i do unironically think the best artists of our generation are posting to get 20 notes and 3 reblogs btw. that fanfic with like 45 kudos is some of the best stuff ever written. those OCs you carry around have some of the richest backstories and worldbuilding someone has ever seen. please do not think that reaching only a few people when you post means your art isn't worth celebrating.

Not to derail or anything, but OP if I may, I think the same of musicians too. Your 300 monthly listeners on Spotify don't mean that you aren't the best band in town, and those 1000 streams don't mean that crowdsurfing with you guys at an 80-year-old pub isn't the best time of my month. Your art is so worth celebrating, and we're richer for it

Don't wake him up

didn't need to be. i just love him that much 😌

@peachy-artist @ranidspace absolutely!! here's a blank version for your convenience

Second real tumblr post

Digital painting of matt from the Huddersfield show in June… idk what song he’s singing in this picture I was thinking verona but idk

Reference and closeups under the thingy :D

I was thinking about streaming and how it’s genuinely killed any revenue that could help musicians ever rely on their music, or take the sort of financial decisions that bands and artists could take even 5 years before streaming began to take up the largest % of people’s listening habits.

I mean, Arctic Monkeys are considered the biggest success of the internet days. Soundcloud, MySpace and word of mouth is what people talk about the most, but after all of that, people were still buying their album. All that work didn’t just disappear into a void. 2006. It is recent enough, and also just close enough to the streaming takeover. Little Simz calls off a North America tour because despite how big she is, the streaming money just doesn’t translate. How does it make sense?? Streaming companies themselves are still pulling in billions in revenue. How does it make sense? Piracy didn’t replace buying music. Streaming just absorbed the impact of both of those and so much more, and now your tunes aren’t worth a dime. God, it makes me angry.

It’s hindering artists’ literal ability to do their job. They were talking the other day about how at bigger gigs you just are expected to have a live band, a recorded backing track simply can’t fill larger venues like that. But can a musician who’s already losing money on touring (lest we forget, even the merch they print out all by themselves doesn’t fully pay them: venues take anywhere between a 10% and a 50% cut of all merch sold at their venue) actually afford to get a backing band with people and instruments to hire and travel with them? And then people get pissy and talk about how performers these days just aren’t as genuine as they used to be and these kids just stand with their laptops. Well then do something? I’m sorry Loyle Carner can’t bring a string orchestra with him. He’d love to, and he did on Jools Holland. But streaming simply doesn’t cover the costs for bands to travel like that anymore. Not even a band like Fontaines D.C. could put on a production like Muse do, it’s just a circumstance of their time. It’s shitty. It’s literally affecting artists’ ability to do their jobs! God I hate it, Spotify should just fuck off.

I hate that this post is fucking relevant again, but that's what's happened again. People have been idiots again.

Tor Maries, who performs as Billy Nomates, is an indie musician on an indie label. She writes really cool indie and post punk, she's collaborated with the likes of Sleaford Mods, but her career really took off during lockdown, and as with many bands that weren't established pre-pandemic, has found the cost of touring as a new band to be difficult. She announced last year that it just didn't make sense for her to tour with a whole band anymore. Her music is still amazing though, and so she was up on stage at Glastonbury yesterday. She performed with a backing track, and clueless out-of-touch idiots online lost their minds.

The same people who have no qualms at all with artists being underpaid are now inconvenienced that their entertainment on telly wasn't up to scratch because Tor can't afford to bring a band to Glastonbury. There were really mean comments about her performance being "karaoke", even though everyone who was actually at the gig said it was really good and a fun show. And so many musicians use bits of backing tracks on their sets, you can't recreate the studio onstage, and you certainly can't always hire as many musicians to do it with you, not as an independent artist without the money and backing that larger labelled or bigger artists may have.

It got too much, she's asked the BBC to take down the video of her set because the abuse got too much. Disgraceful behaviour online. Artists just can't win, one way or the other.

It's why we're been shouting and screaming for so long, artists rights matter! Pay them fairly! You can't squeeze the middle out of them and then also complain about the ‘quality’ of your entertainment. For the record, Billy Nomates was great. But people can be such arseholes. What I worry is that her post said "there won't be any more shows after the summer"— it would be so sad if we're witnessing in real time another woman getting bullied out of music by idiots, it makes me so angry!

Man, Spotify is such a fucked up beast.

Its primary existence is for optics. Musicians who put their music up on Spotify are literally only gaming an algorithm. There’s nothing at all to do with music about it. The only things that matter are little technical details: what’s your monthly stream count (“monthly listeners“), which ways does the algorithm count it and which ones does it not.

The nature of collaborations is changing for it. Notice that crediting artists as “features” is no longer popular (I.e. Musician A’s song featuring Rapper B, who did a guest verse). That is singlehandedly because of Spotify. If you are not listed as a co-credit in a song’s metadata, Spotify’s algorithm doesn’t count it towards your monthly listens. This means you have to be listed as a co-artist or co-producer, when you may really only have joined for a single verse.

This, which is called a “primary artist designation”, looks like a 50% split in the credits doesn’t it? So then why would you allow yourself to look like a co-writer on a song you wrote 100% of? Circle back to paragraph 1: optics. Spotify is one big fucking optics fest. Being able to ride the wave of another artist’s super popular collaboration will make your monthly listeners increase, which I guess acts like enhanced SEO but within Spotify: better searchability. Visibility. I guess.

So, you’re thinking. Make a few friends in high places, put together a Coachella for the ages on a single song, and you’re golden? Make the next Get Lucky? We used to call that a supergroup (*granddad voice*) back in moi day.

But it’s not quite that simple! Only three artists can be listed as primaries. And that means the power to grant primary status, particularly say, to a rising hot shot, holds weight in negotiations. And we all know, where negotiations are involved, labels are involved!

There’s an impressive amount of red tape and fine print around record labels as it stands, now labels have to ability to, say, demand more money from one artist or their label, in return for a primary credit (which is listed in forms you’re more familiar with today: “Artist A & Artist B”; “Artist A X Artist B”, which honestly sounds like you’re crossing two brands rather than people working together… which I guess, indirectly or directly, is the point. Spotify is nothing to do with the music or the actual content. It’s all about the optics, the marketing, the branding. The goddamned #brand and riding the #trend. The breaking in small and meaningless bursts of PR. The death of longevity, etc. but that’s a discussion for another day. Today we’re talking pure decisions and their logistical and legal downstream consequences.)

Anyway, it complicates things. You as an artist could be prevented from getting a promised credit because your label has outstanding beef with your collaborator’s label. A label might deny you, on another label, primary credits because another of their artists has a release on the same date, and primary credits affect things like the “Appears On” playlists at the bottom, that are ordered by popularity and not release date. Sometimes it’s just in fucking bad faith. Either way, what it does signify is the death of the “featuring” credit. I’m not sorry to see it go, I found it annoying tbh.

But it is worth noting that Monthly Counts are only a significantly in contributing to algorithmic popularity on Spotify. Apple Music, Deezer, think of a few others… they don’t work that way. (Primary credits are not that important to them).

Today, less than 4% of all the Billboard Top 10 singles have had a ‘feature’ on them in all of 2022 so far. The entire music industry has changed for the whims of one single company.

And people still believe using or not using Spotify is simply an artist’s “choice”.

#the more i read about this stuff the more i consider staying indie forever#anyway apple music & deezer > spotify#i’ve heard that bandcamp is good too

@jinspiracy re your tags because they reminded me of more stuff I had to say:

Bandcamp all the way! Bandcamp is more like an Etsy store for music than it is a streaming site, so what you pay for the album goes entirely to the artist (usually about 83% of it, after money transfer fees and Bandcamp’s hosting fees, etc. are paid. Which is still really good, compared to the fractional amount other streaming sites pay).

Apple is slightly better than Spotify, yes. When Spotify got themselves into a PR nightmare by publicly telling artists that they should just “release more music” when they were complaining in the middle of a pandemic, about how their songs are paid about $0.0004 per stream on Spotify (I know, ew), Apple decided to toot the publicity horn and declare that actually, they pay artists 1 cent per stream, or were planning on doing it anyway. I don’t know if that’s true yet, because Spotify has a habit of being disastrous at PR and drawing all the criticism to themselves, but I do know that Apple Music pays a little better than Spotify. YouTube’s payout is the worst one ($0.00012)

(These are all early 2020 numbers though, I don’t have the latest ones)

Deezer has talked about how they have tried for years to implement a user-centric streaming model, which is different from the current model popular in streaming, the ‘pro-rata’ model.

For anyone not in the know, the user-centric model is where artists are paid per stream. You have a fixed base rate which just gets multiplied by the number of streams. If you had a cent per stream and 5 million streams, you would get paid 0.01 x 5,000,000 = 50,000 for it.

You would think this is how it works, right? It seems so logical! But that’s not how streaming works, at least in the music world.

Instead, when you pay for Spotify premium, all the money that comes in, the $10 every premium user pays, gets put into this large pot. Now, if you’re Ed Sheeran with a billion streams, and the total number of streams accumulated by every listener on Spotify in total in that month was 5 billion, then Ed Sheeran had 1/5 of all the streams on Spotify that month.

In the pro-rata model, this means that Ed Sheeran gets 1/5 of all the revenue collected on Spotify. (Ed’s an example, these are not real figures, but 2-5 billion is the ballpark for total Spotify streams)

You think to yourself, this is a little different, but maybe it’s okay? What could be the problem with this?

The problem is that artist with 5 million listeners now.

In this model, 5 million is not an absolute number to be multiplied by, it is a fraction of 5 billion.

5,000,000 / 5,000,000,000 = 1/1000. Your multiplier is suddenly 0.001. What the fuck.

Now, this too is a bit of a simplification, truth be told, but then these companies don’t reveal their workings. What we do know is that there are more factors that play in: what location a musician’s listeners are in, whether they are free or premium users (free users count for less, so the multiplier for their free streams is lower: sucks for you if your fans are poorer), and we don’t know what the base multiplier for all of these is (i.e., “how much” a single stream is worth. Musicians unions worldwide (see: MU in the UK, UMAW globally, but based in the US) are fighting to have this amount set at no less than 1 cent per stream).

5 million monthly streams is still a lot of streams! It should make you a moderately successful artist, when combined with physical sales, other things like sponsorships, roles and appearances, and to an extent, touring (separate post but in summary: most artists lose money touring. Little Simz, very successful, recently had to cancel a North American tour because she admitted there simply wasn’t the money to do it. She has 2.5 million monthly listeners and is one of the fastest rising musicians in the UK right now).

5 million streams should make you able to live off your music alone. The Beatles have 26 million monthly Spotify streams. Instead, as a recording UK-based cellist with 5.5 million monthly listeners pointed out, it nets you £12 a month. (I’m so sorry but I cannot find the tweet. It is from around July 2020 but I don’t remember her name…)

If you’re in a group, you have to split that three or fourways. Labels and managers take a cut. By god, do labels take a Cut. Fontaines D.C., one of the biggest independent bands in the world right now, talked about how it was for them when they were getting big in Dublin a few years ago. They would each work the door at their shows, surprising fans who would be like, “you’re in the band! You shouldn’t have to do this”, but as they said, the €50 in hand from working the doors was more than what streaming would’ve made them in the month (then split that amongst 5 band members)…

So we’ve established, pro-rata model bad. Pro-rata model disastrous. For a music fan, it means the money you pay isn’t even going to the artists you like, you’re mostly paying for top musicians you don’t listen to. Easier to buy albums you will listen to a million times once (there’s also chat about how offline albums are more eco-friendly than streaming from servers halfway across the world, a million times).

Deezer has tried to change to a user-centric model, but they keep getting blocked by record labels, from whom they need to license the music to be available on streaming platforms. Why? The big 3 record labels (Sony, Universal, Warner) all have stakes in streaming companies, and anything that pays the companies more and artists less benefits them more… it’s a tangled, complicated web. It’ll almost make you think we’re no better than when bands were complaining in the 80s about record deals that took away 80% of their money (still happening btw!)

But yeah, sorry for such a long reply. You’re absolutely right, Bandcamp/ purchasing albums/mp3s >>> streaming.

There are a few newer streaming companies that are aligned with these musical campaigns for fair pay, campaigns like Broken Record and Fix Streaming. Sites like Sonstream and Resonate.is are following different models and paying their artists better, although they’re still growing, so check them out if you’d like to.

Wow, thanks for this information! (I’m @jinspiracy​, just replying from my other blog.) That’s shocking. I’m definitely going to be using Bandcamp now and recommending it to others. (I currently use Landr, which distributes to all the major streaming platforms but not Bandcamp.) If I may ask, what news platforms or sources etc. do you keep up with to find out things like this? I’ve been getting more interested in keeping up with news about this kind of thing!

OH I'd meant to answer this, I'm so sorry!

First, since you mentioned distribution: most distribution sites don't distribute to Bandcamp because it's not really the same as a streaming service. Bandcamp is a shop front, you just go on there and upload your wares, it's just that in this case your ware is your music and merch (you can sell physical merch through Bandcamp as well, and link it to the album it's for: tour shirts, CDs, vinyls, etc.) It's partly because the whole philosophy behind Bandcamp is that you're free to do as you please with your music, upload and delete at your own free will, unlike streaming companies, Bandcamp doesn't get a percentage of the albums and merch you sell (what they do take is a small amount to cover payment and transaction fees when you buy from there, although even in that case there is the option to simply link your fans away from Bandcamp and onto your own store, Bandcamp lets you do that. To be honest I don't see it being much different, because somewhere down the line presumably, you're paying some site or other to let people make a paypal transaction. It amounts to the same thing I imagine).

Where I get my information: I started following Tom Gray on Twitter, and that's from where I first heard of a lot of this stuff. Tom used to be in the English 00s psychedelic rock band Gomez, these days in addition to writing soundtracks and the like, he's also turned to artist rights and founded the Broken Record campaign on Twitter at the start of lockdown, when touring coming to a halt meant that the only real source of income for musicians instantly stopped. He started out talking about streaming, but has since also cracked open the tin for things like predatory record label deals and contracts, amplified other artists, alarmingly, often women of colour making music that cannot be shoehorned into RnB, who have been essentially gagged by their record labels, unable to release the music they write because the labels have kept it on a shelf, refusing to either release it or let them leave their contract in case "their kind of music becomes profitable popular in the future". Tom's talked about touring, how much money artists lose on touring, and the way music venues take anywhere between a 20-50% cut of the merch sold at a venue from the artist's sales that evening, and that's led to some artists selling their merch from a van 10 ft away from the venue (Dry Cleaning did this once), and the FAC creating a list of venues that don't take a cut. The PRS for music in the UK is involved with song publishing and royalties, and Tom has talked about and worked with them a bit too. There are a ton more, and I guess this list is a bit UK-heavy, since Tom Gray does work within the UK. There were some interesting findings from the UK DCMS, the government committee overseeing culture and music, that did a formal inquiry into the effect streaming had on artists' lives and careers that basically confirmed what artists had been saying all along: something needs to change, and the committee has some recommendations, so it's interesting to see where that will lead.

For now, to summarise, here are a few links/orgs/twitter handles you might find useful, and if Twitter's not your thing, check out their websites.

If I think of others later, I'll add them in. I hope these help you get started!

like to tell him goodnight

reblog to tuck him in and give him a lil forehead smooch