Some More News - SMN: Why Spotify Is Bad For Music

Episode Date: March 6, 2022

Hi. In today's episode about Spotify, we talk about how the current state of the music industry and streaming completely screws over artists, unlike the previous non-streaming music industry, which was notoriously good for artists. We now have a MERCH STORE! Check it out here: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/somemorenews Right now, Some More News listeners can get 15% off their Raycon order at BUY RAYCON.com/somenews. Stop overpaying for shipping with Stamps.com. Sign up with promo code MORENEWS for a special offer that includes a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Get an extra three months of ExpressVPN free at EXPRESSVPN.com/MORENEWS. That's EXPRESSVPN.com/MORENEWS. And for our listeners, right now Trade Coffee is offering a total of $20 off your first three bags when you go to drinktrade.com/morenews. To get started, take their quiz at drinktrade.com/morenews, and start your journey to your perfect cup. That's drinktrade.com/morenews for $20 off your first three bags. Follow us on social media! Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews Source List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tn1zvH4w1CzPQVMMQ46VIk-lG-1PAur8jnPYpfL6MC8/edit?usp=sharingSupport the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. Oh, shucks and f***, it's you again. Sorry. Okay, I was just listening to all of the ska that has ever existed before my Spotify subscription ends. You know, your powerful boss tones, a command telling you to catch a large fish, a finger of gold, your skulls glowing and voodoo, some victims of choking, and Jake, but not as much as.

Not to mention all your skatalities and skarmies of darkness, probably one called Ska Skank Redemption, also Ramstein, but that's just for going to the bathroom music. The point is, I'm canceling Spotify. Got another 60 or so minutes left in my subscription, so I am really cramming it in. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Cody, you tiger of a man, you. Is this because of the whole Joe Rogan thing? It is after all the only news happening right now

in the entire world. So I understand why you would think that. Only get this Rudy, just between you and me, this isn't an episode about Joe Rogan. And that's just, that's great news for everybody. Except for music artists. Spootify, Suit Ryan. That's right.

In case that brilliant title and all of my sick as hell music refs didn't tip you off, plus the fact that I pretty much just told you, this episode is about Spotify, the popular music streaming platform, and why it sucks and is bad and should be deleted from your sundry electronic devices as soon as possible. If you want, I'm not your boss.

I'm just reading stuff out loud. But there's a lot of stuff happening in the world right now that we don't have much control over. But at least we can tell a single corporation to eat our behinds. Not for all the Rogan stuff, although we should probably start there. If you weren't aware, Spotify has come under fire recently

for its lucrative relationship with swollen provocateur and comedian Joe Rogan. In addition to looking like a bee sting somehow became an entire human man, also please don't beat me up Joe, this is a joke, it's just, it's fine. Rogan hosts the most popular podcast in the entire world, the Joe Rogan Experience.

Along with compelling podcast titles, Rogan is known for news radio, making people touch bugs, something about fighting people really hard, and most important for this video, his just asking questions bro approach to racism and goofball COVID misinformation, such as baseless conspiracy theories about the pandemic and alternative treatments that are,

let's call them unscientific. Spotify, meanwhile, is hands down the most popular music streaming service out there, boasting 406 million users and 186 million subscribers, nearly a third of all music streaming subscribers. Recently, the platform has begun to pay more attention to podcasts to beef up its subscriber base. So it makes sense that they would throw a gigantic money hat

at Joe Rogan's equally gigantic head, like some sort of completely smooth carnival ring toss game, to woo him over to their platform, which they did. In 2020, Spotify gave Rogan a cool $100 million, now reported to be worth over $200 million, to be the exclusive home of the Joe Rogan experience. Cut to today, and Rogan has since been called out by several artists for various degrees of COVID misinformation and casual racism on his show. And while they did pull a great deal of his episodes, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek responded

to the controversy by saying that he doesn't believe silencing Joe is the answer. Now, this episode is not about that or about what the answer could be, but obviously he would say that because Spotify has been riding the wave of Rogan devotees and COVID shut-ins, binging their favorite playlists to boost their net worth to $70 billion in 2021, outperforming every other major streaming entity, including Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Facebook. Granted, that number has gone down significantly since Spotify only now worth a piss poor,

embarrassing $30 billion after the controversy. Gee, that is like Tiny Tim money. Though, it's actually quite a lot of money. But despite Spotify making all of those billions, the musical artists who created that massive library of tunes earn an average of.00348 dollars per stream, or roughly one third of one cent. And while I'm just a humble rude boy,

that seems just a teeny weeny bit extremely criminally low. Like I'm pretty sure you'd make more money if they literally paid in peanuts. Wait, people can be paid with peanuts? You earn your dried leaves and you enjoy them. So let me save you some math. In order to earn what Spotify paid Joe Rogan

for the privilege of hosting his weekly show, where he pretty much just gets incredibly high and surfs the web, an artist would need to reach 28,735,632,184 streams. And that meager amount of cash Spotify does pay out, typically doesn't even go to the artists themselves. It goes to whichever entity owns the master recordings of the song, who will

take the lion's share of that third of a cent and pass on whatever table scraps they're legally obligated to toss to the people who actually performed it. Now, why is that such a bad thing? Or more specifically, how is that any than the music industry was before streaming? The recording industry, like pretty much every corner of the entertainment industry, is notoriously predacious, built around pressuring or sweet-talking starry-eyed young artists into signing contracts

they don't fully understand or don't have the means or clout to negotiate, and handing virtually every potential avenue of income over to the record label. Don't forget, this is the same industry that drove Prince, one of the most celebrated artists of his generation, to change his name to an unpronounceable symbol and write the word slave on his cheek in protest. All this essentially means that more often than not,

all royalties generated by radio play and album sales are going straight into the pockets of gigantic companies like Interscope, RCA, or Atlantic, which are owned by Universal Music Group, Sony, and Warner Music Group, respectively. You know, three of the biggest corporate entities in history. Currently, terrestrial radio stations,

which are the old-timey, non-streaming grandpa radio stations that still exist, don't pay artists. They're only required to pay songwriter royalties every time they play a song, meaning they only pay whoever is credited with writing it. In many cases, the performer and the songwriter arealties every time they play a song, meaning they only pay whoever is credited with writing it. In many cases, the performer and the songwriter are the same. Every time you hear tub thumping on the radio,

you can rest easy knowing that the fine bards of Chumbawamba are being duly compensated. But, unless they also share a songwriting credit, the artist who performs the song gets nothing. It's hard to pin down an exact figure because the music industry smokescreens this information like Batman's search history. Not to mention that the copyright laws that dictate this are over 100 years old. Kind of a lot of things have changed in the past hundred years, such as the music industry and how much money is worth. Streaming services pay royalties to artists,

but they were only required by law to do so as of 2018. And as we've mentioned, Spotify, the biggest music streaming platform in the galaxy that we know of, we don't know everything in the galaxy, but probably, pays out at a rate that would be considered a punchline in any other context. And the artists have to split that payment between themselves and whichever corporate entity owns the recording of the song, be it Warner Music or Joe Rogan's gigantic Mars Attacks head. Recently, Spotify all but purged comedy albums from their service after several comedians

demanded to be paid royalties as writers. After all, they wrote the jokes they are performing. Spotify had only been paying them as performers, which, as I mentioned a few skankin' seconds ago, is a separate payout that is equally required by law. Spotify made a unilateral decision, as it has a habit of doing, that either comedy albums aren't written

or that writing royalties don't count if you're also the performer. So rather than pay comedians and spoken word artists the complete amount of royalties they were due, Spotify just removed their work from the platform. Notably, Joe Rogan, Spotify's number one comedian and spoken word performer, had not one thing to say about this decision.

He had 100 million things to say about it. The point is, the royalty model of radio airplay was already broken and wildly designed to favor corporations over artists, and Spotify has widened that disparity even more at the expense of all but the biggest artists in music. According to one study cited in Business Insider, only about 12% of the annual revenue generated by the music industry actually goes to artists.

The rest goes to massive corporate entities like record labels and Spotify, because we've decided that whoever paid for the recording of a timeless song deserves 99% of the financial credit, or 88, or you know my point. Whereas the artists who created the song can't even earn enough from a million monthly airplays to pay rent on a one-bedroom apartment in most cities in America.

Spotify set those rates absurdly low for obvious reasons. It lets them massively profit off the work of millions of artists without having to invest much of their own capital or, you know, create anything. But why would the record labels agree to such low royalties? They're the ones who would normally be receiving that money, right? Wouldn't they ask for a bigger piece of the pie for themselves? Well, I'm glad you asked, hypothetical rude person, interrupting me like that, because the answer is that those gargantuan record labels I mentioned earlier, Sony, Universal, and Warner, among a few others, have ownership stakes in Spotify. They own the streaming platform that pays doo-doo rates, and they agreed to do those doo-doo rates because it does mean a bigger piece of that $10 billion Spotify revenue pie. Spotify enables them

to pay themselves for airplay and pay the artists as little as possible for their work. Egads, that's a whopping dollop of horse. I am still reeling from that reveal. And I bet you are too, which means this is as good a time as any to horse kick over to an ad break. But like a horse kick because the Spotify record label connection,

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That's right. Take their quiz at drinktrade.com slash more news and start your journey to your perfect cup. That's DrinkTrade.com slash more news for $20 off your first three bags. I've had a lot of coffee. Oh boy, that sure was an ad break. But now we're back and we're talking about Spotify, which is essentially Facebook for music. A gargantuan billion dollar platform that doesn't create anything itself, but happily pays itself the majority of the revenue generated by the creative work hosted on the platform.

Spotify is a middleman created in tandem with record labels to effectively garnish the wages of musical artists for the privilege of being featured on a platform most of them never agreed to lend their music to in the first place. Now, that's an important distinction between terrestrial radio and streaming services like Spotify. Radio is a broadcast. Spotify is a library. You sign up, and in some cases pay a membership fee, to have access to a colossal collection of music that you can organize and curate and listen to whenever you want, as many times as you want. That used to be called owning albums, which generated a significant amount of the money musical artists depended on to make a living

aside from live shows. Artists rarely get a cut of that subscription money, and most of them didn't agree to have their work added to the library. Even a library has to buy a copy of a book to have it on the shelf or have it donated, which still means that someone bought a copy and the creator was compensated.

And libraries don't charge people monthly subscription fees or have a CEO worth billions of dollars. Also, libraries have bathrooms you can do drugs in and are just generally better in a lot of other ways as well. Now, losing out on a huge amount of royalties that were typically generated by album sales and radio airplay isn't a huge problem for massive artists

like Neil Young or Taylor Swift, who can both afford several apartments in America and have the power and clout to negotiate better deals for themselves. But this essentially wipes out the ability of most musicians to make a living doing their art. Especially now, COVID has eliminated touring as a source of income for the past two years,

and all of the money Spotify has been paying itself for all of the streaming we've been doing isn't being used to correct this problem with these artists. No, that would be too not evil of them. And so along with paying a throbbing rhinoceros vein $100 million to do racism and spread misinformation, Spotify's CEO, Daniel Ek, also invests millions of dollars in defense technology. No,

really, atop of all the other stuff I already just told you, he somehow decided he didn't quite suck enough. Rich ghouls flock to defense spending like flies at a picnic. Ghouls at a picnic? Plenty of stuff there to hold their interest. Ek announced a plan to invest over a billion dollars in European tech companies, one of which is Helsing, a defense company designing national security AI to help maintain democracies by collecting constant live data from vehicles and computer systems to help identify and manage potential threats and cyber attacks.

Now that's ghoul speak for spying on people. Compiling a library of people's personal information without asking anyone's permission and then profiting wildly off of that library kind of sounds exactly like Spotify, which might be why in addition to his $100 million investment in Helsing, Daniel Ek has also joined the board

along with the company's founders. So not only is your Spotify membership or even just listening to your rad curated playlist of the rudest ska jams, lining the pockets of parasitic corporate entities at the expense of the artists you love and enjoy, but you're also helping finance a defense contractor as it develops broadly defined surveillance technology

under the pretense of national security. Man, that is ska-ful. Wait, no, I'm skari! A real skottastrophe. As it happens, being a wet gym bag of scumbaggery has essentially been part of Spotify's mission statement since day one. Jim Anderson, a former Spotify executive,

was secretly recorded at a music industry conference back in 2019, stating that Spotify doesn't have to pay artists because Spotify wasn't built to pay artists. To quote Anderson, Spotify was created to solve a problem. The problem was this, piracy and music distribution. The problem was to get artists' music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.

Now, as you may have noticed, this statement is a big steaming pile of new radicals. First of all, music piracy hasn't been a widespread problem since the days of 1-800-COLLECT and new episodes of Punk'd. Not the reboot, mind you, the orig, the cooch years. Napster, incidentally, still exists today as a music streaming platform, and they pay artists way more than Spotify.

Also, the argument that Spotify was solving a problem by getting the music out there is the same we'll pay you in exposure argument that has grown increasingly popular as digital media companies continue to slash labor costs to the bone to avoid having to cut into the profits being collected by shareholders and CEOs. You know, people like Jim Anderson.

Unless you're a monkey who has been trained to write titles, never ever trust someone who just wants to offer you exposure. It's literally never been easier for artists to get their music out there. In addition to Spotify, you have Tidal, Napster, Bandcamp, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, College Radio, freaking MySpace, and yes, iTunes and Amazon. That's in addition to all the terrestrial radio stations that have been getting the music out there for, oh, I don't know, the past 130 years. There wasn't a problem with reach or distribution

in the music industry. We just got through an entire American presidency during which virtually every policy decision was conducted via Twitter. The world is connected now, Jim. It's easier than ever for someone with no manager or record label to put their music out into the world

for literally millions of people to potentially discover. The problem is they can't compete with the marketing arm of massive record labels who, as you recall, are partial owners of Spotify. And let's be clear, Spotify does not help emerging or independent artists. When was the last time you saw Spotify commercial highlighting some exciting new performer or promoting an unknown band? Have you ever seen a single Crispin Glover album

get the spotlight? Those artists still face the exact same competition on Spotify as they would on MTV or the radio, only with the additional wrinkle that Spotify is owned by record labels who get to decide which bands and artists are featured and promoted on the platform. And guess what?

They have no incentive to promote unknown bands. They promote the bands who have albums on their labels, who have massive fan bases they can depend on to generate millions of streams every month. So they can pay themselves royalties and buy Joe Rogan's. And spy cameras apparently. In addition to only promoting the music that the platform's record label owners want to push,

Spotify funnels most users towards their curated playlists. We've all seen celebrities share their Spotify playlists. Barack Obama regularly shares his, and the entire country on two different sides of the bed for completely different reasons. The playlists are the feature that Spotify seems to want to identify as being unique to their platform, the element that makes them indispensable. If you search for an artist's name on Spotify, you're more likely to stumble across either their playlists or

playlists featuring their music than you are to be directed to any of that artist's albums. That's because the playlists have been a huge part of Spotify's marketing strategy in terms of convincing other brands to advertise on their platform. And as a bonus, it's yet another way to get around paying artists the royalties to which they would normally be entitled. See, when you hear a popular song in a soda commercial or blasting into Matthew McConaughey's ears as he drives a Lexus, there was a whole series of legal maneuvers that had to occur for that to happen.

Negotiations had to be made, palms had to be greased, and most importantly, artists had to be paid. If they're a big artist or they own their own masters, they even had to be asked permission. But Spotify doesn't ask artists permission to do Jack's Mannequin shit, because again, Spotify is co-owned by the recording industry,

and they own most of the recordings. They're going to grant themselves permission to use their property 100% of the time because it means free, easy revenue that they don't have to do any extra work for, you know, on top of all the other zero work they already do. For all I know, we're on Spotify. Stuff just winds up on the platform one way or another.

And rather than paying to get a popular song into a commercial about their soft drink, giving Kendall Jenner the power to cure decades of racism, Pepsi can just curate an official Pepsi playlist and put it out into the world on Tweeda, Insta, Facebook, and whatever to show their consumer base how cool and hip they are. Now their brand is associated with those songs

and they didn't have to pay a cent for it. The artists don't make anything extra on top of Spotify's standard meager royalty payout. And they were never even asked for their permission or how they feel about their music being used to promote a brand. And in many cases, they don't even have any idea that their music is being used in that way. Because once again,

Spotify doesn't ask permission for shit. Anyone can put any song on any playlist and share it, including major corporations. So not only does Spotify create a backdoor for its record label owners to get around paying their artists the royalties they would normally be owed, it also creates a backdoor that allows them to lend those artists music to brands to make Spotify more advertising bucks and maintain their valuation to the tune of 30 to $70 billion. No matter what those artists think or want.

The Beatles didn't wanna use revolution to sell sneakers, but they didn't have a choice because Michael Jackson bought their entire catalog and he didn't give a solitary shit about selling the Beatles music to Nike. Why would he? He was the king of pop and of brand integration. Although Pepsi did set him on fire.

Wonder how many Kendall Jenners it would take to mend that burned bridge. I'm gonna think on that for a moment, actually. So I don't know, watch these ads because I at least had to approve the ads first instead of just having my likeness used to sell things. And even then, there's a quota so we can't really say no to everything

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Welcome back. Have you deleted your Spotify yet or do you like defense contractors and screwing over artists? We were just talking about their playlists, which you can roll over to other accounts if you cancel Spotify, which also kind of suck because Spotify can't even say that it's rewarding artists with more exposure because along with burying any artists

they don't want to feature, they also bury every artist in favor of their playlist feature by design. They don't want you to discover new artists. They want you to discover new playlists and share those playlists, and for celebrities to make and share their playlists, and for brands to make and share their playlists,

because that's what gives the platform its identity. That's what makes them money. So while Jim Anderson claimed Spotify was built to solve the problem of distribution, the real problem it was created to solve was how to get around having to split airplay revenue with the artists who made the music they're selling. So they created their own 24 hour radio station

with an infinite library of music and set the payout rate criminally low, which all but cuts the artists completely out of the equation. Remember, the artists still have to split that third of a cent with the record labels, and the labels get the bigger percentage. The labels control what gets promoted on Spotify

and how much the artists get paid, so they can maximize their profits and market value and invest millions in constitutionally flexible surveillance technology and Joe Rogan body art. Anderson targeted Taylor Swift in his assault on the ridiculous notion that Spotify should be expected to pay the artist who created the work he made billions of dollars off of,

saying that Swift, the only musician, doesn't need.00001 more a stream. In addition to sounding like the kind of thing a guy with a DUI conviction would say before refusing to leave a tip at the Cheesecake Factory on a credit card with his dad's name on it, Anderson is accidentally pointing out all of the things wrong with the platform he helped build.

True, Taylor Swift is one of the most successful musical artists in history, and is a very wealthy person, but most artists aren't either of those things. And I'm pretty sure we should be talking about more than a 0.00001 bump per stream. And while Taylor Swift can't afford to take a pay cut, she shouldn't be expected to. The Cheesecake Factory is the most successful

full service restaurant chain in America, but you still have to pay for your cheesecake when you go there. And a $5 billion streaming executive telling someone they make too much money to deserve to be paid for their work isn't the David and Goliath story Anderson seems to think it is. It's more like a Godzilla versus Kong situation.

If Godzilla had like a little dude on his shoulder who told you not to get vaccines. Goliath and a much shittier Goliath. The reason Anderson focused his smug, fart-sniffing ire on Taylor Swift is because Taylor Swift has a long history of completely annihilating anyone who crosses her, including Spotify. Swift first called out Spotify's chicanery back in 2014

when she wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal arguing that music shouldn't be free, and that if we all want to continue to have music to listen to and enjoy, we need to make sure that artists are able to make a living creating their art, not get rich, mind you, make a living. Remember, once labels and distributors

and whomever else take their contractually obligated piece of that sweet third of a penny pie, Spotify doesn't leave enough crumbs for the actual artists to even pay rent. Swift followed up her editorial by pulling all of her albums from Spotify, which is a stance against the platform that few artists have the power to take. Most of them have no say whatsoever, because again, Spotify is co-owned by the record labels who own the recordings.

Swift isn't just speaking up for herself when she calls out Spotify's bullshit. She's one of the few artists with enough power and clout to call out their bullshit without the fear of losing her career in the process. To wit, Anderson's comments were recorded by singer-songwriter Ashley Janna, who sat on the recording for two years before releasing it because she was so terrified of retaliation. Also, highlighting the fact that Swift is essentially arguing for fractions of a cent because that's the rate your platform pays artists

isn't just saying the quiet part loud, Jim. It's blasting the quiet part on a pair of Iowa headphones in the backseat of your parents' Mercury Sable while they drive you to the Warped Tour, presumably to watch a ska band. Swift also got into it with Apple back in 2015 when the tech giant launched its own streaming platform, Apple Music. To help convince people to sign up for the service,

Apple offered every new subscriber a three-month free trial, during which it would pay no royalties to any of the artists, regardless of how many times their music was streamed during the trial period. Swift called the decision disappointing, mentioning that Apple was essentially asking artists to work for free for three months and that we don't ask you for free iPhones. Now in a move right out of 1984, Swift threatened to pull her then upcoming album 1989 from Apple entirely if the platform didn't agree to compensate artists as normal during the trial period That's how powerful Taylor Swift is she had the power to delete an entire year Apple executive Eddie Q initially defended the decision pointing out that Apple pays a much more generous royalty rate per stream than Spotify and that

73% of the collected subscription fees would be paid to the music industry, which is a term here meaning record labels. Therefore, Q argued, the three month period would ultimately be to everyone's benefit. Rather tellingly, Q admitted in an interview with Billboard magazine that he'd already heard a lot of concern from indie artists about not getting paid during the three month trial period, but had heroically decided to do absolutely nothing

to address those concerns until the most famous singer on the planet threatened to pull her music ahead of the service's launch. He said, we never looked at it as not paying them and insisted the three month, keep our platform afloat for nothing period had been part of the negotiation that had allowed them to pay a higher royalty rate on an ongoing basis.

The problem of course, is that no artists were a part of those negotiations, not even Taylor Swift. No, those deals were made with record labels. Warner Music can afford to miss royalties for three months on a streaming platform with a built-in user base of hundreds of millions of people because they've got a zillion artists spread out across a zillion other revenue streams.

But the humble presidents of the United States of America, bands at that level can't afford to miss out on three months of royalty checks. Regardless of how you feel about Taylor Swift throwing her weight around to protect her money, she is one of the few artists these people actually have to listen to. And that's important because Taylor Swift

is far from the only artist who has a problem with Spotify. But artists can't depend on Taylor Swift and they shouldn't have to. Swift, with all due credit, backed down once her personal grievances had been addressed. Her music is now readily available on both Spotify and Apple Music at the time of this filming. Same with Neil Young, who just quietly moved over to the equally predacious and busted Amazon Music, and didn't say another word about Spotify's practices of exploiting and devaluing the labor of an entire industry to make Joe Rogan a millionaire and help its CEO invest heavily in surveillance and defense technology. Recording artists have been pushing for more equitable royalties for several years, in

both streaming and terrestrial platforms. Recently, Frustrated Art artists formed the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers in May of 2020, taking specific aim at Spotify and its practices. The Umar's list of grievances and proposed changes are extensive, but the relevant one to this specific rant is that they're asking for a flat rate

of one penny per stream. The record labels and Spotify, which are one and the same if you recall, would rather die than do that. Sounds like a plan. In addition to the penny per stream, the UMA is seeking a user-centric payment model that pays musicians according to the number

of streams they receive. Currently, artists are awarded their money in a pro-rata model that pools all revenue, then pays artists a percentage of that pool according to how many streams they receive. According to the Umah website, the pro-rata model means that as artists on the top of the pyramid accumulate

a greater percentage of streams, all other artists receive increasingly tiny payments. This model puts artists in competition with each other. We demand the adoption of a user-centric model, which pays artists directly according to the number of streams they receive. So yeah, Spotify doesn't even make equal payments according to how many streams you get.

They pay artists a percentage of a set amount according to the total number of streams across the entire platform, which is yet another way of getting around fairly compensating anyone for their work. The Umah is also asking for more transparency about contracts, which honestly, same. It'll make researching future episodes

on this topic way easier. One of the reasons Spotify and the recording industry get away with essentially shaking down artists all of the time is because nobody really knows what exactly is going on under the hood. Contracts and negotiations are kept incredibly secret. It's a classic anti-union move. Don't discuss your salary with your fellow employees,

otherwise you might all realize that the whole industry is wildly inequitable and that you're all getting pitted against each other to line the pockets of a bunch of the least creative people in the entire world and some doofus tech bro coming up with a way for the Pottery Barn to share its workout playlist. Feel the barn.

They're also seeking proper attribution credits for work on recordings and an end to legal battles intended to further impoverish artists. That last thing is another classic anti-union tactic. You keep people from speaking up by threatening them with prolonged legal battles against a million dollar legal team. If there's one thing billionaire tech empires hate more

than paying for labor, it is unions. Spotify even rejected the idea of a temporary provisional rate of a penny per stream during the pandemic, which has eliminated artists' ability to make money by performing live shows. Now, the only way these artists can make a living creating music for all of us to enjoy is if places like Spotify pay them to play their music.

And Spotify, who, as I certainly mentioned before, increased its value to $70 billion in that first year of the pandemic, categorically refused. Something to note, this isn't the same fight as the one against Napster in the late 90s and early aughts. In fact, outside of Lars Ulrich and a few others, most artists were totally fine with Napster. Way back in the year 2000, when the recording industry was fighting tooth and nail to destroy

Napster, Eve Six frontman Max Collins said, you know what? Can we just pay him a fraction of the penny or some dried leaves or something and get him here to say it himself? I'm totally cool with kids stealing our whole record. You know, I think if a fan is downloading an entire album, they're interested in the band, they're likely going to be supporting the band in other ways, going to shows and buying shirts and stuff like that. Listen, Cody, I'm going to need that penny pretty soon. Thanks, Max. I'll send you those leaves ASAP. Anyway, Collins has since become one of Spotify's most vocal critics,

and for very good reason. For example, all of the ones I have already given. Also one key difference between Spotify and Napster is that the latter actually guided people to new music. Bands that had languished in relative obscurity suddenly saw their music being shared and enjoyed by a generation of new fans who stumbled upon it thanks to Napster. There were no playlists, nothing was being curated.

It was just people sharing and discovering music. And many of those people found new favorite bands and became lifelong fans. The point is, the experience was organic. Nobody was making any money, period. It truly was all about the music. Now I'm not saying that piracy is good, wink, or that you shouldn't pay for art that you enjoy

to support the artist because you absolutely should if you can. No wink. Otherwise, that art will cease to exist, and we'll all be listening to music made by robots built by shitheads like Daniel Ek and Jim Anderson. But what I am saying is that people became fans because of things like Napster and Kazaa and Morpheus and several others that just copied the same UI and probably also stole my credit card information that time I tried to download all four seasons of home movies. And when you become a fan of an artist, you follow that artist.

You buy their albums and their merchandise and go see their shows. You support them. It's a special connection that is deeply personal. Think of how much your favorite band or your favorite album means to you. Spotify, by design, smothers that experience in the crib with a pillow stuffed with Pepsi bucks. And so I guess that's why I'm deleting my subscription. That actually reminds me,

I need to finish listening to all of my ska. Spotify. Yes, Cody. Oh, thank heck. I know you're not in any way a voice activated app except for the narrative purposes of this episode, so I appreciate you responding. Yeah, no problem, Cody. What can I do for you? I want you to play through every remaining song on my current playlist at triple speed.

Yeah, what playlist is that, Cody? You have several in your queue, including Bartles and James, Songstuff, Wizards 2, and Cracker Barrel's Happy Birthday, Kurt Cobain. songstuff, Wizards 2, and Cracker Barrel's Happy Birthday Kurt Cobain. Um, Cody's cool playlist Summer of 98, woohoo, only one more summer until Star Wars. Cody, that level of personal curation has only been attempted once before, bye. For the love of Bennigans, I know, I know! Never tell me the Scods! Understood. On your mark. 1998 playlist, engage. Whoa! Hey man.

Oh good, another alternate me. I'm you from a divergent reality in which 1998 never ended. Yeah, I just said that, I know the deal. Right on home skillet. How are things going in your universe? Honestly, not great. I'm just trying to get through all the songs

on my Spotify playlist before my subscription ends. Do they still have ska in your universe? Honestly, not great. I'm just trying to get through all the songs on my Spotify playlist before my subscription ends. Do they still have Ska on your universe? What do you mean still? Ska is the president. Save Ferris, really? Which band? I don't understand the question. Hey, what in the boss tones is Spotify?

It's a music streaming platform formed in tandem with the recording industry to get around paying artists anything for their work. Oh man, that sounds hella whack. Yeah, it's, I just did a whole thing about it. I'm not gonna repeat myself just for your benefit. So anyway, Spotify never existed in your universe. Nope, kind of sounds like a super low stakes Skynet

to be honest, but I'm glad we dodged that bullet. Please tell me how you did it. The future of music in my universe may depend on it, but do it quickly because my playlist is about to end. Sure. So did you guys have Napster? Oh yeah, that's the only reason I know who you are. Right on.

Well, Napster triggered a revolution in the music industry. Labels realized they needed to be transparent and equitable in dealing with artists and nurture the fan base instead of trying to squeeze more and more money out of it. I said quickly, we're burning through ska here. Gotcha. Well, my suggestion is to delete Spotify and move to another platform that treats artists better, like Tidal, which pays the best rate per stream, or Bandcamp, which lets you stream and buy music directly from the artists. Even Apple Music is technically better if that's an easier switch for you to make.

Where honestly, there's simply no good way to use a subscription model and properly pay any artist for any work, be that music or film or books or any art. But there's no going back now. So until we figure that out, you need to do the work as a consumer to support the things you love.

Even going so far as to buy physical media. And while it shouldn't be on us to make sure artists get paid, no one else will have their back until we're willing to shed some conveniences for the things we love. The main thing is, whenever possible, give your money to the artists rather than a corporation. So what's it like to be in 1998 forever?

Is it one long year or do you keep reusing the same calendar? Oh, we just add sequential numbers to each year. What would it like to be in 1998 forever? Is it one long year or do you keep reusing the same calendar? Oh, we just add sequential numbers to each year. So right now it's 1998 part 24, but otherwise it's pretty much the same year. How did Y2K turn out? Fine, mostly fine.

Right on, right on. Oh, hey, did the new Star Wars ever come out? No, bummer. We still just have the original three. Account deleted. Take me with you! Ah, geez. Well, my Spotify subscription just expired

and I've run out of things to talk about. So I guess we're done here. But before I lay my weary Ska head down on my swinging Utters pillowcase, do music a favor and delete Spotify. If your favorite artists are all saying that a certain platform sucks, Skadzar, it probably sucks.

With the exception of Joe Rogan and Daniel Ek, none of us are exactly rolling in cash right now. So if you're going to throw down your hard earned money, you might as well make sure that it's going to support the artist you like, so they can keep creating the art that you love. Subscribe to our Patreon. Or Wombo will find you!

The big reveal! I couldn't name you a single ska song or band. Ever. I couldn't name you a single ska song or band. Ever. with the rest of your get up and get on out to the internet where we've got a podcast called Even More News. This show has a podcast if you prefer that. We've got a Patreon.com slash SomeMoreNews. We've got merch with other things. And we've also got a new show called Some This,

which you can see on the internet, which you are on currently anyway. And furthermore, another thing about Ska,