You can count me among that number, along with the US-based advocacy group I am a part of, United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) or Tom Gray of the band Gomez, who launched the very visible campaign #BrokenRecord in the UK. Some artists have been screaming about this imbalance for years. Even if they have never, ever streamed any of those very, very popular artists. Down at the level of most tracks on the platform, a devoted fan who listens to the work of a lesser known artist over and over still pays most or all their subscription money to Ed Sheeran, Drake, Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny. This seems like it might work out the same, but it doesn’t: it slants toward the top, where massive numbers pull massive proportions of the pot. Each of us is paid not by the individual listeners we attract to our recordings, but by the proportional share we can claim of the total money in the system. The way Spotify accounts for the music it uses is a zero-sum game. This while those at the top of the pyramid – the platforms themselves, and the handful of rights holders they benefit the most – continue to swallow a greater and greater share of industry revenue. We’ve been hearing these slogans for decades, while watching our incomes from creative work go down and down, until finally now, for many of us on Spotify, they will hit absolute zero. And their primary business partners – the three major labels – are cheering the change on because it will mean more money in their pockets.įor the rest of us, this is the quiet end to a number of loudly promoted ideas that would enable working- and middle-class creators to benefit from micropayments in the platform economy: the “long tail”, the “democratisation of content”, the “end to gatekeeping”. This sounds incredible, but there’s nothing to stop it. Tracks falling under this arbitrary minimum will continue to accrue royalties – but those royalties will now be redirected upwards, often to bigger artists, rather than to their own rights holders. That is any track receiving fewer than 1,000 streams over the period of a year. And now, to make matters far worse, starting in 2024 Spotify will stop paying anything at all for roughly two-thirds of tracks on the platform.
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