My Spotify and YouTube Rants

[Polkasound]

Spotify:

At the beginning of 2024, when Spotify launched their Reverse Robin Hood streaming payout system to divert tens of millions of dollars from less popular artists to more popular artists, I pulled all of my music (60 tracks) from their service. I did it based on these two principles:

1. I'm happy to donate my music, but only to charities and other causes that I deem worthy. Spotify does not qualify. They are a for-profit business whose CEO made $345 million last year. If they want to make my music available to their customers, they will have to pay me for it. No exceptions.​

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2. I cannot, in good conscience, accept any portion of royalties that were rightfully earned by, and stripped away from, other artists.​

I also predicted that of all the musicians I personally know, I would be the only one standing up for these principles and leaving Spotify. To the best of my knowledge, I am. All of the musicians I spoke with looked at it from their personal, financial viewpoint. "I'm only losing a few bucks, so it's no big deal." I agree losing a couple bucks is not a big deal, but I look at it from this perspective:

Spotify is taking all the royalties earned by approximately 87% of the tracks they host and redirecting them to the artists whose tracks are in the top 13%. Spotify would not be the platform they are today if it weren't for the massive catalog of music in that 87%, but they know that all those artists will do anything to be seen and heard on their platform, including sacrificing their hard-earned royalties. Spotify has indie artists wrapped around their finger, and they'll stop at nothing to exploit them.

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YouTube:

On CD Baby, the payment ledger that shows earned royalties goes to eight decimal places. My per-stream royalties from YouTube always used to be a few tenths of a cent, similar to most platforms, so my ledger would show a typical song entry like this:

​

$0.00420000 x 8 streams = $0.03360000​

Around June of 2021, I noticed more than half my YouTube streaming royalties suddenly started looking like this:

$0.00000000 x 8 streams = $0.00000000​

I contacted CD Baby twice for answers, but my inquiries went ignored. I assumed YouTube simply decided to stop paying me royalties, so I started pulling my music off the platform. But with the release of a recent EP, I accumulated enough plays with a few songs to find the root of the problem:

$0.00000000 x 1,066 streams = $0.00310000​

Although CD Baby's royalty ledger shows eight places to the right of the decimal, I discovered it only shows numbers in the first four places. The last four places are always zeros. It turns out that I'm still being paid for all my streams, but most of my royalties had dropped from a few tenths of a cent to a few ten-thousandths of a cent per stream. If the ledger showed numbers in all eight decimal places, this is what it would have showed:

$0.00000290 x 1,066 streams = $0.00310000​

At that rate, I would literally need over a quarter-million streams just to earn enough royalties to buy a 73¢ postage stamp.

 

[proggermusic]

The only way this will change is through legislation and regulation, sadly... And that seems unlikely to happen any time soon. I would be thrilled if something were done to help sustainability in the arts.

In the meantime, things are much the same as they ever were for most of us... We do whatever we can to survive and wear as many hats as possible in the business. I'm excited to have a couple new records in the works at the moment, and an extremely cool label helping with at least one of them (plus some funding from a local arts grant). This label understands the current landscape more than anyone I've ever known, and they're also genuine music nerds, seriously good people... so I'm gonna go with whatever they recommend, including the inevitable streaming robber baron monsters.

Maybe I'll report back in 18 months with a post-mortem on how it all goes this time around.

 

[Louie]

Maybe I'll report back in 18 months with a post-mortem on how it all goes this time around.

Please do--would be interested reading!

I have a solo jazz fusion/experimental rock record that was mostly recorded at home on ADATs, with drums tracked and mixed in a now defunct grungy basement studio in Detroit, and professionally mastered to CD, but never released. And otherwise have enough material on the computer to make at least a couple full albums, probably more. But I can’t seem to get the motivation to release anything without the prospect of at least breaking even and getting heard, which in my case without a band, would be near impossible. So I just keeping making stuff to fill up the computer.

The point being, and hope I’m not being presumptuous, I’m amazed and happy anyone is still making niche jazz fusion recordings the "old fashioned way", referring to working with a label and recording with excellent musicians in a nice sounding recording environment with good equipment, and getting it professionally mixed and mastered. In the CD era—without getting nostalgic, just saying--at least it was possible to make the recording independently, sell CDs at gigs, recoup, and even make a modest profit over a period of time. In the streaming age, the indie bands and jazz musicians I’ve followed from my generation (X), who are all in and have stuck it out, sadly haven’t released anything regularly since maybe around 2016 with the exception of some live albums and/or singles sprinkled in. I don’t know, but the obvious reason must be the expense and effort involved in producing a band, with little prospect of ROI from the record--or at least breaking even.

 

[Polkasound]

The only way this will change is through legislation and regulation, sadly... And that seems unlikely to happen any time soon. I would be thrilled if something were done to help sustainability in the arts.

I was really hoping that when Spotify announced their new royalty payment system, an artist like Taylor Swift would have stood up for all the hard-working indie musicians around the world by publicly refusing to accept their royalties. She's one of the only artists in the world big enough to influence Spotify. But I'm sure her label would have put the kibosh on that notion pretty quickly since it's their money, too.

Imagine if a new streaming platform was created that cost $0 per month, but they'd charge customers 29 cents for every song they added to their playlist, or $2.99 per album. Artists would be paid directly from customer purchases. From a consumer perspective, it would be a horrible deal compared to a free Spotify account, but...

Imagine if all of the world's independent artists left the major streaming platforms and switched to the new platform. If they did that, they would take with them over half of the world's available music. That's a LOT of music. Most teenagers wouldn't even notice, but millions of true music aficionados and fans of indie artists would need access to that music.

The major labels would continue to make millions of dollars at a fraction of a cent per play from their mainstream artists. Indie artists would continue to have a considerably lower playcount than mainstream artists, but make a roughly 5,000% higher profit per play.

For lots of reasons, such a scenario could never happen, but I like to dream.

 

[Polkasound]

In the streaming age, the indie bands and jazz musicians I’ve followed from my generation (X), who are all in and have stuck it out, sadly haven’t released anything regularly since maybe around 2016 with the exception of some live albums and/or singles sprinkled in.

I can relate. Most polka bands of my generation and older stopped recording around 2010-ish, when polka CD sales to local fans really started tanking. The bands are still performing, but haven't recorded anything new in the last 15 years, and have no plans to ever record again. (If I hadn't teamed up with Mollie B, then 2018 would have been my last year for recording a full-length studio album.)

I’m amazed and happy anyone is still making niche jazz fusion recordings the "old fashioned way..."

If they're just a local band, then chances are someone very generous (or very naive) is donating a lot of money to its production. There are musicians out there who love recording music so much, they spend thousands of their own dollars producing albums just to give away to friends and family. If they're lucky, they might recover 10% of their production expenses through album sales, but it doesn't bother them because they're doing it more as a hobby.

The obvious reason must be the expense and effort involved in producing a band, with little prospect of ROI or at least breaking even.

There was a day when the average local polka band could recover all their recording expenses just by selling albums to local fans. Today, that same polka band could hit 10 different dance halls and festivals in their circuit promoting their new album, and be lucky to sell 10 albums. With breaking even not even a remote possibility anymore, it's no surprise bands have quit recording. Very sad.

 

[John Slater]

YouTube:

On CD Baby, the payment ledger that shows earned royalties goes to eight decimal places. My per-stream royalties from YouTube always used to be a few tenths of a cent, similar to most platforms, so my ledger would show a typical song entry like this:

​

$0.00420000 x 8 streams = $0.03360000​

Around June of 2021, I noticed more than half my YouTube streaming royalties suddenly started looking like this:

$0.00000000 x 8 streams = $0.00000000​

I contacted CD Baby twice for answers, but my inquiries went ignored. I assumed YouTube simply decided to stop paying me royalties, so I started pulling my music off the platform. But with the release of a recent EP, I accumulated enough plays with a few songs to find the root of the problem:

$0.00000000 x 1,066 streams = $0.00310000​

Although CD Baby's royalty ledger shows eight places to the right of the decimal, I discovered it only shows numbers in the first four places. The last four places are always zeros. It turns out that I'm still being paid for all my streams, but most of my royalties had dropped from a few tenths of a cent to a few ten-thousandths of a cent per stream. If the ledger showed numbers in all eight decimal places, this is what it would have showed:

$0.00000290 x 1,066 streams = $0.00310000​

At that rate, I would literally need over a quarter-million streams just to earn enough royalties to buy a 73¢ postage stamp.

Wow! Even with chopping off the last four digits, that royalty is way low.

I don't think YouTube's royalty structure has changed significantly, so I'll be that's because of CD Baby, not YouTube. I hope you're able to get to the bottom of this.

 

[Tim Nash]

Spotify's end game seems to be to eliminate the artists entirely and replace them with AI bots.
The first question I asked myself when I tried Spotify was " do I really need or want access to every audio file ever recorded?" The answer was NO!!! I then asked myself, how many great and really good recordings are there? By my guess 50,000 would be pretty optimistic. 100,000 audio files are uploaded every day. Maybe one might be good. A spotify subscription is like being given access to the city dump!!!!!! Play in it all day and maybe you'll find something of value someone accidently threw out. Good luck washing the stink off when you're done. So I don't use streaming services at all.
I think the future for artists will be direct to consumer in the vein of Bandcamp with a NON AI certification implemented. Most commercial music will be done by AI. And there'll be a clear distinction between artists and content providers. The days of 100,000 per day uploads will come to a close as more wannabe's realize there's no money in commercial music and creating original music is hard. In the long run this will bring back a level of quality we haven't seen in quite some time.

 

[Nekujak]

Probably a different situation than OP's, but I'll mention it anyway since it might be a useful data point for this discussion...

I earn microsync payments from YouTube through one of the libraries I write for. These don't come through a PRO, but are paid directly by the library as sync fees, whch means I get 50% of the full amount paid by YouTube.

On my last quarterly statement, one of my tracks is listed as having 3264 uses and I got .33, while another track with 256 uses only paid .01. Obviously, these numbers are very small, but they do add up over time, since each statement usually includes about 20-30 different tracks with microsync.

I also get microsync from Twitch, which pays considerably more than YouTube. For example, I received $1.07 for a track that got 180 uses on Twitch.

I honestly have no idea who, where, or how these tracks are being used. I assume content creators are licensing them for use in their videos, but I have no insight into the mechanics of how that happens.

 

[PaulieDC]

Thanks for posting this, these are the kind of metrics we need to know. Back in the day it was the record companies that soaked up all of the profits... now it's the streaming services. Same issue, different entity.