When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
As a musician and composer it really took the life out of my identity as a composer seeing an alternative to bandcamp never really form and then one day waking up to it bought by Epic.
I didn’t cry that day, but I might as well have, it made me extraordinarily sad to see that headline and I imagine there are actually countless talented musicians out there who will never actuate on their creative vision because the environment for music production is at this point, downright hostile towards artists and musicians considering the amount of work music production is.
It takes an obscene amount of work to take a song from something that has promise to being as polished as listeners demand nowadays, and listeners won’t even give your song a chance on actual speakers. You have to twist and warp your music so it sounds good on essentially monophonic phone speakers with shitty frequency coverage or otherwise nobody will give it a try on speakers for actually listening to music. Doesn’t matter though, nobody is going to actually support you for the art you make.
🙃
It seems like https://resonate.coop/ is still around tho which seems like a cool idea (a coop owned streaming service where listeners can stream-to-own a song).
It seems that ampwall.com may come sometime as an alternative to Bandcamp? Time will tell…
Not sure if this is exactly good news, but Epic Games doesn’t own it anymore, it was sold to Songtradr.
As bad as Epic is, probably worse…
Even though Bandcamp was profitable the new CEO said this after buying it
the financial state of Bandcamp has not been healthy
So they’re probably looking for any way to cut costs. They fired half of the staff on day 1, including anyone who tried to unionize
🤷♂️ not really, none of these corporations are real in any sense that matters other than sucking up actual companies that actually make the world a better place and mining the goodwill out of them until they are cynical, worthless husks that corporations use to fleece consumers into buying products from before they realize their favorite company/brand is dead in everything but name.
the largest music licensing platform in the world
Doesn’t sound too good to me. Bandcamp used to be where I could get music from smaller artists who couldn’t afford clearing samples (as they weren’t making money) and I worry a lot of that will be lost.
Still is, for now. I run a small vaporwave tape label via Bandcamp. No significant changes under Epic Games or Songtradr that I’ve noticed. That could change, though.
