Tag: disappointment

Spotify Theft: Another Indie Musician’s Rant

The Portly Politico6 Comments

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.

Read More »

SubscribeStar Saturday: Disappointment

The Portly Politico10 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Well, the midterm elections have come and gone, and my primary reaction is bitter disappointment.

I’d been tepid about the elections this year, barely taking notice of them, but allowed myself to fall for the “red wave” hype.  In a sane world, that should have happened—a major backlash against inflation and insanity.

Instead, we have a brain-dead automaton in the United States Senate and a lean Republican majority in the House—a majority, I fear, that will be ultimately meaningless.  At the time of writing, the balance in the Senate itself is questionable, and the Democrats may even walk away controlling it—completely the opposite of what we all thought would happen.

I was a fool to get my hopes up about national politics.  Even had the Republicans taken huge majorities, what would have been the result?  Would anything have substantially changed?

Perhaps with time I’ll take a more measured response to events, but right now, it seems like our national republic is a joke, and the American people are addicted to government largesse and cultural degradation.  We don’t want to improve, and we don’t want to be free.  We want to be children, and children can’t govern themselves.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.