As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)

The post's actual title is "Giving it Away: How Free Music Makes More Than Sense" and is far more interesting than the part about preferring illegal downloading. The author, Derek Webb, gave (gives?) away albums in exchange for your ZIP Code and email address because the chance of getting you out to a live show was worth more than what he made on a digital sale or stream.

But for context, the full quote about preferring illegal downloading is: "I’ll go even further to say that I actually prefer illegal downloading over Spotify because when you get music illegally it’s at least implicit in the transaction that what you’re doing is potentially harmful to the artist. But with Spotify, your conscience is clear because you’re either enduring ads or paying to use the service and access the music."

This is an argument that, for an independent "middle-class" musician, giving recordings away in return for direct fan contact can be economically superior to selling individual downloads. Fully agree. I started to do so more than twenty years ago: https://rochus-keller.ch/?cat=3. I went even a step further in that I'm not even associated with a collecting-society (SUISA here in Switzerland), but permit everyone including radio stations or vloggers to play my music for free; the very little copyright royalties is much less than the publicity effect.

I saw in a YouTube video once, and I'll paraphrase because I forgot, something that resonated well with me about piracy.

They said piracy is never about cost, but almost always about a service issue. Basically people flocked to Napster (and the likes) at the time because it let them browse an infinitude of music which was, back then, incredible.

That was just market demand validation, a latent problem waiting for a solution to address it. Piracy just did it first. Once someone solved it, a little bit better, like Spotify did with realtime (instead of p2p waiting), and with indexing/filtering/curation/etc. It automatically won over piracy.

Then, the one fun argument it brought after, is that the same tools that ended piracy are likely the ones making it rise again. Netflix made everyone happy, but now we have a subscription circus. There's N streaming services, and keeping up with subscribing/cancelling/finding the one that has your content created a ... service problem!

So we're bound to see piracy rise again, not because folks don't want to pay $20/mo for streaming, but because they don't want to deal with the hassle of jumping across N subscriptions and keeping track of that.

I think some of the big media is trying to solve for that, which is why you see all of them now becoming "channels" inside each other, but I'm curious to see how this will evolve.

Does this argument change now that Spotify does offer meaningful connection to fans?*

Spotify tells me when any of the artists I listen to are coming to town - I’ve found and bought tickets this way and I don’t go to a lot of live shows in general.

Spotify is trying to sell me merch and artists can have both a merch and an events tab in app.

Edit: I see an artist with only 400k subscribers selling merch (compared to Lady Gaga’s 99 million), so it must be at least somewhat accessible.

* I don’t know if Spotify is charging money for these services or if they are ultimately fair, but at least for some artists it is generating ticket sales

The last concert I went to was Lord Huron in the Boston House of Blues, in 2018. Not much of a concert guy, clearly.

Just make the albums easily downloadable on Bandcamp is all I ask.

Until we are honest about the Spotify payment model, how can we ever possibly come to a consensus of what is fair and what is not? These comment sections are full of misinformation, and posters are very rarely held accountable for spreading that misinformation.

There absolutely is a conversation to be had here, but it is not the one that has taken place for years and years. To be fair to OP, the information wasn't quite as ubiquitous in 2011 as it is today.. but for the last 5 years at least Spotify has published yearly reports giving information to how the payment system works.

The model is a pro-rata model. There is no per-stream rate. The amount of money paid out each month is stream-share based from a shared pool of money which contains roughly 2/3 of every dollar spotify makes. These payments are paid to rights holders (not artists.. labels, distributors) and then rights holders pay a percentage of that to not just artists, but also publishers and song writers. The rate they pay their artists is their business, Spotify isn't dictating that. In fact, this payment model is industry standard (most major streamers pay the same 2/3) and heavily favors the rights holders, which have always dominated the cash flow of the music industry. They just have Spotify to take the heat now.

So, like I said, there is a conversation out there to be had. That conversation is more is 2/3 of music revenue fair? Should Spotify charge users per stream instead of a monthly subscription? Should the subscription be something more like $20/month? $50?

Just dunking on Spotify isn't helping artists. https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/

Can't get to the noisetrade website. 502 and appears to be using a private certificate.

Spotify is increasingly a very objectionable company. I wouldn't ever want to give them my money.

There's no reason as an independent artist to put your music on Spotify or any other streamer if you're not making the money you think you deserve. There's no reason to complain if you did it anyway.

as a guitarer * with a realy cheap phone running butchered android and "side loaded" everything, and zero accounts for anything other than web space, the whole web looks like it's part of my file system as a default, some of it works, most does not , and some tiny fraction of all that is now local. people send me links and files all the time, again most does not work, and I have to specify, I can open old school pdf's, jpegs, and whatnot, but spotify!, ha!, nope, just tried,it just goes into a fit trying and failing to load who knows what, I could probably spend a day or two, three and build a hinky work around, but then it would fail, so I will stick to what works

* edit: I called myself a musician, but thats not quite true.

Without Spotify and (to a lesser extent) piracy before it, I wouldn’t be listening to 1/10th of the artists I listen to. Maybe it’s just moral cope but I can’t see how it can be made any better for niche or up and coming independent artists.