The Moneygoround: Spotify, pay musicians fairly!

“Eyes down, round and round
Let’s all sit and watch the money-go-round
Everyone take a little bit here and a little bit there
Do they all deserve money from a song that they’ve never heard?
They don’t know the tune and they don’t know the words
But they don’t give a damn”

– The Moneygoround by The Kinks (1970)

It’s Spotify Wrapped season, basically the Met Gala for music fans. You’ve probably seen people share their Spotify Wrapped, which is basically a year in review for your listening on Spotify (but not really because the cutoff is like in October or November). In this Instagram Stories like feature, you find out what songs you’ve listened to most this year, what genres you listen to most this year, who your top most listened to musicians are, what percentile fan are you, and this year which city your music taste is most similar to (I got Cardiff, while everyone else I know got Portland or Berkeley lol). Spotify Wrapped is just data mining with a shiny coat of paint on it. They know what you listen to, when you listen to it, and where you live. Everyone hates data mining because it’s really just companies spying on you and using their algorithms to sell targeted advertising: that explains why two people’s Tiktok or YouTube feeds can look so different or when you have a conversation about something and then now you’re getting ads for that thing or if you change your Facebook relationship status to engaged or announce that you’re expecting, you’re getting ads for wedding/honeymoon, and baby/pregnancy stuff.

Data mining isn’t Spotify’s only problem though. The other problem is how the artists are being paid. This year, there was the SAG-AFTRA strike, which brought to light how poorly actors got paid. Creatives and content creators could relate and it inspired them to start a movement. While I’m not a musician or an actor, I can relate because there are issues that hurt smaller content creators like high payment thresholds, long payout times, minimum subscriber/view/watch time counts in order to monetise, censorship and demonetisation-happy and shadowban-happy platforms that suppress videos for no reason (these policies especially harm the LGBT community and frank discussions about mental health, sex ed, or race relations), and algorithms that favour bigger creators and enable burnout for small creators because they can’t keep up with someone who does content creation full time and has a whole ass team working for them. Content creators need a union too.

As someone who writes about music, I’m keeping a close eye on what musicians are saying about labour rights and getting properly compensated. As Spotify Wrapped came out for listeners and musicians, Weird Al shared what he made on Spotify this year. Drum roll please… A grand total of $12 for 80 million streams! Say what?

Note: This could be a joke or an exaggeration to make a point about how Spotify pays musicians hardly anything. But keep in mind musicians don’t always own the rights to their music and a lot of money ends up going to the record label anyways.

This isn’t some local band that plays at small venues, that’s the comedy music legend, Weird Al Yankovic! Weird Al spilled the tea on where your Spotify subscription fees are really going. They’re not going to the musicians you love and listen to most, they’re mostly going to the giants like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.

This has been a problem for a while now and it’s getting even worse because Spotify will straight up not pay you any royalties if you don’t have at least 1,000 listens on your track, and this change affects 66% of tracks on the platform according to an infographic posted by United Musicians and Allied Workers (formerly known as Union of Musicians and Allied Workers). So this means that Spotify is making money off indie bands and not giving them anything in return. It’s slavery. Your blood, sweat, and tears enriching some rich guy and adding to their Swiss bank account or whatever. Spotify is just a content platform and a service provider. It’s nothing without the musicians, who make the content that gets people to subscribe to the streaming service in the first place. I have musician friends who plan to take their music off of Spotify, and frankly I don’t blame them. Spotify needs musicians more than musicians need Spotify. Apparently, Spotify operates at a loss and frankly this makes me think of small businesses who pay their employees like crap or even worse, startups who use unpaid interns, and make excuses for why they can’t pay fairly (or at all). Frankly, if you can’t pay people a living wage, you don’t deserve to stay in business. Your business is not sustainable or viable. Simple as.

Lately there’s been a lot of discourse about physical media: vinyl, CDs, books, DVDs and Blu-rays and how it’s even more important now more than ever before in this age of streaming and throwaway culture Look at how HBO Max and Disney+ yeet a bunch of their shows off a streaming platform for tax write-offs. At least with physical copies, those can’t be taken away from you. Well, unless you have a housefire or a flood, hurricane, or earthquake destroys your home and everything in it. CDs and blu-rays can be scratched, vinyl can be worn out. I guess there’s pros and cons to everything. Point is, streaming and the cloud has some positives, but there are a lot of negatives. While musicians and actors get nothing from physical media sales, it’s still better than streaming revenue. And if you buy the musician’s albums on something like Bandcamp, especially on Bandcamp Fridays, they get more money than if you bought from say, Amazon. Some musicians have Patreon and virtual tip jars through Paypal, ko-fi, buy me a coffee, cashapp, etc. I’d rather my money go to a musician who truly earned it than some fatcat CEO who may have never heard the songs I’m listening to. Better yet if you want to support your favourite musicians, buy merch and see the band on tour.

So where do we go from here? I like listening to music on the go, making playlists on the fly, and my phone space fills up quickly because I love taking pictures and I have a bunch of apps on my phone. I don’t want to go back to having an iPod, oh wait, Apple discontinued those. Like I said before, some musicians are pulling their music from Spotify and encouraging people to cancel their subscriptions, but America’s antitrust laws prevent this type of boycott because that would be “collusion” and “unfair business practices” even though streaming services paying artists a pittance and being part of the problem of devaluation of creative labour is an even more unfair business practice. And in even more sad news, musicians can’t unionise. UMAW had to take union out of their name and there’s no path for them to become a union. Streaming is far from the only battle: there’s predatory practices all around: venues taking cuts of merch sales; SXSW paying bands in wristbands or just a measly $100 for solo acts or $250 for bands – imagine that, musicians lose money by playing a renowned festival and get basically paid in exposure (banks and landlords don’t accept exposure dollars); and of course there’s jerks like Ticketmaster that tack on a bunch of fees and ticket scalpers who buy up tickets to popular concerts and try to sell them for multiple times face value – this screws over fans and artists alike.

Enough people have to boycott these streaming services in order for things to change. Spotify’s obviously the big guy in all of this, but are the other streaming services any better? From what I could find, it seems like Spotify aren’t actually the worst, but rather YouTube and Pandora pay even less. Amazon Music seems to be the same as Spotify more or less (and it’s not like Amazon is free of baggage). Apple Music seems to be a bit better and Tidal seems to be the best of the bunch. Here’s an overview of all the services (I’m located in the UK so all prices listed here are in GBP, sorry American and international readers). But it all depends on which tier you pay for. Tidal has better sound quality, but if you want the best sound quality you gotta pay £20/month, standard is £11/month, family is £17/month. Apple Music’s prices are the same as Tidal’s for standard or family subscriptions (but Apple Music’s family plan allows for up to 6 users). If you’re not an iPhone user, you can download the Apple Music app on Android. Amazon Music has a slight discount for Prime members, where you can subscribe for £8/month, rather than the standard £10/month. Family plans are a bit cheaper at £15/month. Spotify on the other hand is the only one of these services with a free ad-supported tier, which makes it popular for those on a low budget. Spotify Premium costs £11/month, Duo is £15/month, and Family is £18/month. So it’s not the best price overall and it doesn’t have as good quality audio as Apple Music or Tidal. Anyway some food for thought if you’re thinking of switching streaming services.

Once again, this is another example of there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Here’s hoping musicians organise to get a better deal.

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