When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
I don’t subscribe to this cynical of a viewpoint, it isn’t inevitable that recording music is not valued labor, it is a cultural choice same as any other.
I live in the richest country on earth, it is a subjective choice to devalue the labor of musicians and decouple it from the profits of music companies.
Who the fuck has a label? Do you know anything about music that isn’t already incredibly corporate? When was the last time you went to a DIY show and bought handmade merch off a band touring in their minivan? Compare that to the last time you bought a record from a label or merch from an online store run through not the band.
There are more than likely 300+ bands in a 20 to 50 mile radius around you. Do you support all of them as much as you’re pushing people on the internet to support all music? What about the really bad cover bands? Them too?
Your statements paint a picture that you have no idea what I meant by “levels of fame” because fucking no one makes money off music unless you get lucky. There’s just too much because music is fun.
Again I don’t see any quantitative evidence to accept this framing of the status quo as inevitable or reflective of some fundamental tendency of human artists to overproduce art.
Capitalists have systematically stole the labor of musicians and normalized and absolutely absurd vision of austerity where the only way to make money is by doing things that people don’t want to do. It is absurd, and this ideology is pretty easy to locate the motivation behind, it makes us good compliant factory workers.