Historically, artists never made much money selling music. Artists made most of their music going on tour, selling merch, or monetizing their likeness.
I see spotify more like as an audio-based customer acquisition channel, like the radio.
Maybe it could build in some kind of "donate" patreon-like feature into the app. I wish Soundcloud had this.
Historically, artists never made much money selling music. Artists made most of their music going on tour, selling merch, or monetizing their likeness.
They never made a pound touring. Their success and much of their impact was tied to European club playlists, the sales of singles, album sales, and the media.
You can talk to many other artists from that era who did depend on touring and merch, but also used distribution and sales of singles and albums (and advances on record deals) to establish themselves.
While plastic media was doomed long before Spotify, this "audio-based customer acquisition channel" is, by design, set up to benefit Spotify, record labels, and top artists, in that order.
Have societies justly and fairly treated individuals in the past? If not then there’s little reason to point to it when talking about a person in power “doing the right thing”.
SoundCloud does have a donate button. At least in the sense that an artist can setup a paypal button that shows up on their profile.
I have created something similar with SoundRat (https://soundrat.com) that connects more with the patreon-like features and makes listening of music free but gives fans an option to donate to artists and get some perks for doing so.
While artists made much more of their money on tour or selling merch, it didn’t take all that many sales of physical releases for an artist to top $12/month. Yes, the distributor and label took their share, and the royalty paid to the musicians was a minority of the sale price, but they could still make more money than they do now on streaming platforms.
I see spotify more like as an audio-based customer acquisition channel, like the radio.
Maybe it could build in some kind of "donate" patreon-like feature into the app. I wish Soundcloud had this.