The Music Industry Is Finally Scaring Spotify

[boscy]

MAY 13, 2021

The Music Industry Is Finally Scaring Spotify

The music business is booming again, thanks to streaming—and musicians are fighting for a bigger, better piece of the pie.

BY NITISH PAHWA

The music industry, at just about every level below the C-suite, has had enough.

The recording business is still haunted by its 2000s slump, which resulted from a rapid decrease in physical and digital unit sales as well as the fallout from multiple economic recessions. Yet it’s largely recovered from those lows: The industry has been consistently profitable as a whole since 2014, thanks primarily to streaming and, in part, still-growing vinyl sales.

Slate.com/culture/2021/05/independent-musicians-union-spotify-streaming.html

[bat1990]

I wish everyone success on finding a more equitable distribution for industry profits than just C-level execs.

[areyoureadytojump]

The physical slump started in 2001.

The digital slump started in 2014.

[Koochie]

lmfao what are artists gonna do, make their own streaming subscription services on their website? They already tried something with TIDAL and we all know how that went. Spotify controls so much of the market that I can't imagine anyone doing much about it.

The people most vocal about this "issue" sound like the artists crying about piracy in the mid 00s (who were already making millions regardless) even after it was proven that album leaks trended towards increased opening sales weeks (Tha Carter III being the most noticeable example). Like, I'm sorry you can't afford to add a carriage house to your Calabasas property?

[Devil Marlena Nylund]

Most of the artists I see complain about this tend to be smaller scale artists who work in music as a career but also for their livelihood who also don’t make charts, and aren’t label priority, which are most of my favs. So I see posts about it a lot. In particular, with the pandemic shutting down the ability to perform live, many of them have been struggling because sales are minimal and streaming contributes nothing so a lot have had to branch out to different things. I’ve definitely noticed a push toward artist stores and merchandise. I don’t think Spotify is really set up to help out artists that aren’t world famous or already super successful, but it has served to take away a bit of what smaller artists were able to make on physical media. Granted, physical media was on the way out anyway so it Spotify (and other streaming sites) might help them keep their names out there while giving them literal dollars in place of nothing, but Spotify hasn’t exactly been a boon for career artists.

[Gary]

Eventually as prices go up you will likely see less offered in the bigger streaming services and more and more labels offering there own streaming options.

[Au$tin]

It's a really rough issue to tackle because Spotify operates in the red already. Paying out more is only going to hurt the service. In fact, do any of the streaming services operate in the green? Apple Music and Amazon might, but simply because they're just branches of already existing companies with massive profit margins to begin with. (Which is one of the reasons I support Spotify.) Plus, A-list musicians make plenty off of streaming revenue. However, smaller scale artist, especially small independent musicians, make next to nothing. Literally. Their almost needs to be some sort of tiered system so smaller scale musicians can be payed better through streaming services while A-listers don't receive astronomical amounts that are impossible for a company to sustain. I personally have no idea how to go about setting up a system like that or what the logistics would be like, though, so that's about as much input into the discussion as I could possibly give.

May 25, 2021 11:29:10 GMT -5 Gary said:

Eventually as prices go up you will likely see less offered in the bigger streaming services and more and more labels offering there own streaming options.

I don't see this ever happening. It's happening with visual media because that's just how it started and that's how the streaming war in that sector was defined and built. And as it gets worse, piracy is back on the rise again. No one seemed to learn the lesson. In the audio industry, though, it's always been about having everything in one spot. If you remove that defining trait, audio streaming will collapse. And people are not about to go back to purchasing things individually either. Piracy will once again reign supreme if this happens. And I think labels know this, otherwise we'd already see them doing the same thing visual media has been doing for decades. So, yeah, I don't think this will ever happen.

[Gary]

What I posted may not happen tomorrow but at some point it could end up just like movies/tv

Example:

If Spotify and other streaming services pay more to the artists - then profit margins go down. To compensate ad fees and subscription rates go up. At some price point, customers leave, to keep customers, streaming services start offering less for the same price

or artists get fed up and pull content and move it elsewhere

In either case you have something less than the current whole universe all because of economics.

Which is the first step towards where movies/tv currently are

[bat1990]

Au$tin

It's not so much that the biggest artists make tons of money - it's that the labels wised up after the early 2000s Napster and iTunes environment and inked deals with Spotify and other services to make the lion's share of the profits. It's like the 20th Century all over again with the labels having all the money, paying the artists advances which they expect back, and pittance going to the songwriters and publishing. Add 360 deals into the mix to make labels suck even more money away from the artists.

[Ty]

I only reason I stopped buying physical copies is I'm too poor to afford a big room to store my collection. I still make iTunes purchases to support the artists (especially indie ones), but I almost only listen to music on streaming platforms these days to boost up their numbers (in hoping to give my favorites some additional cents, lol). However I do think platforms like Spotify has gained too much control over music consumption even simply with those big playlists with several millions of listeners, and this results in big names getting even higher streams while making small artists difficult to make money by simply selling music.

[Push The Button]

May 25, 2021 11:29:10 GMT -5 Gary said:

Eventually as prices go up you will likely see less offered in the bigger streaming services and more and more labels offering there own streaming options.

Which means those of us who still buy CDs and have a SuperDrive and iTunes Match will be smooth sailing. 💪🏻

[Au$tin]

May 26, 2021 6:58:54 GMT -5 Gary said:

What I posted may not happen tomorrow but at some point it could end up just like movies/tv

Example:

If Spotify and other streaming services pay more to the artists - then profit margins go down. To compensate ad fees and subscription rates go up. At some price point, customers leave, to keep customers, streaming services start offering less for the same price

or artists get fed up and pull content and move it elsewhere

In either case you have something less than the current whole universe all because of economics.

Which is the first step towards where movies/tv currently are

There aren't any profit margins to begin with, though. What you're describing simply won't happen. It will kill the streaming industry all together and everyone involved knows this. Audio streaming has already attempted the exclusivity route before and it failed.

What's way more likely is the services that aren't a part of another service will go belly up as the only services that will be able to afford the rising costs will be tied to other big name companies like Apple and Amazon. Spotify itself is such a well-known brand and lucrative marketing get that I never see it dying unless streaming as a whole is replaced by something new. That is to say, someone is likely to purchase Spotify before the company dies off due to rising costs. (My money would be on Disney given the ties between Hulu and Spotify already.)