this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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[–] blazera@kbin.social 35 points 2 years ago (28 children)

If you want to do the maths, the maximum one can possibly earn in Spotify royalties is $0.003 a stream. It doesn’t add up to a living wage for most artists.

And now, to make matters far worse, starting in 2024 Spotify will stop paying anything at all for roughly two-thirds of tracks on the platform. That is any track receiving fewer than 1,000 streams over the period of a year.

So if my maths are right, this means people not getting paid...are people that would make less than 3 dollars in a whole year?

[–] admiralteal@kbin.social 30 points 2 years ago (23 children)

Which really illuminates how fucked it is that they aren't paying those people.

These tiny artists earning barely anything are evidently a major enough cost sector that it's worth Spotify just telling them to get fucked. Playing their content is evidently significantly important to Spotify, but not enough to justify an annual check that isn't even enough to buy a beer.

[–] blazera@kbin.social 15 points 2 years ago (22 children)

With hits that low, youre basically just advocating for UBI at that point, you cant expect pay for every little amateur hobby folks have.

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 8 points 2 years ago

What they're actually advocating for is dividing each user's pot by their listens.

If a user primarily listens to a handful of small bands, why shouldn't their cut go to those bands, rather than being thrown into a big pool to be diluted? At first glance they'd be similar, but they're arguing that if you do the math out they aren't.

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