I honestly fail to see why it’s wrong for Spotify to adjust their commission structure to slightly favor more successful artists just because you have paid a third-party multi-channel distributor. Ask your distributor to renegotiate (over $3)?
The positioning is wrong though, in my relationship, Spotify is the third-party.
A third-party that used to pay for streams of my music, has decided to, instead change their terms, and use my music to generate more revenue (which in this case they are using to pay other artists, which is very strategic of them, because now they don’t have to pay those other artists more from their own pockets).
I negotiated with my distributor, distrokid, And paid to have my music distributed to services that pay for streams of my songs.
Suddenly one of these services altered their terms to the above.
And just to clarify, I’m not trying to be difficult. The fact of the matter is that my content has been taken by a third-party, and instead of paying out based off of an agreement, they have decided to take money from the content, creator, and instead use it to pay other artists (it is my strong suspicion that they did in order to not have to pay for transactions, even though this was all part of the arrangement from the beginning).
They have effectively saved themselves $40 million and more popular artists feel better because they are making more money, and the only people that lose out are people that have no real leverage in the situations.
I completely agree three dollars is very little money and is pretty insignificant. But it doesn’t change the fact that this was very strategic and the money that is generated is coming from creators, who have paid to have their content hosted, in exchange for money generation.
If you remember how big of a deal limewire was, this is a similar situation for songs under 1000 streams per year. It is distribution of music, without the consent of the artist, and worse off the platform is monetizing it and the artist does not get that money.
This is a very different situation than something like YouTube ad sense paying out after 1000 views, given that a content creator directly uploads content to YouTube and agrees to their terms.
Well, when you published your stuff you have certainly signed a contract saying that terms may change in the future. Hell, Spotify may even shutter in the future.
The argument that this is only benefitting “popular artists” and hurting small artists is really quite misleading here. It invokes the Taylor Swift against everyone else image, but it’s really not that. This friend of mine is very far from a big shot, but when she publishes a new title, she posts it on social media, and within the hour, probably minutes actually, the 1000-stream threshold is hit. And they’re giving a year… I don’t have stats but I have a feeling that this is going to primarily hit borderline plagiarizing (or actually plagiarizing) content mills than real artists. Not passing any judgement on you naturally, I don’t even know if you’re quitting out of principle or practicality.
