There is a huge drive to boycott Spotify at the moment. Brilliant!
Are people leaving Spotify because of the way they underpay artists? No. Are they leaving Spotify because only the top few percent of major artists are making any money and the rest of us get next to nothing? No. Are people leaving Spotify because the whole streaming model is just not very fair? No.
People are boycotting Spotify because the CEO Daniel Ek is investing $100 million in AI defence tech company Helsing. All that money that people are paying for access to 70 million songs is being given to the investors and now to fund war. That doesn’t seem right or fair to me. All those profits really should be going to the artists that work hard to create all the amazing tunes people take for granted in our over consumed lives. Now, don’t get me wrong, funding war is a really solid reason for boycotting Spotify, but, so is the under payment of artists. What kind of message does it give when the biggest music company in the world puts such low value on the commodity they sell. Artists become worthless hacks stripped of their assets to pay other people.
We need that money to go directly to the artist at a fair price thats worthy of the hard work it takes to create music.
So don’t just #Boycottspotify because of the nasty CEO, boycott Spotify because what they do is just plain wrong for artists. The problem is there are no real alternatives to Spotify so artists need to look for different ways to recoup those lost streaming earnings. Driving buyers of music to Bandcamp seems to be the option these days but Bandcamp only sells your music, it doesn’t stream.
gotohear.com sounds like a great option as is working well for me at the moment. Easy to drive my listeners here and I can sell and get paid directly for streams. Bonus!
But its going to take some time for the shift away from giant streaming to really help artists. The top artists won’t move away from Spotify while they’re earning mega bucks. And Spotify will never change, no matter how much shouting goes on and MPs debate bills. We need the little guys to force the shift. We need our message of fair artists payments to become a movement!
Who’s joining me!
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