streaming services – The Portly Politico

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“:

Dear old Audre Myers e-mailed Ponty and me a couple of Sundays ago recommending the HBO Max series The Last of Us, based (albeit, I suspect, somewhat loosely) on the video game of the same name. I’ve never played either of the two TLoU games, but I am quite familiar with the controversy surrounding the sequel, which went fully woke. It is a classic scenario: a hugely successful cultural phenomenon gets hijacked—willingly or otherwise—by the Cultural Marxists and becomes a pitiful version of its former self. The Cult Marxists hope to trade on the popularity of the intellectual property or franchise by shoehorning their bizarre beliefs into it, thereby reaching a massive audience before everyone sours on it.

It’s a fundamentally vampiric, parasitic relationship: the healthy host rapidly loses whatever cultural cache it enjoyed, becoming an insufferable, withered husk of its former self.

I was not surprised in the slightest that Ponty reacted so negatively to Audre’s request that one of us review the show. As an avid gamer who (it seems) enjoyed The Last of Us video game and despised its woke sequel, I knew the suggestion would touch a nerve. Poor Audre had no idea; I hope Ponty wasn’t too hard on her!

So, I proposed that Audre write a review. I’ll check out the show when I’m able, but she is the queen of television reviews around here.

With that, here is Audre Myers’s review of the television series The Last of Us:

The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

Tag: streaming services

TBT: Spotify Theft: Another Indie Musician’s Rant

Myersvision: The Last of Us (TV Series)

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