What You Might Not Know About Spotify
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2024
- Xisuma Says Playlist ► • Xisuma Says
Xisuma talks about the new Netflix series The Playlist, about Spotify and the value of making music.
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Edited by SkyfighterZX:
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0:00 Coming up
0:21 The Playlist on Netflix
1:00 Spotify vs Record Labels
2:04 Value of a Musician
4:24 Effect of Success on Inspiration
6:15 Xisuma's other thoughts
#xisumasays #spotify #music - Ігри
A couple of months ago I watched a video called "The Illegal Rise of Spotify", which goes over the history of the app. One of the major points is that major record labels have a direct stranglehold on the app, since they can threaten to pull out their licenses if Spotify doesn't make the changes they want to make. Of course, Spotify is still a big company so they're not entirely free of blame, but the influence of the record labels and how much money they take from Spotify that doesn't go into artists hands really can't be ignored.
such a good video, I've watched it
spotify pays penny anyway
I've watched that video too
magnates media, wonderful channel and video
Crazy how right after I get premium this pops up in my notifications
They are watching us...
Having worked with and around the record industry id say spotify is a vast improvement. yes they still take a cut but they don't make demands, don't force time tables, don't structure "identities", and don't change the music the artists put out. These practices were very common with record labels. Spotify gave anyone access to put on a platform for anyone world wide to see. That's pretty incredible if you ask me. Is there room for improvement? Always.
Im just glad to see the record labels taken down a notch as well as industries like ASCAP and CSAC. terrible corps.
"they don't make demand". Well excuse me. there are article of Daniel Ek demanding artists make more album and he is billionaire wow.
Spotify certainly does make it easier to put your music out there. I'd also say it makes it even harder to live off making music too. 90% of musicians will tell you that the only way you can still live off of being a musician is doing concerts. With Bandcamp, you might sell an LP, who knows, even an CD or a digital download, but most people won;t bother whether or not it is on streaming services. Gigging is the only way musician can """reliably""" make money.
Concert tickets sell, streaming doesn't.
Some older models of crowd-funding music still work, like ArtistShare. One of the big people using that platform is Maria Schneider. Lots of people keep buying her music, digitally or physically because she refuses to join services like Spotify. But this route is still only people for artists that have a big name already, or are surrounded by a caring community.
@@thewafflemancer that was true with major record companies already. They take something like 75%+ of the profit from record sales, contract depending.
@@cleio81 I'm afraid that for most people that is still preferable than making no sales thanks to streaming.
I don't have data to back this up, but I do hear a lot of echo's that this is a horrible situation regardless
As someone currently watching this video with a group of people which includes two individuals who have achieved moderate success in the music industry (both have independently had multi-album record deals and both mode a living from the music industry as their only source of income for over a decade each) they have asked me to post this comment. Both would like to point out that Spotify is absolutely a bad deal for artists, and in particular artists who were talented, driven, and focused enough to have made a living in the music industry previously find that the share of profits and money to be made from Spotify is inconsequential and unsustainable in comparison to their record and touring contracts.
Part of the reason why the record company took such a high percentage is because they invested a lot in the artist. They were usually in charge of production, recording, mixing, mastering, creating physical copies and merch, booking tours, brand tie ins, getting records into stores, etc. Record labels also have special Pressing & distribution contracts where they invest less in the artist, and in turn take less of a cut. Spotify invests nothing into the artists, so even though they take a smaller percentage, I still think they are treating artists unfairly.
That being said, artists have the option to advertise their new releases on the platform
I do agree that some amount of corporate greed is in play, however, Spotify is, in my opinion, the lesser of two evils
Record labels get paid on sales, while Spotify gets paid through ad revenue and premium subscriptions, therefore, Spotify isn't selling the artists work for their own gain
I wouldn’t say they invest nothing, one of the most fundamental ways artists gain new followers is how spotify promotes the music to new people through algorithmic playlists based on someone’s similar music tastes. That is part of the value artists pay for when they put their music on the platform. And of course spotify has to pay coders to make all that happen. Of course the investment is minor compared to the amount of artists that use their platform, but I wouldn’t undermine the value spotify provides
Came here waiting for the “Spotify doesn’t shuffle music” but got a much more insightful conversation instead about the music industry. It never fails to impress me how much you know about all these different types of music. I’m also a music fanatic but I’ve never learned much about the history of the music itself. Maybe it’s something I should pay more attention to.
The Playlist is more or less half true. There are some episodes that are almost fully true like the "The Industry" one while some other are almost completely made up as the "The Law" as well as the two last episodes.
The series is not endorsed by Spotify either, the Swedish book "Spotify inifrån" is a huge inspiration. The people played in the series, like Daniel Ek, have been contacted but they or Spotify had no influence in the series.
There are some good Swedish articles explaining all this. However, I have not found as good ones in English, except the interview by Variety.
When talking directly with my friends who work at Spotify they say that most people working at Spotify at least in Stockholm are seeing huge flaws in what's true and not and generally the details are wrong. So you should look at the bigger picture and don't get stuck with exactly what's being said or details.
Great talk as always though X!
I'm not an artist, however I am in a small community of an obscure genre of music. The community itself is all about passion rather than profits, though some of the artists do try and make a living from it. Honestly, at first it was strange to me how much work people put into this community with songs being completely free to stream and download, people hosting multiple day 12 hour long events on twitch without even allowing donations, traveling around the world and hosting live events at a loss, just because they enjoy it. Any revenue they get comes from direct donations of generous fans, though i've never seen anyone ask for donations before. It's definitely admirable and inspiring, however at the same time a lot of people quit or branch out into different, more mainstream genres of music. not because they prefer to do so, but because they have to if they want to live their own life. There are very few artists from said community who are big enough to make a living from creating music.
The only reasonable way for underground genre artists to make any money is to go the bandcamp route and either rely on donations (which usually are fairly uncommon), charge people for the songs, or make physicals. the latter is quite popular, but even so a lot of the times the artist will do this at a loss, because they're passionate about it.
Also, a lot these people are extremely talented in what they do, and some of them have been in this for over 20 years!
I think a lot of artists on tour need to just do more shows in places that sell out. It's really tough to possibly double the touring timeline, but increasing supply would be a great solution to overpriced tickets
Think about your favorite rock band. It's probably 4 or 5 people right? Each playing their own instrument and/or singing. Each of them on their own has learned their instrument, that's likely taken thousands of hours. Then as a group they've spent thousands of hours together being able to coordinate with each other. And that's all just to play already existing songs. To write your own you then need to not just be creative but functionally make it work and each person needs to learn it. It's a LOT of work. I've dabbled in making music with some of the software out there, but performing in front of an audience scares the hell out of me, which is a whole other point.
Okay so I wasn't on the stream so I haven't heard the full conversation, and I haven't seen the netflix show either, but what I can add to the discussion is what I know about spotify from Adam Neely. He made a really insightful video on it (it's called 'How much is music worth'), in which he discusses just how unfair and terrible spotify's revenue system is. It's basically very heavily biased towards big pop stars with a massive following, leaving indie artists in the dust. Because the money from someone's subscription isn't shared proportionally between the artists they listen to, but instead shared proportionally between all artists that are on spotify, based on what percentage of the total listens is on their songs, small artists with an audience just big enough to pay them enough in theory, actually get basically nothing. Adam Neely, for example, only gets about $0.0029 per stream on spotify.
So if you want to help indie artists, the best thing to do is buy their music on bandcamp instead of spotify.
yeah bandcamp all the way, there is no alternative to supporting artists directly, if you were to pirate all your media, and then later buy only a few your favorite media directly (say a blu-ray of your favorite show, or your favorite artist on bandcamp), overall you actually end up contributing way more to the creators than any subscription service would.
@@___echo___ Great comment. This is the kind of thing I wish people like Xisuma would see and communicate to their fanbase.
One thing to consider is that, if spotify didn't exist, most people would just straightup not pay for most of the music they listen to. People have only so much disposable income they're able/willing to dedicate to music. I'm not sure how exactly that factors into the equation, but it's certainly something to take into account.
not really. there is graph of cd sales. cd sales were still big before iTunes store and then streaming came.
As an aspiring musician i can say i agree but also you have to remember that it is still essentially a small business which means that it comes with all of the risks associated with entrepreneurship. So even though at face value it seems unfair for musicians making niche music, if the market doesnt want it then there is no point creating it.
just wanted to say this because it does often feel like creative jobs are talked about like they need to be protected but if you look at it as a business then it starts to appear as more reasonable.
I'm very sad I missed this conversation, because this is something I feel VERY strongly about. I tweeted Xisuma a few really good resources about Spotify's place in the music industry. I recommend a video by Benn Jordan called "Should We Hate Spotify?", which has a very unbiased view from a musician's perspective. It goes a lot deeper than X does here and it's well worth a watch.
The other resource I recommend is an article on NPR called "A Tale Of Two Ecosystems: On Bandcamp, Spotify And The Wide-Open Future". I can't link it or UA-cam deletes my comment, but I recommend seeking that out especially if you have been using a streaming service a lot without ever actually buying from artists. Really puts Spotify's system into perspective by comparing it to Bandcamp's.
mate its impossible to have an unbias view, there will always be some amount of bias
@@gingerbread101 I didn't say it was COMPLETELY unbiased, just "very unbiased". By that I mean it spends an equal amount of time discussing the positives and negatives from multiple perspectives, uses accurate information from reliable sources and comes to a conclusion based on his own experience in the industry as well as external data.
@@thefinkie6459 oh sorry lol i didnt see the very
4:40 - I once had a friend of mine play a song of the same artist (Samy Deluxe) to me. One the original and version he made years later after becoming successful. The first version was far far better, even though it was produced on much lower quality.
Everybody talks about creative and entertainment industries as if they’re nonessential and frivolous (hence the gutting throughout the pandemic and beyond) when it absolutely is essential to every day life. How many people ever go a single day without watching, listening to, reading, observing, or playing a piece of media? Very few. What would people do without any positive stimuli to distract from the tumult of the world? What would they have done stuck at home in lockdown without these things? What about the people who provide these things? Are they less deserving of a living wage than anybody else? It often feels like that is what people think. Recent additional cuts to the arts is buckling my industry even more and those of us who work in it are just collateral damage to the greed of the tories, like many other undervalued industries (except others are at least acknowledged as essential). But who cares, right? It’s not like we’re providing society anything of value… we aren’t people, just puppets.
/end rant
Spotify is just terrible at paying the artists, if big artists like Taylor Swift spoke against Spotify about payment, can you imagine how much small bands/artists are paid? Between Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal, Spotify pays the artists the least.
Exactle. People need to listen to Aloe Blacc's I Need A Dollar Spotify song.
I am 100% certain when it comes to scalping tickets that companies have insiders that reserve tickets to be resold at ridiculously inflated prices. Why sell something for 1x when you can sell the same thing for 5x
A big player in this topic is also the government, and they want primary and secondary jobs that produce goods which generates taxes and makes their country run. Music and pretty much all creative productions are tertiary jobs that while do produce taxes, do not produce any physical goods that the population relies on to get by on a daily basis. It's just much more profitable and sustainable for the government to place people in primary and secondary jobs, so that may explain why it's so necessary to become succesful to get paid well in a creative environment.
With that said, I do wish that recommended algorithms would create space for small creators. They don't, especially not on UA-cam, where they just boost already popular channels, which makes the few stronger instead of the masses. I do remember a time where UA-cam wasn't so stingy with recommending popular channels, I still find videos on my favorites and liked lists that I remember fondly, yet don't have millions of views, because classic UA-cam was better at showing unpopular channels in the past, and allowed people to find these hidden gems.
I agree with a lot of what you said here, but I think the section about the effect of success on inspiration has to be very carefully stated. There are similar sounding arguments saying that Van Gogh was so good because of his issues, for example, and that can both mislead people and hurt artists. Some people say that it's good that Van Gogh (or any other artist) suffered in some way because that gave us their art, but that dehumanizes artists and promotes unhealthy work practices. In reality, Van Gogh painted most of his famous stuff while in recovery
Suffering could fuel inspiration, but it inhibits the actual creation, and romanticizing "the suffering artist" can be very dangerous
30s in and I really wanna know what arista networks(thumbnail) has to do with all of this
lets be honest if spotify was in the opposite position, they would also be abusive. In fact, they are abusive and i dont really think they should be defended. They're a company. profit goes above all. They're absolutely still exploiting artists, and their users too, by collecting their data or paywalling features like downloading songs (even though constantly streaming songs to them over and over is actually going to be more labor for them, there's motive to gatekeep something basic like that)
I got front row tickets to a concert once, all I could see were the cellists’ feet
I think I've found artists and bought their music exclusively on Bandcamp for nearly 4 years now, and only tend to use Spotify or YT Music for older albums from the 60s through to the 90s that might not have as much of an online presence outside official channels.
It's a tricky one as to whose to blame more, I'm not overly keen on either. I suppose streaming services and labels promote artists (Ad campaigns / featured playlists respectively etc) in their own ways. Maybe labels do it harder as it's in their own self-interests to do so to see fiscal return on signing the artist, hence the old saying "you've got your whole life to make your first album, but only 18 months to make your second".
Bottom line, support small artists when and how you can - if they're local, even better.
i use tidal to try to support artists a bit better but yeah the industry sucks
I say the big record labels are evil
They take 70% that's not fair to the creators
Spotify has plenty of music that record labels have no claim to and the same record labels are brutal when it comes to getting paid, I got copyrighted for HUMMING Hikaru Utada's "Passion" I didn't sing, and I made sure the song wasn't recorded on my software and they still said "Your income from this video is paying for this" even though my channel is too small to earn them anything
So, yes, record labels are absolutely evil
I understand that there's probably a reason for this, but having a coming up section in a 7-minute video is so annoying. It's fine to have it if it was like 20-30+ minute long, but I don't like it in a shorter video.
I dislike spotify mainly because my spotify user expierence is terrible.
By your own logic Spotify is the good person because if they were successful they would be at that second album low 😂😂😂 Poverty inspires creativity and wealth inspires the beach.
Bro I just got premium don’t do this to me
jay z is awful now
Quote at start reminds me of "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits