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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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I know the sentiment that you are conveying, and I understand each of the words in your comment individually, but I honestly have no idea what you're saying here.
I think Wrapped is like youtube rewind for spotify.They are talking about how the layoffs happened just after they finished working on that?
Though I think it is less the streaming model being a scam and more the way Spotify is taking all the profit and avoiding to properly pay out smaller creators.
It doesn't seem to me like Wrapped requires a terribly large amount of development work every year. There's a new design each year, but they probably just reuse all the SQL queries with the year swapped out. After the first year, it probably only requires bugfixing and regular maintenance. I bet a few devs keep an eye on it as part of their other duties.
Unlike YouTube Rewind, which requires a writing team, a production crew, talent, and music, on top of the analytics.
This is how I understood the comment:
Wrapped gets Spotify a lot of positive buzz. Layoffs while that buzz happens may get less notice, because people are on the “look at all the neat Spotify numbers” train and essentially advertising good vibes for the platform.
Ah! You may be right. That would make a lot of sense.
Spotify made this quarter the first time a profit since it existence. So if you think artists aren't paid enough, its either of these three:
We pay too little for consuming music.
The record labels take a too big share.
Spotify is really inefficient and could pay out more if they work more efficiently.
The only thing not possible is Spotify taking all the profit since they don't make any.
Very true. There's another possibility, though: That pay for certain employees (ie executives) is too high. It may not be included in 3, if the pay is normal. However, that "normal" may be considered immoral, and/or straight market failure,
Spotify take a standard cut?
It's record labels that are scamming small artists, and frankly spotify offer a better chance for them to go independent than having to rely on connections to get radio play so someone will buy their music
Wohh there, that's a lot of claims with 0 proof.
Can yo source any of that?
https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per-stream/
They charge 30%
Which is what Apple charges (and Spotify complain), and what Steam charges, and what GoG charges, and what Epic charges, and what Google Play charge, and what the company I work for charges
For a digital media marketplace, 30% has been settled on for the industry standard whether it's reasonable or not.
Okay? And physical stores don't? This isn't news and doesn't address your claim whatsoever? It doesn't compare spotify vs indi labels.
Discoverability, publishing, advertising, gigs etc.
30 percent of what? How much is each stream making? You know why I ask? Because I have been independently releasing music for almost 4 years and have made $26. On top of that I've surpassed 1000 streams, so what is the 30% exactly?
The kicker: that $26 is not only Spotify, it's Apple Music, Deezer, and dozens others, combined.
So the only reasonable take is, that we don't pay enough for consuming music, right? Because you have no label taking a cut and streaming services are not profitable themselves.
According to my spotify wrapped I listened to about 2500 different artists. Yearly subscription is 143,88€, so if spotify took 30% and ther rest is split equally to every artist they'd get a nice 0,0578€ from me each. For your $26 that'd mean on similar math that you'd need ~450 listeners, so it's atleast nearby the ballpark if you have 1000 streams on there.
I obviously omitted things like VAT and other taxes, payment processor fees and complexity of revenue streams in general, like how long I listened to each to keep it simple.
I'm not saying if that's fair or not, I just did quick and rough math around the data I had easily available. All I know is that for that half a cent per artist I'm not providing anything to anyone but I receive quite a lot every day.
For more detailed info you can check spotifys own report.
Looking at your Spotify page you will be an artist who gets nothing in this new plan. You have 14 average monthly listeners right now - each song needs 1000 unique listeners per year to get any sort of payout.
14 monthly listeners doesn't mean I didn't have 1000 unique streams, though. According to my info when my album went out in September I had over 400 unique streams in the first week, but my monthly listeners were not affected.
30% of the subscription price. That small artists get screwed over is entirely due to labels.
After the service cut has been taken, all money is put in one big pool and them divided by total number of streams and sent to the labels. How the cut between labels and artists is divided is up to individual contracts between artists and labels but usually the majority goes to the labels due to still accounting for cost of producing and shipping physical CDs. Pooling all users money also unfavourably favours big artists and is enforced by the labels as bigger artists makes them more money than smaller ones.
You can't just put your music on Spotify unfortunately. Google Play Music had the option to pay a small one-time fee to get your music up there, but they did away with that when they moved to YouTube Music.
If you're unsigned you need to go through a service like TuneCore to get your music on any of the streaming services.
Someone said Spotify reported 54 million in profit. For being the largest music streaming provider that is basically nothing. I suspect that they mirror the rest of the world, in that there's enough money, but they decide to give the vast majority to people who are already rich, like Joe Rogan or Taylor Swift.
This is how I understood the comment:
Wrapped gets Spotify a lot of positive buzz. Layoffs while that buzz happens may get less notice, because people are on the “look at all the neat Spotify numbers” train and essentially advertising good vibes for the platform.