{"id":26464,"date":"2025-07-27T04:16:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-27T04:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/26464\/"},"modified":"2025-07-27T04:16:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T04:16:10","slug":"angry-metal-guy-speaks-on-spotify","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/26464\/","title":{"rendered":"Angry Metal Guy Speaks: On Spotify"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AngryRecently, in the Phantom Spell review<\/a>, a number of people commented that the great new record from Kyle McNeill is not on Spotify. This is, indeed, the case. Phantom Spell is part of a nascent movement of musicians who are divesting from the platform because of Daniel Ek\u2019s involvement in the development of AI war tech<\/a>. A decision like this is never an easy one to make. Spotify, due to having a free option, is extremely hard to leave behind. It has an enormous listener base, and for bands who are trying to reach as many people as possible, it can seem like an impossible thing to do.<\/p>\n

Yet, there are good reasons to leave Spotify behind. A startling bounty of reasons to give Ek and his streaming service the boot, one could say. We here at Angry Metal Guy are pro-musician. I think we all agree that musicians should be fairly compensated. We love music, we want music to flourish, and I think I speak for all of us when I say that it is sad that the industry as we understood it has perished. I\u2019m going to argue here that supporting Spotify is probably not the best way to accomplish music\u2019s future flourishing. And if we want to do that, then I think we need to make some different decisions. So first, I\u2019ll tell you why. And then I\u2019ll suggest some alternatives.,<\/p>\n

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Spotify pays artists less than almost anyone. Spotify pays an average of $0.00318 per stream. That means it takes over 314 streams to make a single dollar on Spotify. Start to break that down, and even artists who have a million streams will only earn $3,180<\/a>. By contrast, Tidal pays $0.01284 per stream ($12,840 per million), while Apple Music pays between $0.008 and $0.01 (8-10,000 per million). Want to earn the minimum wage from Spotify? That\u2019s 350,000 streams per month to do it. And remember, these are gross figures. Musicians net considerably less than this because there are a lot of grasping hands that come between the payout from the streaming company and the artist. Spotify\u2019s model prioritizes volume over value, which takes me to the second point.<\/p>\n

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And Spotify keeps trying to pay even less by suppressing royalty rates, developing new ways to underpay artists, and withholding pay from obscure artists. The first of these, suppressing royalty rates, has to do with a lawsuit that first appeared at the end of the last decade. The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board (USCRB) has a fixed royalty rate. In 2018<\/a>, the USCRB raised the \u201cmechanical royalty rate\u201d for songwriters to 15.1% of revenue, gradually set to increase to 15.35% by 2027. Spotify, along with Amazon, Pandora, and Google, appealed this increase, fighting to keep songwriter royalties lower.<\/p>\n

Then, in 2024, Spotify quietly reclassified its Premium subscription as a \u201cbundled service,\u201d which includes audiobooks. That allowed the company to apply a lower royalty formula, and that cut the songwriter\u2019s pay by 30-40% overnight. They were, of course, sued<\/a> by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC)\u2014which, be honest, did you know that there was a Mechanical Licensing Collective?\u2014which alleged that Spotify underpaid creators by over $150 million. Spotify won the case<\/a>, but the US court system siding with moneyed interests<\/a> isn\u2019t exactly an unexpected outcome. And the ethics of this are pretty fucked up, in my opinion.<\/p>\n

Also in 2024, Spotify officially implemented a policy stating that any track with fewer than 1,000 annual streams will not generate royalties for rights holders, even if it has been streamed. Spotify defended this move by claiming<\/a> most of these payments never reached artists due to distributor payout thresholds and thus redirected those funds to more widely streamed tracks. According to critics, this demonetized between 60%<\/a> and 87% of all the tracks on Spotify<\/a>, with an estimated $45-50 million in lost royalties during 2024. So, even if the infrastructure has a bit of a dystopian vibe where the ostensible payout just lands with some other entity, anything earned could still eventually be paid out if something takes off.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

You probably heard about this guy who made a fake band called The Velvet Sundown recently and garnered over a million listeners<\/a> in a short period. While that\u2019s dystopian, what\u2019s worse is that Spotify has increasingly embraced the use of anonymous and AI-generated music. This isn\u2019t a fringe experiment; it appears to be a deliberate business strategy. Investigations<\/a> have revealed the existence of Spotify\u2019s internal \u201cPerfect Fit Content\u201d (PFC) program, which fills popular playlists with tracks by pseudonymous or entirely fabricated artists. These \u201cghost artists\u201d are often produced by stock music firms and earn Spotify higher margins because they circumvent royalty structures. A Swedish investigation uncovered over 5,700 fake artist identities linked to just 20 creators, with some garnering billions of streams<\/a>. And while The Velvet Sundown turned out to just be straight-up fakes, AI tracks falsely attributed to deceased artists like Blaze Foley\u2014a country singer who died in 1989\u2014were found on their official Spotify pages<\/a>, which raises a ton of questions about how these are curated.<\/p>\n

All of the foregoing examples point to the cheapness of \u201ccontent\u201d in a streaming world, and it seems like Spotify is leaning into that for music, like Netflix did for films. They are creating generic brands to fill out playlists, thus keeping royalties in house through company-owned, algorithmically optimized content. And they think\u2014probably rightly to some extent\u2014that listeners won\u2019t notice or care.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Spotify\u2019s headquarters are in Stockholm, but in 2023-2024, when Swedish unions asked Spotify to sign a collective bargaining agreement\u2014which is literally how labor law works here\u2014Spotify refused. When Swedish courts denied Spotify\u2019s request to make engineers work overnight shifts (which is against Swedish labor law), Ek and co responded by moving hundreds of jobs abroad, instead of negotiating. So, not only does Spotify treat musicians and listeners poorly, but it\u2019s also setting a precedent of labor hostility here at home.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Most recently, Spotify has come under intense scrutiny for the ethical implications of Daniel Ek\u2019s involvement in military technology. Daniel Ek, through his investment firm Prima Materia, led a \u20ac600 million funding round in the German military tech company that specializes in shit like AI-powered drones, underwater systems, and\u2014I find this one to be devastatingly frightening\u2014battlefield decision-making software. Ek is now Helsing\u2019s chairman<\/a>. In response, bands that I have never fucking heard of like Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu<\/a> have announced they are removing their music from Spotify, viewing participating in Spotify\u2019s capital accumulation as akin to being complicit in Spotify\u2019s monetization of both data-mining and war technology. There have, predictably, been calls for an artist-led boycott<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

People have different preferences, but the two primary alternatives to Spotify\u2014if you intend to stay in the streaming game\u2014are Apple Music and Tidal. They both pay better than Spotify, and Apple Music has the added benefit of allowing its subscribers to upload and stream personal files that are not in Apple\u2019s catalog. This latter thing, in my opinion, is among the very best features, and it is the one that has kept me with Apple Music even though I don\u2019t use it for real streaming very much. Tidal, on the other hand, pays the most per stream of any major platform and has experimented with direct-to-artist payments and different payout models that I honestly don\u2019t understand very well. The point is, both of these options are heads and shoulders better than Spotify (or fucking YouTube Music or Pandora).<\/p>\n

But you\u2019re here at Angry Metal Guy Dot Com, which means you\u2019re a fucking music nerd. And that means you almost certainly are aware of Bandcamp and Ampwall, where you can support many of your favorite artists directly. Spotify\u2014and even Tidal and Apple Music\u2014pay fractions of pennies. Bandcamp pays 80%+ of the sale price. You buy something for 10 bucks, the artist gets 8. Ampwall, which is newer and was formed after the sketchy Bandcamp buyout a couple of years back, when half the staff got fired<\/a>. I have less experience with it, but my understanding is that it\u2019s artist-owned, transparent, and committed to ethical monetization.<\/p>\n

Even if you think AI weapons systems are the way of the future and hey, why shouldn\u2019t Daniel Ek be trying to break up the collective bargaining system in Sweden, there\u2019s a pretty solid case to be made that if you are using Spotify these days, you\u2019re making a choice that isn\u2019t to the benefit of the artists that you love. The solution that I have chosen, in part because of Angry Metal Guy, and my ability to be able to listen to promo on the move before it\u2019s been released, is Apple Music. It\u2019s a great service that does everything I need it to. It\u2019s full of cool features they don\u2019t advertise, and I strongly recommend it. It\u2019s system-neutral\u2014yes, it will work on your Android phone\u2014and Apple has not taken part in things like the lawsuit about the USCRB that most of the other big names in streaming took part in. Tidal is even more generous, however, even if it doesn\u2019t quite have the features that I\u2019m looking for. And many of my friends who are moving on from Spotify have moved to Tidal.<\/p>\n

No matter what you choose, this fucking timeline is the stupidest timeline. And one way to express your dissatisfaction with this stupid af timeline is by telling Daniel Ek to suck it. He\u2019s certainly been telling us that for years.<\/p>\n

\n\tGive in to Your Anger:\n<\/p>\n