Absolutely!!
The very reason we have Spotify and streaming rip-offs is because everyone responsible for them getting away with it, being the artists who did not think first, wanted their 15 minutes of fame. There was one band in my country who wanted a record deal so badly, they signed for 0% royalties. That was pretty much the beginning of the end.

Also some people should read what they post - not you... The contradictions across multiple posts are astounding.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Mar 10, 2024

Spotify is basically an agent. Agents get between 15%-25% and that's it. Not 99%

 

Totally, 15 years ago apple charged $0,99 for most of their songs but no one would pay for music. People stopped downloading only because streaming was at a accessible price

 

agreed with you. but if spotify is getting 25% for him and paying 1 dollar to the artist, spotify must charge in average about $1.25 for stream.
the price paid per stream needs to be in the middle term not too cheap but no to expensive either.
spotify payment for artists right now is totally shit and if i was snoopy i'd probably take my music off the platform
on the other hand im not snoopy dogg, and spotify may be a decent platform for exposure

 

As @saccamano implied earlier, the problem exists mainly as a direct result of artists making incredibly bad and poor financial decisions in their search for fame. In many ways, the musicians themselves opened up the doors to be exploited. I agree with you about Snoop should simply get out. Taylor Dane's lawyers managed to force a settlement fee from Spotify to keep her music streaming, but she has 100's of millions behind her and one of the largest fanbases to give her that weight. Snoop is nowhere as big.

The unfortunate part of this century's musical society is that all too many people think 1% of something is better than 1% of nothing. You can only lead a horse to water...

 

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that's really sad, but it is the truth. a lot of people nowadays will do just about anything to be famous.

 

ALSO - if anyone looked a little closer at what Snoop got it is not 10%

If anyone thinks this a good thing, then do not moan about getting abused because it means the royalty on what they actually own, not the people keeping 99.9955% who own none of it, is behind the decimal place.

 

Now I am not a mathematician but $1 per stream is obviously too much based on current platform pricing models, I agree. For that to work, they'd need to drastically increase the membership plans and/or cut out all the current excessive high expense bloat, lower owner/shareholder cash payouts and include ad sales revenue into the pot - which they should adjust and increase the artist per stream royalty incrementally year by year as cost of living rises. The rate should be going UP, not down, as is.

Right now, they need to eliminate a few zeros from their criminal $0.00003 formulas. I think they certainly could start with something simple such as $0.01 per stream up to 10,000, then increased to $0.02 up to 20,000 streams etc capped at say $0.05 per stream. Completely eliminate major label artists, podcasters, any and all from the current ridiculous scheme where with these backroom deals they're taking mandatory % cuts from every user of the platform regardless if they stream their content or not (i.e. if your music gets played, you get paid. If not, you don't), no exceptions, period. So if you manage to bring in 1,000,000 streams in a year, congratulations, you've reached a poverty level quality of life! (for that year and that year alone).

There should also be similar tiers of advertising share splits based on real world verified subscribed fans of an artist, so the artist is getting paid for bringing in their fans to the platform, it adds incentives and rewards for artists out there really hustling, which in turn means more eyeballs on the ads link clickbait product up sales data farming and all the other shady bullshit these platforms get up to (and currently don't pay artists anything for).

If not this, then perhaps 2 platforms, one for major labels/artists (run as is with their secret shady bullshit schemes), and the other for independent labels/artists (fully transparent, merit based, something similar to what I outlined above).

I dunno. I don't have all the answers, but at the very least, they need to be forced into full transparency and legally held accountable for their actions and crimes. None of them ever truly have been.

 

It is actually not that difficult.

For well over 100 years there have been 'Agents' or publicists as they are called now as a composite package. Every musician in history who had one or a manager, came to expect that they took 15%-25% of the total earnings. This WAS in place for 100++ years and it worked. Nobody was really disgruntled like many are in the last 20 years. Mozart even had a manager, his father for many years.

It worked. If Spotify and apple and other streaming services took 25% then they still would have made billions considering the name artists on the playlists. It's plain GREED. And they got away with theft, do not kid yourself it isn't. It will change again, but probably not in anyone's lifetime who is on this site.

EDIT:
History shows that over thousands of years, people put up with being exploited only for so long, then they revolt. Plenty of historical revolutionary evidence and accounts up to the French and Russian revolutions including Caesar and many others in ancient history, and in the last one-hundred years against Hitler, Mussolini and Marcos. It will happen. It's even in the Bible with Moses and the Egyptians. The saying of when a person throws enough mud it eventually sticks, is very true. One day these people and their corporations will be overrun from screwing with too many people too often, and cease to exist. History shows it reoccurs with regularity.

 

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hopefully we're lucky and won't take that long...

yes!! that'd be a great start

this one i think it would be bad for independent artists hahah

 

$45k sounds about right, on the publishing side of things, especially if he's splitting it with other producers or people involved in the works. What he's not talking about in detail is the actual streaming revenue, which is closer to $3,300,000, give or take a few hundred thousand.

I'm no Snoop Dogg, but I've made a decent living with streaming over the last 12 years. Revenue adds up, especially when you add publishing revenue on top of it, but you have to hit the threshold of at least 10,000 daily listeners. Once you do, the money starts rolling in, and the algorithm is hit like a freight train, over and over.

Anyone who believes otherwise isn't really at the level where the revenue makes sense.

 

Last edited: Mar 10, 2024

Additionally, I would urge all of you to look into Ameritz, and their backstory. They are responsible for "White Noise Baby Sleep" and endless amounts of regurgitated ISRCs as artists such as Lofi Chill Sleep & Study (125k monthly listeners), and endless branches of that. Their website used to have 100 noise artists, lofi artists, "singer-songwriters" (all fake / AI stuff, long before the current AI stuff)... they removed those from their website, but you can still see the "artists" at Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230508133219/https://www.ameritz.co.uk/artists.asp

Most of those artists are still active on Spotify, still putting out new releases regularly. Scrolling through the discography of any random artist often shows 300-700 albums released between 2021 and 2023, alone. It's insane. And again, a lot of it... repeated tracks, repeated ISRCs, all with new artists and artwork. You're not really allowed to re-use ISRCs as multiple new artists, but their distro (probably sending directly to Spotify, without a distributor) and Spotify simply turns the other cheek.

Their site now shows them a "proper indie label" (signing the trip-hop group The Dining Rooms, and others)... but, they are the #1 bad actors that are ruining it for a lot of indies, in 2024. They are the reason Spotify tightened the noose around everyone else's neck.

Ameritz made $50,000,000 from streaming, from 2020 to 2023.

Ameritz started as a failed karaoke company in the UK. Look at them, now.

Lofi Chill Sleep & Study releases albums basically every few hours... if you follow the branches of the other artists featured on their albums (they don't all branch out, but most do)... you will see, they've gamed the system harder than anyone, and they keep gaming it, and getting away with murder. As mentioned above, Spotify turns the other cheek, with all of this.

According to the rabbit hole I went down, Kyle Ross (aka "Lunakai") is responsible for a lot of the Lofi Sleep Chill & Study, as well as (my estimation) maybe like 20-40 other producers. They all absolutely rake it in. Some of the music is ok... most is horribly-produced and sounds like stock GarageBand loops, with a lofi effect added to them. Oftentimes, through albums, the volumes are completely inconsistent... some tracks loud, others half the volume. I'd also assume there's a hell of a lot of uncleared samples in those tracks, too. Millions upon millions of streams, and that's just the music. That's not including the thousands upon thousands of albums and tracks of rain, brown noise, air conditioner sounds, fans, etc.

If you google a bit about them, you'll see that Ameritz producers spent months on end, recording fans, air conditioners, rain, etc... they admitted that they exploited Spotify between 2018 and 2023, but still, today. Again, all those "artists" are active. They are just rolling in it. And my guess, partnered with Spotify.

Fifty million fucking dollars.

 

Last edited: Mar 10, 2024

More on Ameritz:

I have been studying them since about 6 months ago. Here's a text list of all their "artists". Just search Spotify and see for yourself. Anyone with a proper "human" name, never shows their face on the profile. It's a silhouette of a person in the distance.

432 Hz Sound Therapy
Acoustic Worship
ADHD Focus
Always Raining
Avery Cohen
Azure Rey
Back 2 Sleep
Beautiful Sleep
Bedtime Baby
Beyond the Bay
Brain Power Amadeus
BR
Cafe Ibiza Chillout Lounge
Cafe Roma Ensemble
Calming Music Academy
Cena Espanola Con Jazz
Chakra Align
Chill Lounge Music Bar
Chillout Lounge Ibiza
Classical Kid
Concentracion Profunda
Concentrational Brain
Deep Tech House Lounge
deepenergy
Dirk Johan
DreamDrops
Dreamscaper
dreamycloud
Edward Jamison
eighth degree
ENAKO
ESTUDIO BRILLANTE
ESTUDIO HERMOSO
ETHERMAX
floating mindz
Flourished Mind
French Dinner
Music Collective
galacticbreath
GLOANS
Green Noise Therapy
Gym Workout DJ Team
Happy Piano Music
Instrumental Collective
harmonicnite
Healing Peace
hi-life
Hope Parker
Ibiza Deep House Lounge
Jonas Waves
Lara El Rey (defunct-- maybe sued by Lana Del Rey?)
Lofi Harry (does not branch out, like the other artists)
Lofi Joe (does not branch out, like the other artists)
Lofi Jordan
Lofi Matt
Lofi Mike
Lotrxx
Meditacion Maestro
melowmania / melow mania
MUSICA PARA
ESTUDIAR ACADEMY
Ocean Sounds
outside broadcast recordings
Piano Chillax
Piano Lovely
Pink Noise Therapy
placidity piano
Rain Hive
Rainy Dreaming
recorder rain
reflowed (only "human artist" with a high stream count-- the others have VERY low numbers)
Relaxing Meditation Music Zone
Rilassamento Ensemble
ritchie loops (hands covering face)
Sacred Music Collectors
Sad Instrumental Piano
Music Zone
SCHLAFMUSIK FUR DICH
School of Rain
Seafront Serenity
Severard
silhouettez
Sleep Christian
Sleep Herbs
Sleepify
Sleeping Mozart Relaxing Baby
Sleepy Dogs
Static Therapy Research
Strolle
Teddie Lofi
tempus lucrari
The Field Recording Collective
The Forest Escape
The Outdoor Library
The Sounds Research Forum
Trabajar Y Concentrarse
Weather Garden
Willow and the Rainbows
Your Favorite Coffeehouse
Zen Meditatiezone

I don't know how to post a table with different columns here, but here are the first few artists above, doing the automatic-embed thing in this forum:

Definitely urge everyone to go down the rabbit hole and see just how far this goes.

Remember-- Fifty million dollars from Spotify streams, alone. Not including Youtube revenue, or anything else.

 

Last edited: Mar 10, 2024

It's always interesting to hear someone made a success from someone exploiting others by exploiting them.
That said you should have a look at Daniel Ek's net worth.
50 million is a drop in the ocean compared to what Ek made by exploiting the people who did not know any better.

 

I hear you. But what bothers me is because of these "bad actors" (as Spotify likes to call them), the indie artists are truly, truly screwed as of 2024. Or so it seems.

So, while, cool that they exploited Spotify... but, now what? What happens to everyone else?

 

Library music companies have been making good money supplying the commercial world with background music for 70 years, isn't this just background music for customers who want it for home use?

 

But Ameritz didn't market any of itself as library music.. it was "artists" (but most of it, instrumental). Also, it seems like Spotify is frowning upon instrumental music in 2024. Not cool.

 

I'm sorry but knowing how viciously exploitative the music business has always been, it seems strange to lay the blame on the talent for not being so talented in legal matters. It's not like there's a fair power balance between record companies (and today, platforms) and artists, and the latter get fucked over because they didn't carefully read the contract. Not every musician has Taylor Swift's family connections to the industry.

I mean if we take your logic far enough, we could say all those black musicians who helped create multiple genres that defined what popular music is for a century but we've never heard of, who died without ever being fairly compensated for their work while the record companies did unimaginable amounts of money off of them.. all of that is because they wanted their 15 minutes of fame and didn't properly read the contract? At a time where they couldn't even EXIST in the same spaces with white people, where everything they had could be taken away on a whim (cabaret card laws)...

The blame lies essentially with them too?

You can cite all the individual cases of "this one band didn't read the contract but it said for every album sold the singer's mother would drink the producer's butterscotch enema juice" and it won't change the fact that the game has always been rigged in favor of those who have all the capital. A musician can have ten lawyers going through each word of the contract, in the end the company makes most of the profits. And they have ten billion lawyers.

 

I was agreeing with you at the start, about blaming artists, contract lawyers and such.. I mean if someone gets ripped off, they could always sue in court right? The American way. We see it every day. But then you dropped the race card etc.. and just no. When you start talking about slavery, civil rights, discrimination and other sociopolitical issues in America without mentioning the backstory, and "black" peoples involvement and lack of accountability for their own actions with these very same issues, from the source beginning's of the transatlantic slave trade, their roles in the extermination of native American mainland and islander peoples, tens of millions of 20th century European immigrant discrimination, non-black no go zones across the country, to this very day of hypocritical skin color based privilege, you are talking out your ass. But I digress.

Back on topic, the truth is, without the suburban American white kid, Snoop Doggs career would look far far different than it does. Nothing to do with skin color, just facts. Educate yourself before bringing up such topics.

This thread now venturing into ridiculously misinformed spam and racism topics has run its course for me.

Good luck with your streaming.
Ciao!