TBH, I’m sceptical about fairness to content creators. Spotify for example is paying exactly nothing to your favourite artists. They get around 2-3€ per 1000 streams, which means that you can listen to them quite a lot without them getting rich. Go to some concerts, they will get more money than from spotify
Spotify’s incentives also work to make new music worse. People now release “albums” with a large number of short, low-quality tracks (because each stream above the length threshold pays the same), with only one or two songs that are standouts (to gain entry into Spotify playlists which are the major discovery mechanism). It’s also been proven that Spotify artificially increases the field of your competition by contracting out lowish-quality original compositions in some cases, for which they get to keep all the royalties.
This was already the case, well before digital music streaming: go look at music albums from the 90s and before that, and they’re overwhelmingly 2 or 3 good tracks and the rest filler.
Only a few of the greatest artists would mainly escape this trend and often only in a few of their albums, and there are plenty of one-hit-wonders who only ever produced one successful album with only one popular track in it and the rest pretty much filler.
It’s not by chance that even in the music disc days, there was the LP (i.e. an album) and the Single that only had a couple of the best tracks.
You’re right, the tendency for catchy singles did exist already. But still, I’d argue it used to make more sense to put work in a 30-/45-minute album worth listening to than it does now.
TBH, I’m sceptical about fairness to content creators. Spotify for example is paying exactly nothing to your favourite artists. They get around 2-3€ per 1000 streams, which means that you can listen to them quite a lot without them getting rich. Go to some concerts, they will get more money than from spotify
Spotify’s incentives also work to make new music worse. People now release “albums” with a large number of short, low-quality tracks (because each stream above the length threshold pays the same), with only one or two songs that are standouts (to gain entry into Spotify playlists which are the major discovery mechanism). It’s also been proven that Spotify artificially increases the field of your competition by contracting out lowish-quality original compositions in some cases, for which they get to keep all the royalties.
This was already the case, well before digital music streaming: go look at music albums from the 90s and before that, and they’re overwhelmingly 2 or 3 good tracks and the rest filler.
Only a few of the greatest artists would mainly escape this trend and often only in a few of their albums, and there are plenty of one-hit-wonders who only ever produced one successful album with only one popular track in it and the rest pretty much filler.
It’s not by chance that even in the music disc days, there was the LP (i.e. an album) and the Single that only had a couple of the best tracks.
You’re right, the tendency for catchy singles did exist already. But still, I’d argue it used to make more sense to put work in a 30-/45-minute album worth listening to than it does now.
Anywho… *proceeds to yell at clouds*
Yeah, they are quite shitty. OTOH if you pirate music then artists get 0.