Happy Thanksgiving, Spotify chose this holiday week to officially announce that 2/3 of tracks on the platform will no longer receive any royalties. That includes tracks of mine and likely some of yours, too https://dadadrummer.substack.com/p/1000-streams-or-bust
Seems like the only right thing to do is pull all my music from Spotify. Well not quite. Leave one track behind, a short musical ditty called “It’s Just Not Worth It” or something like that, which explains why all the other songs are gone, and where you can find them (Bandcamp, until the enshittification gets too much even there).
@dada_drummer Time for two thirds of Spttify's artists to jump ship methinks. Plenty of other platforms. Vote with your feet.
@dada_drummer @anna anna do you think this is a preemptive measure because of the incoming (ongoing?) flood of ai music?
Dec 6, 2023, 10:03 AM@helvetica @dada_drummer oh wow, that is a really interesting take. My assumption was that there would be an easier way for Spotify to resolve that (eg music published by established record labels), and that this had more to do with pulling their leverage to broadly reduce payouts to artists. But I wonder if you're right!
@anna @dada_drummer yeah it is easy to imagine a world where arrived here through trying to find a way to maintain letting anyone upload music (even without a label) and wanting to treat everyone equally for payments.
or maybe they’re just tightening in an extra messed up way for everyone
Dec 8, 2023, 6:40 AM@helvetica @dada_drummer yeah, I'd like to think it wasn't predatory. The new system has precedent (eg video streaming), but it's a mismatch to most musicians' output. We typically see albums released, which are a holistic work vs a focus on hit singles.
Many musicians aren't trying to create pop music. New sound can be challenging to the broader public, and a model that focuses on hits or single tracks disincentivizes creative risk and thriving in an inherently smaller community.
Nov 24, 2023, 5:37 PM@dada_drummer thank you for the reminder, time to break out my cassette of On Fire.