Yeah because a few insults to a lemon who took it that direction on a messageboard is comparable to gang warfare on the streets.

My motivation wasn't to insult him, it was to respond to his boomer ranting, the insults just came with the territory. Also its irritating when you're being respectful to someone and they get all high horse on you. Without trying to further the insult game, from my experience people who do that are 100% twats.

 

One can suspect that Ameritz and other similar bad actors can get away with this is because they are in bed with Spotify who is probably receiving kickback payments. Spotify would use them as the reason why they change the rules allowing them to not pay for legit streams of indie artists. The fact that in 2024 Spotify won't pay artists for tracks with fewer than 1000 streams in one year and then take the revenue earned from those song right owners and re-direct that toward paying major label artists basically confirms this...

 

over here in the netherlands we (used to have and is probably still like this) have this central bureau of copyright (buma-stemra) that actively collects and distributes royalties from basically every venue ( FE:bands playing cover songs in a venue and the venue has to pay the royalties for those cover songs), radiostation, tv-channel and such (even non profit youth center can get in trouble). you'd think that this could be a good thing, apart from trying to put pressure on non profit youth centers.

but the thing is that to collect those royalties from them you need to pay a subscription (which they actively discourage to smaller acts). now one might wonder what happens to all those royalties that are collected from artists that arent members, well it's given to the artists that are members... and now guess who's at the head of this bureau: yup, one of the bigger artists. of course i have to add that the last time i looked into this is about 20 years ago so it could be that this has changed but chances are this system of distribution of royalties is being uphold by the ones who have the most to gain from this system.

 

Today there is a news on spanish newspaper talking about this
https://elpais.com/eps/el-pulso/202...ogos-los-temas-sin-apenas-reproducciones.html
Maybe this is because this huge loads of LOFI-shitty music, to trick the paying system of spotify, a proof of validation on the visits.
It is not bad perse, anyways, 1000 visits is like 0,004 $ so nobody loose. In the worst scenario, If you have 100 tracks as indie and none have the 1k limit (999), you loose 100.000-100*0,004= 399,6$ maximum a year that is going for other artist. If you have a lot more tracks you should be just overuploading music.
Anyways, any artist who wants to live exclusively with his streaming revenues, needs 5million visits a year to make 20k $. To live with dignity, and pay taxes, and gear, etc. At least 10 million streamings a year to make 40k. How many artist in the world reach that line?

 

Last edited: Mar 11, 2024

I wouldn't have a problem with Spotify if they chose to reserve/withhold those earnings until the right holder of the uploaded track met the 1000 stream per song threshold before payout while temporarily using those funds to pay active artists. However, them stating that they will reallocate those earnings directly to pay other top earning/higher level artists without reserving is basically stealing from the artists. There are so many small indie artists who actively promote their music on social media or paid ads that often have tracks on their albums fail to reach 1000 plays. That doesn't mean they aren't entitled to the money they earned via streaming, especially since they are paying a 3rd party distributor like distrokid to collect (and Spotify is a part owner of distrokid at some point). What spotify is doing isn't a delay in payment but a voiding of payment for these earnings. The sad part is they made a 3 year global licensing deal with UMG basically ensuring all UMG artists will get paid for their streams. One can't guarantee that many of those smaller catalog of artists aren't using streaming farms to generate fake numbers but Spotify is guaranteeing that they will subsidize those payouts at the expense of small indie artist play count earnings. Think about all the money Spotify is stealing as this accumulates over time...

 

What I think we really need is something similar to what is happening to decentralized finance, we also need a decentralized music industry where there is no intermediary and every artist gets paid equally, where there is not "official" music playlists and where everybody can listen around the world, no region/country blockages, no censorship, a place where is the people who decides whom are really the biggest artists and no the amount of money the companies invested in their bad and fake artist pages they made just to launder money (see Swedish music industry case), we need something as revolutionary and as fair as Bitcoin is for example, I firmly believe a good approach to NFT's (or a better approach to decentralized art technology) will solve this issue one day, that will be the next big thing on music.

 

Too early in the morning for me to make much sense, so apologies for that in advance, and haven't thought it through... but isn't the blockchain just too slow to handle that kind of bandwidth of transactions with so many people listening to music etc? Or perhaps I am misunderstanding something...

 

I think too many new artists have found a way to create viable music careers as independent artists without the need for a record label and via self distributed releases that major labels and publishers needed to change the way they operate in the streaming game to drive artists back towards the labels. No matter how small the artists, they are slowly taking money and control out of major label hands and the best way is to partner with major streaming services like Spotify to regain the advantage...

 

Suffice to say that 99% of the so-called "music industry" exists as a legalized shake-down scheme on the artists who make/create the content. This includes everything from "major labels" to "streaming platforms" to "distribution systems" to "copyright schemes" to MTV and youtube... It ALL exists to remove cash from the very hands who make the content and whose backs they step on in order to keep that whole capitalist corporate machine running.

 

Ok you do understand that was an example to the subject at hand right!?!?

 

Quite frankly in my personal opinion Napster both helped and fucked up the industry!

 

You are right that in today's technology and infrastructure there is not enough bandwidth and storage to attach audio files in one blockchain, however, blockchain can act as the backbone of the main music data, tags and stats, so then some centralized music platforms can help at storing the audio files, but all the main music data should be in that one, single and universal music blockchain. At least that would be the first steps, because changing the whole infrastructure in a short period of time wont be possible (just as what is happening right now with finance [see ETF's]).

 

More fucked first, later helped. At the end Napster became a paid server.

There are some decentraliced services, but they don't get off. It is still on beta. Maybe not to far from now. But there willbe allways bad actors too. The perfect system of distribute the wealth, is really hard, with our human nature.

Throwing them in the arms of social media. And promoting themselves for pennies. I think too many too... There are a lot more, doing gigs in festivals for free, only for fun, degrading the salary of other musicians. Still too many people consider music is not a real job. More now that you don't have to pay to listen them all. Too many has to work on other jobs to pay the bills. And the few that has a little success, soon they realice actors, and models are having better caches than them, so they try to move on. Success is not a common thing on arts, it is a real fight. Actually, Record labels were the fan base creators with their contracts, now without them, and their ecosystem is harder to climb. Everything is atomic. Social media + traditional media + auto promotion.

 

Each person has to do what works for them. That sounds like stating the obvious but it is not. Music should not be a fight, but as you mentioned, for some people it is. If you speak to a lot of people who work regularly doing exactly what they want to do, there is almost a common theme. "If you love music unselfishly it will love you back". It sounds like bullshit but it isn't. Additionally, the modus operandi is everything which you have alluded to. Some people never made their own music for anything but the art. That smaller segment of the industry could not care less about money or what other people think, only the quality of what they make. Thank God they exist because they are the true seekers and finders, regardless of of how many or little hear of them.

I enjoyed your usage of the word atomic. It can imply exploding, imploding or miniscule. Depending on the context in the industry with so little of its inception and mainstay for over 50 years remaining, it is almost ironic.

 

But all major actors that earns millions are affiliated and pays their couta to the Screen Actors Guild, and are on the front of the speeches to make the causes more visible, even Brad Pitt. Why this is going to be different for musicians?. Don't underestimate guild solidarity. Of course unions are more interesting to lesser artist, but they are even more interesting to well known artist cause they make them look good if they support it and extremely bad if they don't in the eyes of their peers.

 

As someone who has been a member of all or many of the various musician unions and performing artist "unions" in music etc for decades, it is pathetic what they do not do.

 

I've been unionized all my working life, since my shitty jobs at fast food. And I'm still pay my couta even I don't have to anymore cause I work for companies that are not based in where I live so I know is pointless for me but that couta helps other with lawyers and expensive stuff in my country. Because some unions are shitty and acts shitty that doesn't mean that Unions, as a tool, had to be discarded. Let's create better ones. And in the creative realm and in music specifically the lack of strongs unions is the main reason of the state of the industry. Ben Jordans just uploaded a video that screams really loud for a strong unionship or we are going to get mopped under the floor real good in the coming years.