this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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The change exclude payouts that are under 1 cent or something like that. The news got hijacked by click and rage baiters like this title by the Guardian (which I won't link):
The smaller artists would literally get single digit cents! The Spotify hate is getting astroturfed hard it almost seems.
You say that like it's a defense though.
Yeah they're paying the people who make the product we sell so little that they don't even get enough money in a paycheck to have it be worth sending them a paycheck!!
Should spotify offer more money for less views? Maybe. But 1000 views being a threshold (and only valued at a few pennies with their current model) sounds to me like the paper they write the check on, cost more than the person may make.
1000 unique listeners.
If you had 500 die hard fans who stream your music every waking minute, you get $0.
Now, I imagine they did this to prevent people from trying to game the system (create a song and have all your devices stream it all the time, or something), but it's still shitty that if you have legitimate "listens" you can get nothing.
It makes it so that I know some of my listens are just going to line Spotify's coffers. I have a number of bands I listen to who are under even 500 monthly listeners. Even if they're only getting a couple cents, I know they're at least getting something from my listens on Tidal.
No, they spun it that way by deceptively going on a rant about how many "songs get fewer than 1000 plays ever" and doing the math based on that in the "article," but that's not what the change actually was. If you read the details of the change below that, it is that they will no longer pay out at all for songs that get fewer than 1000 unique listeners per year.
You still aren't talking a ton of money, but if each of 999 listeners streamed a song once per month, the artist could be losing close to $40 per song per year.
Playbacks, not listeners. It's not a high threshold and listeners would be a weird metric in the first place. Playbacks doesn't exclude niche content consumed often by fewer people and shows overall popularity.