Woooooooot—it’s Halloween! At long last!
Halloween is particularly fun when it’s on a Friday. My little town “observed” trick-or-treating last night, but I’m going with Dr. Fiancée and my niece and nephews tonight (we’re not dressing up, but the kids are). I’m looking forward to some family time.
How are you celebrating tonight, readers?
With that, here is 31 October 2019’s “Happy Halloween!“:
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.
It’s Halloween! All the build-up, all the ghost stories, it’s finally here!
Last night I took the opportunity to carve my one of the two pumpkins I picked up earlier in the month ($4 a pop!). He’s the cheeky little guy pictured above, and in the photo collage below (I’m getting fancy with the production values in this post).
His brother was stolen off my front porch Wednesday night. I’d just gotten in bed and switched off the lights when I heard some tires squealing. Thinking it was one of my neighbor’s buddies hydroplaning on the wet street, I didn’t think much of it, until my neighbor began shouting for me minutes later!
The Portly Politico 