Man, a lot of people here don’t understand how the music industry works. From the perspective of someone who’s been loosely following the music industry, what I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter if Spotify gave up 2/3rds of their revenue, or 100% of it, the artists would still make fuck all.
Why?
The labels love taking their cuts and as a result, artists make very little. Instead of taking the blame for giving artists a <10% cut of the label’s revenue from their music (my understanding is that it’s pretty common for musicians to get <10%, sometimes <5% if you’re on a particularly shitty label), the labels are blaming platforms like Spotify.
Now, I’m not saying that Spotify is blameless, however I think there’s a lot of misdirection from the labels going on. I don’t remember anyone complaining about pre-spotify services like Pandora Radio for not paying out enough when they were largely ad-supported, which is another reason I’m not totally buying the, “it’s cause it’s free” argument either.
Labels are an outdated concept that needs to die. Now that you can find any music from just a quick search artists shouldn’t have to rely on them, at least not as heavily, for advertising.
Why isn’t there some kind of genre music search for all artists without a label, Foss of course. From what I understand, when you’re starting out in music, getting people to hear it is the hardest part.
Man, a lot of people here don’t understand how the music industry works. From the perspective of someone who’s been loosely following the music industry, what I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter if Spotify gave up 2/3rds of their revenue, or 100% of it, the artists would still make fuck all.
Why?
The labels love taking their cuts and as a result, artists make very little. Instead of taking the blame for giving artists a <10% cut of the label’s revenue from their music (my understanding is that it’s pretty common for musicians to get <10%, sometimes <5% if you’re on a particularly shitty label), the labels are blaming platforms like Spotify.
Now, I’m not saying that Spotify is blameless, however I think there’s a lot of misdirection from the labels going on. I don’t remember anyone complaining about pre-spotify services like Pandora Radio for not paying out enough when they were largely ad-supported, which is another reason I’m not totally buying the, “it’s cause it’s free” argument either.
Fuck, remember Pandora?
Labels are an outdated concept that needs to die. Now that you can find any music from just a quick search artists shouldn’t have to rely on them, at least not as heavily, for advertising.
Why isn’t there some kind of genre music search for all artists without a label, Foss of course. From what I understand, when you’re starting out in music, getting people to hear it is the hardest part.
Relatively “large” truly independent bands like KNOWER are starting to give true home recording a base of proof of functionality.
Power to bandcamp.