Is this the same deal that made it so that artists who got under ~2,000 plays or something like that don't get paid?
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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wish I actually used Spotify, so I could boycott
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My current band, Damon & Naomi, only provided the soundtrack for a comparatively modest trek, “from Berlin to Beijing three times”.
We’ve been hearing these slogans for decades, while watching our incomes from creative work go down and down, until finally now, for many of us on Spotify, they will hit absolute zero.
Down at the level of most tracks on the platform, a devoted fan who listens to the work of a lesser known artist over and over still pays most or all their subscription money to Ed Sheeran, Drake, Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny.
You can count me among that number, along with the US-based advocacy group I am a part of, United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW); or Tom Gray of the band Gomez, who launched the very visible campaign #BrokenRecord in the UK.
We have been calling for a switch from this so-called pro-rata accounting, to a user-centric system that would reward artists directly with the money paid into the pot by those who actually listen to our work.
None of these three extremely well-capitalised corporations need to listen to artists at the low end of the scale like me, even though collectively we are providing the bulk of content on their platforms.
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What's even better: There doesn't seem to be any streaming service that treats artists fairly.