Spotify will end service in Uruguay due to bill requiring fair pay for artists
The Uruguayan Parliament approved an amendment to the country's copyright law last month
If your business can't pay it's workers (artists) fairly, your business doesn't deserve to exist.
Tell that to American restaurants.
We have been
Not trying to glaze, but Trudeau had the same idea here in Canada, and Google and Facebook and most of the internet crucified him for it.
Not really the same, this was more large Canadian companies trying to extort money from Google whilst google still gives them their traffic.
Not trying to defend gogle, that company can burn to the ground as far as I care, but it wasn't the same
The artists aren't going to get more money. Just that the consumer won't have their music now.
its* workers
“Spotify already pays nearly 70% of every dollar it generates from music to the record labels and publishers
Sounds like the issue might be with the record labels...
I’m a small label owner and I guarantee you that it’s a red herring. they set the price of the service, and you can either upload your music on spotify, or not upload it.
compared to the market before digital platforms, where YOU set the price according to several factors, Spotify is the judge and the jury. they choose what the subscription cost is. they choose what your music is worth. they choose the amount of payout you’re gonna get. this is completely backwards! WE should be the ones, labels and artists, to tell spotify what our cost is, and THEY should be the ones setting their subscriptions on the according price for them to be able to cover all their running costs.
but they put themselves in the dominating position on the market, and contributed to the destruction of the physical market. we got left with no choice but to upload our music on their service and eat shit.
we passed from earning thousands of euro per year in physical and digital sales, to getting 100€ every three months for royalties on spotify. this is unsustainable whatever the way you look at it.
they’re the pirates, and ruined the market much more than what pirate bay ever did.
The physical market was long gone before Spotify happened, don't make your legitimate complaints look silly by blaming Spotify for it. The music industry simply had no good answer to deal with digital media.
Spotify did seem to force their hand and some artists improved and adapted. And it's never had a true monopoly with many different services coexesting and competing with it.
I'm curious if you know how this works for other streaming services?
Presumably there's a market rate that users are currently willing to pay and as such an increase of pay from Spotify to artists would mean they need to increase the fee to their users. This would make them less competitive and possibly lose subscriptions.
I've already jumped ship from Spotify over to YouTube music for example because in my country it was a better deal.
I work for a label and need to press that no artist would get actually big without their label. Nit because the artist isn't good, but because if you can't get deals with radio stations, deals with streaming services to get on curated playlists, interviews with Graham Norton/other shows, nomination/performances at award shows, promotions on tick tok, commercial/movie soundtrack deals, world tours, tradional advertising. Etc etc. Then you're never going to be making good money in the industry.
And music is infamously not very lucrative in terms of entertainment. Film, TV and video games companies are actually ordered of magnitude more profitable.
It’s clear that labels are acting as gatekeepers, but are they productive gatekeepers? Or just skimming off of the top — that is, rent seeking, profiting even when they provide little value themselves. It seems like there’s a lot of the latter going on.
Well that's damning
In a letter sent to Uruguay's Minister of Education Pablo Da Silveira, a spokesperson for Spotify said: "If the proposed reform became law in its current form, Spotify's business in Uruguay could become unfeasible, to the detriment of Uruguayan music and its fans," claiming that the amendment would force it to "pay twice" the amount of royalties.
Spotify currently pays out at 70%. Doubling royalties would cause them to pay out more than they make in subscription and ad revenue. This is why they're shutting down.
they don’t. spotify says they’re paying 70%, but they don’t tell how they redistribute that revenue. they have under-the-table deals with the 3 majors who grabs most of that money, and leave the crumbs to everybody else.
Doubling means rising the price and not shutting down or giving less to some and more to others. The new price may be too expensive for the customer. In this case, the service or the business model is the issue.
An other regulation may be to pay egally all artists per listen with this point regulated as well.
Spotify didn't turn a profit yet. I would be pessimistic on the business model knowing the Majors take the majority of the 70%. Spotify is de facto a monopoly and so the Majors. With a fair price, the issue is to see the Majors quit the service and launch their own service. Spotify would be useless with only the indep (this is sad). They are protecting their money and the Majors. They don't care about the smaller artists.
This is at least the second time Spotify has refused to be decent.
Yeah they would cease to exist.
And then nobody gets anything, not even the guys just running a white noise playlist, and making money off of it.
I would love to go back to an artist release model and purchase model where non superstars (with big label circulation) can be successful again.
As is, the same corps own the radio and the venues and the ads. Spotify harms Mariah Carey for example by undervaluing her songs on streaming, but at a fraction of the harm it inflicts to smaller artists.
more reasons to join Funkwhale
This is really neat. Never heard of it till now. As both an artist and developer I always felt that a decentralized and federated option for audio was the future.
I hope you'll check it out. I have an account on funkwhale.it as it allows up to 5GB of storage free of charge, which is the best I've seen for open registration instances (it also happens to be the first I learned of as I use several of the other features of the devol.it who operates that instance, simply because their cryptpad instance was the fisrt thing that showed up when I did a DDG search for Free and Federated Online Documents).
Guess I should finally try Tidal...
Or just stop giving these shitty corporations money altogether and start pirating.
Take a look at these amazing guides:
https://ripped.guide/Audio/Music/
And join !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Personally, I use deemix with Deezer Premium ARLs to download my Music in full 320kbps. Works like a dream. You can accomplish the same thing on Android with Murglar. This section of the Firehawk52 guide explains it pretty well.
Tidal has some pseudo quality (MQA) which they claim to better than lossless but isn't at all and just costs more. If you want a streaming service, maybe take a look at something like qubuz where you can buy the tracks to download drm free. Might also wanna take a look at Bandcamp.
Is this actually that Spotify doesn't want to have to qualify value? Remuneration equal across regions? Oof being equitable could get expensive!
Is this actually that Spotify doesn't want to have to qualify value?
They'd rather pay 200 mil to people like Joe Rogan. It doesn't matter how you look at that deal, he's not worth that much, and there would be 0% chance of getting that money back (thats a lot of additional subscriptions)
Free market.... always look for more ethical options that still fit your music. An ideal platform would be Audius. It's built on blockchain technology but is limited with music content. It would be the perfect way to allow artists to make a living and get rid of the record label kingpins and Spotify pimps forever!
Fuck Spotify. If you don't want to be a 40 year old and buy albums, Deezer and Tidal pay much larger royalties than Spotify.
I actually hate to say it, but I switched to Apple Music the moment Spotify paid joe rogan 200 million dollars.
Obviously Spotify has money to pay artists, but they're choosing to screw them. They've really high-balled a nobody
🏴☠️
Alternately, one could just not listen to music. Life is already too expensive.
But life is boring without music. Anyway I try to buy my music through Bandcamp whenever I can, and stream it from my own server.
and capitalism killed bandcamp too now…
What's the point of living without music? Anyway, check out qobuz.
A life without music is a life not worth living. How about listening to the thousands of artists releasing 100% free, high quality works instead?
make your own if cost is the problem but don't deprive yourself
