Tag: Spotify

TBT: Spotify Theft: Another Indie Musician’s Rant

The Portly Politico14 Comments

I’ve released a lot of music this year.  As of the time of writing, I’ve released six albums (Firefly Dance, Epistemology, Leftovers II, Four Mages, Advanced Funkification, and Heptadic Structure), with a seventh on the way in August.

You can listen to and/or purchase my latest album, Heptadic Structure, at the following links:

The astute observer will notice that Spotify is not listed there.  There’s a reason for that.  While several of my older releases are on the platform, I stopped releasing new music to the platform in 2024.  The reason:  for tracks with fewer than 1000 plays per year, Spotify will take any unpaid streaming royalties for those tracks and pay them to musicians who do reach that milestone.

Note that that is 1000 plays on a track, not 1000 plays total.  In other words, I could have 999 plays on every one of my tracks, but not receive a single dime in accumulated royalties.  If one song reached 1000 plays, great—I’d get royalties for that song, but not the other songs that fell short of the 1000 streams minimum.

It’s theft, plain and simple.  I can’t be a party to it, so I am no longer uploading to Spotify.

It sucks, because I like the platform overall, and it’s the most popular streaming platform in the world.  As such, I’m missing out on a huge potential audience.  But I cannot condone the service’s theft of hard-earned royalties from hardworking artists, no matter how small those royalties might be.

With that, here is 15 November 2023’s “Spotify Theft: Another Indie Musician’s Rant“:

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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.

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