I'm so tired of this anti-Spotify crap. Artists and listeners are free not to use it, just as they are free not to use Tidal, SoundCloud, bandcamp, YouTube, etc. It's a platform and the market is free. If it's not working out for you find a different way to market yourself. It's not like top 40 or the Grammys are fair either. Art isn't a fair industry and never will be. How many amazing artists barely made a living their entire life and some person sticks a banana on a wall and walks away with 6 million.
If some producer wants to make music under 50 personas that seems perfectly within their rights. Many electronic artists do this.
Spotify made a product that people want and continue to pay for. That includes me, someone who has spent thousands, likely over 10 at this point, on physical albums and live music. Some of those artists I discovered on Spotify. Access to lesser known artists is better than it ever has been and that's thanks to platforms like Spotify regardless of what kind of shitheads are running the place.
People are also free not to have a FB account. Doesn't mean that we shouldn't criticize the problems that FB has created, amplified or perpetuated through its practices.
I would defend the right to criticize. My point is that artists and consumers have a choice.
Maybe there's a significant percentage of Spotify customers that give two shits about the art and just want to play some background music. That's ok. There's also artists that can thank Spotify for new fans and new listeners that can thank Spotify for new artists to listen to.
This moral outrage over Spotify tends to overlook that there are tradeoffs and every market has these problems. Blaming Spotify for killing a genre is crazy dumb to me. I'm not going to stop listening to lo-fi hip-hop cause Spotify has ghost artists and AI music on it. These bedroom artists have done what would have been impossible 40 years ago and the fans they've gained aren't going to go away. That's a testament to streaming platforms.
Did you know the musicians get paid very little for there music on Spotify? Look I understand the support from music listeners, but Spotifiy as a service really harms musicians. Its really shortsighted to only look at part of the equation.
Doesn't count downstream revenue. Do you see live music? Buy physical music? I do. Many of those artists gain their audience via streaming.
Just in the last 6 months I found two local bands in my backyard (it's a big city) through Spotify related atists. I streamed some of their music but also bought vinyl and saw them live and I will continue to do so.
These are small label artists and this is how they actually make it big enough to do it full time. I don't understand why people overlook this.
Historically, we retrospectively recognize the seminal importance of scenes that had virtually zero participants, and rather than regretting that those scenes were so tiny and demonizing the distribution networks that served less-seminal music to the vast majority of listeners, we romanticize the marginality of those scenes.
But when we see the same thing playing out contemporaneously, with creative niche music reaching tiny numbers of listeners and not getting traction via the distribution networks that serve the vast mainstream, we treat it as a crisis.
I’ve moved away from Spotify, and it’s actually quite hard to buy music. Bandcamp has a lot of indie music but not so much for the genres I like. There’s Apple Music but I don’t have Apple devices and Amazon music doesn’t work in my country.
What genres? A lot of labels bundle digital with physical copies. Most/all new vinyl I've bought recently did this. Some like ninja tune have digital only options.
I'm willing to bet if you email the artist they will be happy to point you where to purchase their music digitally.
I'm so tired of this anti-Spotify crap. Artists and listeners are free not to use it, just as they are free not to use Tidal, SoundCloud, bandcamp, YouTube, etc. It's a platform and the market is free. If it's not working out for you find a different way to market yourself. It's not like top 40 or the Grammys are fair either. Art isn't a fair industry and never will be. How many amazing artists barely made a living their entire life and some person sticks a banana on a wall and walks away with 6 million.
If some producer wants to make music under 50 personas that seems perfectly within their rights. Many electronic artists do this.
Spotify made a product that people want and continue to pay for. That includes me, someone who has spent thousands, likely over 10 at this point, on physical albums and live music. Some of those artists I discovered on Spotify. Access to lesser known artists is better than it ever has been and that's thanks to platforms like Spotify regardless of what kind of shitheads are running the place.