Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

Paying a nominal amount for each stream is one matter; however, compensating nothing for smaller quantities while you pay for larger amounts presents a fundamentally different issue. This scenario is akin to an author not receiving royalties for the first 1,000 books sold in a bookstore, or a manufacturer not being paid for the first 1,000 candy bars sold at a grocery store. Such practices can be equated with theft. It's perplexing how current legislation permits this.

I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify?<p>I listen to a <i>lot</i> of music on Spotify. And some of it is from smaller indie artists. Not a huge amount, but I’ve definitely listened to songs that are in that &lt;1000 plays category, and for some undiscovered artists that’s a good amount of their library.<p>It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out. A lot of good songs too.<p>As much as I love Spotify and music streaming, it seems like the economics of it fundamentally doesn’t work and can’t work.

I think this is the wrong approach.<p>If they have issues with people abusing the revenue model by publishing white noise and generating fake plays - go after that.<p>However the 1K streams per track thing is going to negatively impact small artists who might have relatively large collections, but few over 1K annual streams.<p>If it&#x27;s a processing cost issue then make it so that payouts need to meet some reasonable minimum threshold.<p>&gt; between $1 and $2 will be added to monthly bills for customers in several territories, including the UK, Australia, and Pakistan, Bloomburg reports. This is said to cover the cost of audiobooks, added to the platform late-2023. More recently, video learning content was introduced to further diversify the offering.<p>I don&#x27;t want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app.<p>They mention that there will be another tier added which doesn&#x27;t have these -- great, so long as it keeps the audio quality for music at the same level, and doesn&#x27;t have ads.

IMO the problem is that Spotify is fundamentally breaking the &quot;spirit&quot; of the deal that allowed them to get in the position they are right now.<p>Spotify&#x27;s entire promise was &quot;we solve the music inequality problem by just pooling all subscriber money together and then we do an equal(-ish, record labels iirc got slightly different deals) split depending on how many people listen to your music.&quot; It kinda sells the idea that if you&#x27;re just popular enough, you can make it big on Spotify. Of course practically that&#x27;s been a lie for ages (numbers showcased that only the top 0.1% could afford to live off of Spotify alone, and all those songs are owned by the established record companies anyway), so you could say this is just dispensing with the charade to avoid transaction costs.<p>I do wonder about the ripple effect this could cause for indie artists; Spotify just told them to go fuck themselves and there&#x27;s pretty much no incentive to use Spotify anymore now that they pulled this stunt.<p>If you want to support artists directly, it&#x27;s still always better to just buy the albums. Most of them have Bandcamp pages and for now, Bandcamp provides a good deal (and as a customer you can just download the FLAC files).

This change quite obviously can&#x27;t negatively impact small artists in any meaningful way. When googling for how much Spotify pay artists per stream, ranges vary a bit. But it seems like a high number is $0.005 per stream, or 200 streams to the dollar.<p>Even if a very prolific artist has 200 songs, averaging 500 plays per year, this would only ever amount to $500 per year. It is not peanuts for a hobby musician, but it would represent an unusually productive artist who happens to be just under this limit with most (or all) their songs, and also who manages to somehow get paid in the upper parts of the span.

&gt; Since going public on the stock market in 2018, the company has lost money every year<p>they don&#x27;t even have a business model<p>the whole thing is a massive scam that devalues music just to earn some VCs a big payout<p>it&#x27;s like if I said I was going to &quot;disrupt the supermarket industry&quot; by giving away free food

I highly recommend trying Qobuz! Artists are paid more, the catalog is rich and comprehensive (I recommend to early users who might have felt a lack of content to give it another try, as it&#x27;s now much richer), most albums are available in Hi-Res Audio, the UI is nice, there is no fluff (just music, nothing more), and most importantly, content is curated, with many articles written by critics and journalists, artist interviews, and, for each album, a small review or a piece of text informing about the album&#x27;s significance. Compared to the awesome but &quot;industrial&quot; recommendation system of Spotify, this is something more personal and curated which, in my opinion, better helps to understand some music genres.

I&#x27;m not understanding the harsh criticism here.<p>Pretty much all platforms have some kind of soft threshold before paying.<p>This is actually very common in real world as well, e.g. in sales you don&#x27;t get commissions if you don&#x27;t meet certain thresholds too.

How much of an issue is this? Does it work like ad revenue on youtube? If something has under 1k streams I have to assume that was only a few dollars hobbyists get occasionally, if even that.

This should be renamed to &quot;Spotify admits demonetizing all tracks under 1k streams with no previous contractual agreements&quot;.<p>Next step would be explaining why artists with the same amount of streams (but different labels) have wildly different payouts.

I think &quot;theft&quot; closer describes this rather than &quot;demonetization&quot;

Streaming services will be regulated in the coming months in EU<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;1&#x2F;17&#x2F;24041343&#x2F;eu-music-streaming-platform-artist-pay-europe-regulation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;1&#x2F;17&#x2F;24041343&#x2F;eu-music-streami...</a><p>EDIT: as it’s been pointed out, the article doesn’t mention a time, which is a speculation on my part

Can someone ELI5: Why is it so hard to just split my monthly subscription money on all the artists that I listened to, proportional to their air time to the total listening time? I really don&#x27;t get it

I suspect the truth around this is that it contributes to their eternal losses actually paying artists so they worked out another way of not doing it for their balance sheet.<p>I was at a gig for a moderately successful band recently and they said rather loudly they were bastards and buy one of their CDs instead even if you never play it because they need to eat.

When I read the headline, I assumed this was to disincentivise uploading thousands of cheap AI-generated songs. There&#x27;s tons of this on the platform, and it looks like it was generated automatically in bulk.<p>But the article makes it sound like this was not a factor?

Considering that according to what I can see online, artists get around $4 per 1000 streams, it doesn&#x27;t look significant and it probably saves on processing fees.<p>One would need to be an artist with a lot of songs just under 1k to make it more than enough for a cup of coffee. The kind of money it isn&#x27;t even worth the time putting songs on Spotify (it may be worth it for promotion though).<p>The general issue with underpaid artists remains but this particular case doesn&#x27;t seem to matter much, in fact, if what they imply is true, it is arguably an improvement since what they save in processing fees will go to artists instead of banks.

I hope this doesn&#x27;t affect Matt Farley[1] too badly, as it seems like he relies on having many songs with only a few streams each as his main strategy for generating income from Spotify.<p>I once commissioned a Mother&#x27;s Day song from him -- sent him 10 facts about my Mom and our family and he came back a few days later with a funny and charming little tune. Best $30 I&#x27;ve ever spent.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;spotify-matt-farley.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;spotify-matt-far...</a>

This seems quite reasonable. I have quite an uncommon taste in music so I tend to listen to artists with very small followings. I know most songs I listen to only have a few thousand views in total on YouTube, so I was initially worried that it would be similar on Spotify so just took a look... Spotify seems to be about x10 whatever the stats are on YouTube so almost all of the songs I listen to qualify for monetisation. The only exceptions are tiny self-recording artists I&#x27;ve randomly stubbled on from browsing Soundcloud or other corners of the internet.<p>I find it hard to see how this decision would impact small artists to be honest. Maybe if an artist had thousands of tracks all with ~500 streams then it might impact them, but I&#x27;m guessing small artists who are currently monetised are making almost nothing anyway from their handful of songs with under &lt;1,000 streams – assuming they only have 2-3 albums worth of music.<p>Supporting monetisation on all songs is probably more headache than it&#x27;s worth when you&#x27;re dealing with paying out a few cents. Honestly the best thing you can do to support small artists isn&#x27;t stream their music, but share it with your friends, donate to them and buy their merch (assuming they have merch because many won&#x27;t).

It really amazes me how tech companies like Spotify manage to disrupt an entire industry, but fail to find a sustainable business model that makes them profitable. This is far from sustainable and it makes the world worse. There really should be laws that limit how much losses a company may generate during their &quot;disruption&quot; of existing markets.<p>Yes, I&#x27;m aware that I&#x27;m commenting this on HN.

The annoying thing is it is per track, not per album. This essentially demonetized all my bands albums since 1997 except for four tracks.

I think one of the main benefits for more obscure bands to be on streaming services is discoverability.<p>In the Discovery weekly and Release Radar you often get bands I have never heard of.<p>Also, if someone says &quot;Oh I like this new band xxxxx&quot; then you can find them on Spotify and see if you like them or not.<p>Fron that perspective Spotify is a free service for bands to be discovered and generate more fans.<p>Yes I do agree that bands should get a bigger piece of the profit pile, as long as there is a profile pile<p>Personally, I like bying physical media. I am not cool enough to buy vinyl, I prefer cds. Finding places to buy cds is increasingly impossible<p>The best used to be going to shows and buying cds at the merch desk or the bands website, but more and more new bands do not even produce cds anymore. There seems to be more bands doing vinyl. I guess with the prices they charge that the markup is a lot better.<p>For now I try to buy digital music and burn it to cd myself. I would vastly prefer buying physical media directly.

When they say demonetize, are they saying they aren&#x27;t playing any ads on them or are they just not giving creators a cut of the ads? Those are very different things.<p>These platforms have every incentive in the world to continue monetizing them but just cut the creator out of that monetization their work earned.

I find it funny&#x2F;interesting&#x2F;annoying that Spotify plays the hero when it comes to condemning Apple for its App Store policies yet has no issues to be the villain when they have a chance to show how to handle such issues better.

i see the ethical arguments against this decision. at the same time, we got testimonials from up and coming artists saying that their current pay is literally a few cents per month for getting similar streams as the threshold.<p>i am no artist but have been making youtube videos on and off for the past 5 years, with only one video breaking 6 figures in views. yet i never reached the threshold in the platform to monetize my content, while youtube is free to play ads on my hundreds of (non - spam&#x2F;short) videos.<p>if not receiving a couple dollars per month for my videos is what stops me from my passion, then i need to ask myself more pressing questions.

I recently demonitized Spotify and am very happy with Bandcamp and Newpipe.

Let&#x27;s demonetize Spotify.<p>Cancel our accounts and campaign to others to do the same.<p>I cancelled my Spotify account, and now I am using Tidal, which pays the artists a higher percent.

I&#x27;m not sure the technical overhead is high enough to bother to do this... Unless the money made for it comes out to be too small to be worth bothering with after transfer fees.<p>It may be as someone else said, that there should just be a minimum threshold for payouts. Like, you get your money after it&#x27;s at least reached $10 or $100.<p>Demonetizing the first 1000 streams is probably not a big deal, but it still sounds a little wrong.

What is the going rate for a service that &quot;organically&quot; plays a track &#x2F; album 1000 times?<p>To misquote Bezos: Your silly policy is my buisness oppertunity.

Here we go, Spotify coming in hot with it&#x27;s own adpocalypse. There just isn&#x27;t enough ad money to go around. What can you do? Targeted advertising is a bubble, at scale it provides little additional return and the industry is overvalued. The only thing that has been propping it up is startups looking for quick bucks to please investors, in the long run it was always going to collapse.

I get that people just want to save money but I absolutely cannot understand how we keep screwing over artists like this.<p>We pay a small amount, the middlemen gets all the money, 0.01% of the artists get more than a few hundred bucks, everyone else gets nothing.<p>Piracy is entirely justified. We should pay the artists and stop paying these leeches. The only real value created is from the artists themselves.

I think it would be fair if Spotify abstained from charging me for my subscription if I listened to less than 100 tracks in a given month.

Even if this doesn&#x27;t really impact the small artists, Spotify is not even profitable for shareholders yet AND still doesn&#x27;t pay a meaningful amount to most artists. It is only going to get worse from here.<p>I do not believe that their business model will ever do anything but fuck over the artists. It&#x27;s also deeply disturbing to me that there are only a few options left for people to actually own their music and the rest is rent-seeking platforms.

According to this artist [0] Spotify will be irrelevant soon because infinitely streaming generative AI music will cater to all your &quot;ever changing&quot; desires.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39967745">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39967745</a>

&quot;You wouldn&#x27;t stream a car for free would you?&quot; This is just playing with meanings but for most musicians having their music on Spotify or on torrents is pretty much the same. the only difference is that only in one case there&#x27;s a company profiting in the process.

Kristin Graziani wrote a comprehensive explainer on this in November: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;consequence.net&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;spotify-royalty-model-op-ed&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;consequence.net&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;spotify-royalty-model-op-ed&#x2F;</a>

I think they should basically turn it into Twitch, where I can &quot;sub&quot; to an artist and maybe get their tracks earlier than others or some other additional content that costs artist $0 to produce for the most part (podcast, making of, e.g. a la Patreon). In addition, if you add &quot;donate&quot; button you&#x27;d see a lot of artists being showered with cash. It&#x27;s a shame that these hacks (streamers) become multimillionaires while real talents make pennies off actual art.

Can you see how many streams an artist has?<p>I&#x27;m generally happy to let Spotify stream whatever for background noise, but it looks like I should play some local bands manually once in a while.

How is Spotify not the loser here? Isn’t it more important to say “we have basically every song ever made” than save a few bucks over small fish streaming?

The market is hungry for a well-done music streaming service. I don&#x27;t know why there is no venture backed competitor.

I really wish my subscription to Spotify was just split to the artists I actually listen to, rather than going to a pool

Does anyone know of a service where I can feed in my Spotify playlists, and it tells me where I can buy those tracks?

Why use Spotify at all when it&#x27;s so much more helpful to subscribe to patreon of new and promising artist?

I&#x27;m so happy with Tidal. Higher audio quality, more money to the artists and less b*hit overall.

Seems like a second order effect: Google cloud is squeezing them, and now they are squeezing artists.

Are there any other comparable (but more ethical) platforms out there that I can switch to?

acceptable as a reaction to the cost of tracking engagement and paying the long-tail of artists. then again this could probably be fixed with a minimum payout policy and a donation button in the app.

isn&#x27;t this partly to combat people who commit search listing flooding by abusing the upload ability to upload 100.000 variations of the same thing?

The 1k streams limit will probably only financially effect &quot;artists&quot; that spams the platform with new tracks. It is not like it will make any difference for real artists.

So which platform pays the highest royalty?

Clickbait song titles enters the scene...

that’s BS and in no way solving their very real bot problem. This wasn’t reported on worldwide, but here in Germany, it got some press due to local hip-hop labels being involved.<p>Malicious labels use click farms to push up the numbers on their artists, either by manipulating all platforms or locking their artist into Spotify.<p>This, in addition to other forms of manipulation such as playlists-aaS, isn’t just a ploy to promote their music. As long as farming clicks is cheaper that the payout rate, they can get paid for laundering illicit gains that way.

This shouldn’t be legal. It’s a massive abuse of power. Small artists need to be on Spotify (pulling their music in protest is not viable and not going to lead to change anyway). What gives Spotify the right to arbitrarily decide “you make so little money it’s not worth our time paying you”? There’s no other business you could get away with this in. Scum.

It&#x27;s THEIR money.

&quot;Additionally, Spotify now requires a minimum number of unique listeners for royalties to apply. This attempt to stop &quot;further manipulation by bad actors&quot;&quot;<p>What a load of manure. The only reason manipulation of royalties even works is that they pool the streams such that the consumer wont pay the artist he listens too.<p>Just tie the royalties to what each user listens to and what they pay. Solved. No abuse possible.<p>But no. Have to have an opaque algorithm and do hacks upon hacks to obscure its funamental flaws.

I spend £17 a month on Spotify. If all I do is listen to “Bob Bobson sings Bob Bob Bob”, then my £17, minus commission (1%, 5%, 30%, whatever), should go entirely to Bob Bobson<p>That’s not how Spotify works. Instead a lot of it goes to Taylor Swift, who I don’t listen to.

And the enshitification begins. Remember that you as users are next.<p>Find a sustainable alternative now. I personally recommend bandcamp + youtube combo. Yt to explore and find new music, Bc to buy the music I enjoy and __own__ it.