With Spotify confirming that a song must be streamed over 1,000 times per year to accrue revenue, it left many artists and fans wondering why this change was made.
At first glance, it was definitely a surprise to us at Eclectic, but as we dove deeper, we found out that it wasn’t as black and white as it first seemed.
Spotify Initial Prices increased from 11.99 AUD to 12.99 AUD for a single subscription. Further, the family plan has increased from 18.99 AUD to 20.99 AUD for a family subscription.
With the cost of living on the rise, it’s sometimes a hard pill to swallow watching Spotify make record profits (18.2 billion dollars in 2022), whilst simultaneously asking for more to use the service and reallocating money away from smaller artists. However, Spotify maintains that the reason for this is to stop fraudulent music uploads and also giving artists larger payouts without middlemen taking large cuts.
Whilst we can understand that this may be a step in the right direction, this move does make it tougher on smaller musicians. Even though royalties may be small, it’s still a nice feeling knowing that you’ve earned a little money from your art.
One way around this could be implementing a ‘minimum threshold per track’ that a song would have to meet before cashing out.
This way, you still keep small artists motivated to keep marketing their material, whilst also creating enough of a barrier to stop fraudulent uploads.
It does also call into question the issue of how much artists are earning from the streaming platforms themselves.
Unfortunately for artists, whilst Spotify is one of the biggest and highest earning platforms, they pay out the least.
It does beg the question of “why is the one of the most successful streaming platforms paying their artists the least?” Especially, without the artists, their business model collapses.
At the end of the day, artists and fans alike want the music industry to be a fair space where people are reimbursed for their hard work (especially successful releases).
We know that this isn’t always the case, which makes supporting your favourite artists even more important than ever!