Have you considered streaming Tidal from an iPad to an Apple TV or AirPort Extreme & from there to a DAC?
That’s how I stuff music into my 5italic… works very well.
I’m not sure about that. I use Bandcamp extensively to discover new artists and usually add albums of interest to my wishlist. These albums are playable multiple times before a nag to purchase appears. At which point I either buy the album or discard it because it hasn’t become essential to my future listening.
There are, of course, albums that I purchase (ether hi res download or physical CD / vinyl) on first listening because they are so damn good such as Jazz Sabbath, Eppi K Paradox.
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I guess I could get used to this, but it’s still different to having everything at my fingertips like with Roon and Qobuz. I guess what I mean is that the alternatives also must figure out how to be comparatively convenient to become a competitor to the common streaming services, in particular for the mass of people who are not dedicated music fanatics.
For artists I know and love it’s easy, I always go to Bandcamp or the artists’ website to purchase the latest or missing ones from my favorite artists, and I don’t have to listen in the first place.
Spotify is by far the largest streaming platform. As an artist, you really can’t afford to ignore it.
The fact that the search ‘who is Neil Young’ suddenly became popular on Google in recent days says it all.
I doubt Spotify will end over the Rogan/NY dust up but perhaps the loss of market cap will prompt them to revisit their profit model which is apparently not very equitable for artists. I don’t know why anyone would use Spotify with better sounding options out there but that’s the mass market appeal I suppose.
I love the actions and comments from artists and competitor platforms. I look on amusingly at NY’s catalogue plastered on the home page of Qobuz this morning. I think I’ll cue up Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere.
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Rubbish. Given how little Spotify pays artists, you really can. And given that between 50,000 and 60,000 new pieces of music are uploaded to Spotify every day, and how difficult it is for new artists without major-label promo budgets or the ability to game the system to cut through the noise, I would say that for most artists, being on Spotify is not only inessential, but increasingly, pointless.
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I don’t think the payouts for the vast majority of artists figures in their plans apart from their annual burger-and-a-beer on Spotify’s tap
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Very strange: I use Spotify (free service, not subscription) to dip in and check out music new to me, then buy if I like enough to want to hear again.i put up with the annoying adverts because the I can easily silence them, while their huge and varied catalogue lets me fulfil my auditioning process on one site covering most things. But what is strange is this afternoon I’ve been on for about 3 hours and not a single advert - I even started listening right through albums. SQ limited, but accepted for the purpose.Nice not to have adverts, but why none?
Meanwhile the reason for Neil Young’s split with Spotify made me sit up and take note - I hadn’t realised Spotify even hosted blogs, let alone political or possibly misinformed ones.
It actually says nothing. I refer you to this quote from the article cited at the start of this thread:
Those sniggering at Neil Young as a supposed luddite might want to chow down on this fact.
In October 2019, the Neil Young Archive – the online destination where Young presents his full music catalog and other digital trinkets for a $1.99 per month subscription – had 25,000 subscribers.
That’s an annual take of over $600,000, roughly equivalent to 150 million Spotify plays, every 12 months.
With the PR momentum his latest Spotify walkout has given him, these numbers could easily be tugged upwards, striking a meaningful blow for the D2C monthly fan subscription model versus the 60,000-additional-tracks-a-day morass of Spotify’s song soup.
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Spotify have experience with these kinds of wars. Neil Young himself, for example, already had his music library removed from Spotify in 2015. He did so out of dissatisfaction with the sound quality the platform offered. With the release of her third album, 25, Adele also did not want her new music to be sent out into the world via streaming services.
Guys, you might disagree but I really think Spotify do not worry too much about this
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I agree that Spotify may not worry about it too much, I just disagree that artists can’t ignore Spotify. The best and actually most popular new indie rock albums in Germany from recent years sold copies in the low hundreds and thousands. That’s not sustainable income from sold copies, and I’m sure it’s even less from Spotify. The artists have to come up with many other ways to earn something, be it from touring, DJing a night in a bar, writing for theater productions, and a million other ways. Spotify is of no consequence to them.
(One of my favorites, “Ja, Panik”, jokingly offered to clean apartments for €20 an hour or so, bookable on their website under merch, along with lots of other things like signed drinking glasses and whatnot)
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You are correct. They are not worried. They don’t care. They never have. What this thread is really about – if you’d taken the trouble to read the original article at the top – is actually that Spotify is in danger of becoming completely irrelevant to most musicians.
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Trust me, any company that loses a couple $billion in market cap is paying attention. Whether or not this prompts change remains to be seen. As they continue to bleed artists.
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I would offer a different view. It would seem to me that Spotify (and other streaming platforms) are about providing platforms that helps artists reach people and develop a fan base. Most artists don’t make much money from these platforms, but that misses the point, it helps them reach a global audience and develop a following. Money is made through touring and live performances.
The idea that Spotify and streaming is coming to an end seems fanciful and completely at odds with what I see. The concept of owning music feels so outdated. Streaming is about accessing and consuming music which it does brilliantly. If you want a more controversial view I would argue that music was dying before streaming arrived on the scene. I certainly listen to more music (and spend more through streaming fees) than I did in the past and I see the same with friends and my children.
My best mates son is in a fairly successful band, they have no record company but use the CD Baby service to release they’re material across multiple platforms including Spotify naturally! It’s an interesting model and they do quite well from it, CD Baby take a small cut depending on which deal you choose.
@Hollow CD Baby is a distro (there are others, eg Ditto, Disrokid etc). You need to use one of those guys because you cannot upload music directly to Spotify, Tidal, Amazon etc.
While I see your point about reach, I have to disagree because I don’t think these algorithms work very well, at least for my kinds of music.
In the past, I had my favorite radio DJs in the mold of John Peel and the like, and my specialist magazines, who I would listen to and read, and through which I discovered a lot of new music. There was some kind of trust in them, and their value was in uncovering different kinds of music that appealed to the same kind of people (their audience). The kind of DJ has largely disappeared, the magazines are mostly dead.
The algorithms only recommend similar music over and over, and while there is some value in it, it only goes so far.
And many of my artists will never have a large global audience (and never had).
I like the new Tidal payment options. I don’t expect the imminent end of large streaming companies, but a better way of getting money to artists who will never have 150 million streams is very much needed.
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[quote=“Oxbow, post:56, topic:21513”]
The idea that Spotify and streaming is coming to an end seems fanciful and completely at odds with what I see. [/quote]
Streaming isn’t going to end anytime soon, nobody is saying that. Spotify’s dominance in the music sector of streaming, however, may well end, and sooner rather than later.
Many new artists use social media as a way to reach a new audience - Spotify is effectively hosting their media (music). If they pick up some listeners through the platform algorithm then that’s a bonus.