I’ve been using Spotify for years as both a listener and a musician, although I’m firmly in the Apple Music camp these days.  That dedication is only cemented further after Spotify’s latest announcement to changes to its streaming payments to musicians.

It seems that for tracks with fewer than 1000 plays per year, Spotify will take any unpaid streaming royalties for those tracks and redistribute them to major record labels (or, ostensibly, to all the other users on the platform who have tracks with 1000 plays or more).

That’s straight-up theft.  Spotify already pays abysmally low—something like $0.0011 per stream.  Put another way, a track has to be streamed about nine or ten times to make a penny.  I’m already not paid if a track is only streamed once in that particular time period, because Spotify doesn’t send royalties below $0.01.  I typically have about four or five monthly Spotify listeners (averaging seven at the time of writing—woot!), which comes out to a few cents every month—maybe.

“Well, Port, who cares?  You’re losing a few cents a year.”  That’s one to look at it.  The other, correct way is to view it as theft of my royalties for my music.  Stealing ten cents is still stealing—it doesn’t make it right.

Granted, my distributor, CD Baby, doesn’t pay me my royalties until I hit a minimum threshold of $10.  As I’ve released more music this year, I’m bringing in a few more royalties from streaming than usual, and am actually close to a payout.  This change to Spotify will slow that down, which stinks, but, again, that’s not really the point.

Indie musicians have always had an uphill battle.  The promise of the digital age was that platforms like YouTube and Spotify would make it easier than ever for musicians to reach larger audiences and to monetize their work.  Sure, the big surprise success stories would be the rare exceptions, but even modest creators could bring in a few extra bucks.  Finally, the payment model for musicians would be democratized.

Then YouTube moved the goalposts on content creators in 2016’s Adpocalypse.  Now YouTubers have to have a minimum number of subscribers and 4000 hours of views annually in order to monetize any content.  Keep in mind, that’s just the threshold to be allowed to get pennies on videos.  That threshold doesn’t guarantee anything like real, substantial money.  So just to get to the point on YouTube where someone like me already is with Apple Music (and, yes, even Spotify) requires massive amounts of growth and content creation.

I understand the economic problem involved before any of the wags in the comments come after me:  I know there’s an oversaturation, and supply far outstrips demand, even though the demand is insatiable.  I also realize that ad revenue is never going to bring in loads of cash for YouTubers, because YouTube itself loses money.

Regardless, these platforms are ripping off individual creators and musicians.  My YouTube videos still feature ads; I don’t see any of those fractions of pennies, but I’m sure YouTube has made something out off my channel.

With Spotify, it’s brazen theft.  Their argument is that there are tons of creators uploading nonsense white noise tracks and getting big royalty payouts for stuff that isn’t really “music,” and that companies like CD Baby are “merchants of garbage.”  That’s ridiculous.  I understand if you can’t pay out royalties and need to reduce the per-stream rate (although, honestly, how could it get much lower?), but just saying, “hey, you had 999 plays, so we’re going to take that $1.10 and give it to Beyoncé” is evil.  Besides, she doesn’t need the money.  What’s she going to spend it on, another head of hair from some kid in India?  I need every cent I can get.

I’ve been beating the drum of how bad it is out here for indie musicians and composers for awhile now.  But why take my word for it?  If you want to know more about how Spotify is stealing pennies from my pockets, catch this video from CD Baby’s CEO:

If you want to stop them from stealing my pennies, listen to all of my music on Spotify starting 1 January 2024.  I can’t tell you to listen to it on repeat—that violates Spotify’s terms of service, and they’d remove me from the platform—but maybe share it with some friends and see if I can get paid for some of my music.

Finally, I won’t be releasing any more music to Spotify (after Leftovers, which has already gone through the distribution process and will release to all streaming platforms on Friday, 24 November 2023).  If you want to listen to my music—and, apparently, not many people do—head over to Apple Music or Bandcamp.