’s kind of a slap in the face of the industry that MADE them this big. Like why is the Talk Tuah podcast getting just as big of bags as the labels & Artist? I know Jay Z tried his own service ran strictly by the artist called Tidal like 10 years ago, but he couldn’t get enough big artist to invest into it long term.
Can someone PLEASE explain to me why the Music Industry allows this?
Actually it the labels who are taking advantages of the streaming services without mentioning profiting from artists they manage. When negotiating deals with streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music, labels often demand large advances. These funds are typically non-recoupable, labels keep this money regardless of how well the music performs on the platform.
All major labels performed very well this year financially. It is really artists themselves who suffers
Ohhh. You know, that makes sense. It felt like a stupid question asking how LABELS would allow themselves to screwed over, but once again, they aren’t the ones getting screwed over.
Fun fact: if you’re an artist on Spotify receiving less than 1000 streams in a year, they won’t even bother paying you. You also need a minimum number of unique listeners. That number is secret.
Spotify is good for those already rich, and bad for those who isn’t.
They also have Joe Rogan and Gwyneth Paltrow on their payroll, and they actively lobby for more relaxed AI legislatiolegislation in the EU.
If you have a subscription, the best thing you van do is to cancel it, get your music from the high seas, and instead donate $12 per month or however much it costs directly to artists you enjoy by buying their music or merch online.
AntennaPod is good for podcasts.
Bandcamp is a good option for directly supporting artists for the time being, especially if you queue up all your purchases for a Bandcamp Friday, where artists/labels receive all the money rather than BC taking their 20% cut.
Bandcamp is a good option for directly supporting artists for the time being, especially if you queue up all your purchases for a Bandcamp Friday, where artists/labels receive all the money rather than BC taking their 20% cut.
Not just a good option, but the best option I know of. If you buy an album for $5, that’s equivalent to the earnings for thousands of plays on Spotify. And that would be assuming the artist even gets enough total Spotify plays to qualify for their payout under the new rules.
They are stealing from artists who bring business to the platform, and using the guise of protecting themselves from bot streamers. Oh, and they recently raised the subscription price by 25% in my country. Spotify was the most satisfying subscription to cancel that I have ever cancelled.
They’re also being accused of pushing their own AI-generated slop music so that they have to pay out even less to real artists. Fuck Spotify.
Spotify is pushing AI generated music now!? Do they have no damn shame? These platforms and labels are NOTHING without the artist.
It’s not confirmed afaik, but there is big motive behind it for Spotify to flood listeners with artists they don’t have to pay.
There’s also the apparent problem of third parties uploading AI slop. Spotify is putting in minimum listener requirements to supposedly deal with this, but what it will do instead is it choke out real small artists, and the AI artists will just get botted above the minimum pay threshold. To me, this gives Spotify even more motive than before to dilute all artists on the platform with their own AI music. They already make deals with large labels and podcasters, they don’t care about the other 90% of artists who eat at their bottom line.
“Spotify … anticipates reaching profitability for the full year in 2024, which would mark the company’s first full profitable year since it launched 18 years ago.”
Interesting that they anticipate a full year of profit when there is this “AI problem” plaguing them. How convenient it would be if it turned out to be their own AI artists they don’t have to pay.
"Ek said moving forward, Spotify will be more disciplined about how it spends money. “You should not expect that we’re going to go back to 2021 behavior. We want to be very resourceful,” he said. "
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/13/spotify-projects-first-full-year-of-profitability-ever
This video shows some AI artist profiles and talks about it more:
For anyone reading this who’s put off by the prices, I ditched Spotify and started exclusively buying music on Bandcamp. Apart from an initial splurge, I’ve ended up paying less for music each month. And I own that music permanently. And they got paid more. YMMV of course especially if you’re somebody who doesn’t relisten much, but seeing an album on Bandcamp that costs as much as a month’s Spotify subscription shouldn’t put you off.
While that is true, even independent artists who don’t have a label grabbing all the profits still get shafted, earning next to nothing with streams.
You are right
Spotify is the only reason I don’t pirate 99% of my music (the other 1% is still played through it). Would go back to creating my own library
IIRC, the music industry was in decline long before Spotify was made. The transition period before Spotify was just illegally downloading everything through Limewire/Kazaa/Napster etc.
Also, the reason podcasts make money is because they can produce something that brings audiences in on a weekly basis. The music industry OTOH has artists that make an album a year or less. It’s not as sustainable and it’s harder to sell ads against.
I don’t think more segmentation is a wanted solution by consumers either. Consumers would much rather use one app for all platforms than have to buy a different streaming service every time they want to listen to a new album.
Yeah the '90s was the big heyday for the music industry when they used to charge us $25 (in 1990s dollars, $48 today) for a CD with 2 good songs and a bunch of filler. That ended quickly as, like you said, Napster and the like came on scene. Then we got the iPod and iTunes and a slew of ‘ringtone companies’ where you could buy songs individually for a dollar or two until streaming took off.
They’ve never recovered to the level they were at back then because there are just too many options now and they don’t control them all.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-revenues-by-format/
Nothing has been as big as CDs but total revenue has been growing since 2015.
Wow, that stretch from 2010 - 2015 must’ve been brutal before streaming popped off.
What do the scales below and above the timeline represent? There’s no explanation of the data displayed.
The total height represents sales of each format in relation to the others. The timeline isn’t the zero line like you might be thinking. $0 would be the bottom of the graph at any given time.
Effectively a stacked bar chart/area chart, but with “pizzaz” that makes it less readable.
I suppose, but I think it’s a really nice visual that gets the point across just fine for this level of discussion.
Why don’t the Big 3 (Universal, Warner & Sony) just come together and make their own streaming service with all their music,
Careful what you wish for. It’s long been a concern of mine that we’ll see a fragmentation of the music streaming market, with the same results as in TV.
You know how one show you like is on Disney+ and one is on Netflix and two are on Amazon, and one is on Paramount and so on…? Result is you either miss shows or pay a fortune.
Imagine that with your favourite bands, except you need a Warner subscription to listen to one band, a Sony one to listen to another, etc.
It’s bad enough with some things not being on one music service while they are on another one, or with songs being there and then gone and then back again for utterly opaque reasons. If the labels get the idea that they can cut out the middle man and gate off their artists from any service but their own, it’ll be awful.
there’s a solution to the streaming fragmentation problem: piracy. i don’t watch diz+ and para+ and netflix; i just go to Plex or jellyfin
I guess, but for your average consumer that’s not going to be an attractive option.
Result is you either miss shows or pay a fortune.
Or you go back to sailing the high seas.
I noted that in the post. It’s even in the quote. “Come together”. Nobody wants multiple subscriptions lol.
Yeah, I know, but I feel like execs are more likely to want to go it alone and have exclusive artists than have to work out a way to share with each other.
We’ve seen it in movies; we’ve seen it in gaming; we saw it starting in music right around when Apple stepped in with the iTunes music store, and then the music execs saw an uptick they didn’t want to lose. When Apple pivoted to streaming, they no longer had much of a say; ClearChannel/iHeartRadio had already consolidated OTA streaming and they had nowhere left to go.
It’s much easier to prevent the likes of Netflix than to stand up a united opposition to it and succeed — especially with the spectre of monopoly regulation sitting back stage.
There were attempts at trying to create a label specific streaming site that failed miserably. If no one was going to sign up for Tidal, they weren’t going to sign up for a Sony site.
Well hopefully not. I didn’t know it had been tried before, that’s interesting.
They own a big chunk (possibly a majority) of Spotify and extract hefty licensing fees from it. (Spotify moving into podcasting was apparently intended to find a market in which they could keep the profits.) The majors get far better licensing terms than indie labels or small artists would get, because they have the whip hand: Spotify has no choice but to pay up as not to become a platform without Taylor Swift/Ed Sheeran/Baby Shark/etc., which would effectively wipe them out.
Make no mistake, the three major labels (Warner, Sony and Universal) are reaping the vast majority of profits from Spotify.
Oh, thank you for informing me. So it’s actually the labels screwing everyone else over?
It has been since the dawn of the recording industry
The film/TV industry splitting into 5+ services wasn’t a good thing. Advocating for the same system for music could be good for artists but would suck for consumers.
i see a lot of comments saying how the current situation is better than if streaming platforms became fragmented like TV, but part of why streaming services for TV became so popular is because TV and movies are things you don’t often return to- aside from a few favorites, you might watch a show or a movie only once every five or ten years, whereas you listen to your favorite music over and over and over again. imo if Spotify were to collapse, it’s less likely that people would shell out a fortune for WB+ and Sony+ and more likely that they would just go back to buying an album every month or two, which is a win win because it’s cheaper for them and way more money going to the artist. hell, even if 98% of people just went back to limewire and 2% started buying music again, that’s still ultimately way more money for artists
Correct, the main selling point for music streaming services is about having one place where you can find all your favourite music. It’s acceptable if you don’t find all the Star Wars stuff on Netflix - you can either watch other shows or movies instead or subsribe to Disney until you’ve seen it all, but a music streaming service with only the content of one or two major labels would probably be less attractive for many people, because they would only get a limited amount of music / artists. Also for the record companies it could mean higher cost (for maIntaining their own streaming service) and potentially lower profits.
The rental economy calls to us and we must go…
The graph is comparing two different things.
Yes. One is the amount of music sales, the other the amount of Spotify.
I won’t argue with streaming services go fuck themselves but music industry’s not being in a good place also deeply related with there are shit megaton quadrillion musicians spawning everyday now. And most of them are pretty good!
Making music got easier by decade and it’s around 500$ to have all kinds of tech and instruments better than what Radiohead used in Kid A, and learning resources are way more accessible now.
Total music related spending (vinyls, merch, tickets) skyrocketed compared to 80s or 90s as well, but it’s also split between 100 million artists, and not 100.000. Yet the listener headcount only doubled or tripled.
Making music got easier by decade and it’s around 500$ to have all kinds of tech and instruments better than what Radiohead used in Kid A, and it’s way more accessible to access to learning resources.
People forget the part. The garage bands who couldn’t possibly make it in the 90s can now release their own music without a label. I’m just a drunk and I’ve got music out there that was mostly recorded in a closet. Anyone can put stuff out and try to find their audience.
The other thing a lot of folks forget is that most bands never made much from album sales. Only the top tiny percent did, even among a lot of famous bands. Musicians have always out there killing themselves on the road to make money on ticket sales and merch.
I love KidA ❤️
Listeners have gone up?
Because the alternative is trying to stay in a dying physical medium (CDs), a nice physical medium (LPs), or accepting piracy.
Streaming was a compromise to allow record labels to sell access to music at a bulk cost so that they can continue to exist.
As someone who remembers the time before spotify: people were pirating alot so legal streaming was the way to end this but giving a usable alternative
If the big 3 get together, artists will get less, pure and simple
