Good afternoon/evening! Today I bring you a couple of articles about streaming and networks.
Obviously, I don't condemn anyone who uses controversial tools to promote their music; we live in a world that is much more complex than good and bad. But it to helps if we understand Spotify as a tool to channel wealth from artists to investors in intermediaries..
This is a book, with a great name, that serves as a significant research and starting point for the topic:
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
This is an alternative link if you have trouble accessing the original link: https://archive.ph/nScZW
Yet another article:
https://consequence.net/2024/12/spotify-perfect-fit-content-report/
In this video, an independent band talks to us about the topic: (they took down the post but I'm leaving it for possible future references, here is the URL https://www.instagram.com/reel/DDyBGCBRyIR/)
Summary:
- Spotify se alía con disqueras para empujar sus sugerencias y reproducciones a artistas de disqueras grandes por encima de artistas que no tienen contratos con las disqueras principales y mayoritarias (que tienen acciones, muchas, en spotify)
- In addition to this, Spotify includes content for which it does not have to pay royalties in the traditional way (podcasts and others)
- Spotify, in addition to that, generates fake artists with fake discographies
- Spotify commissions and creates fake artists with music created by artificial intelligence using the same information provided by its users to determine what users listen to, in order to avoid paying royalties
- Artists whose music was used by Spotify's AI to create music are receiving notifications of intellectual property infringement
- In addition, DistroKid and its distributors (Spotify owns DistroKid and others) report complaints that some tracks are supposedly only listened to by bots, in order to suspend payments to legitimate artists.
- By the time artists return to the platform after crawling back... other users, including bots or AI soup generators, have already uploaded their music...
so... yeah...
This is a more parodic post about how Spotify helps independent musicians create value for investors:
And this is yet another video about it:
and this is one about ghost artists (not related to the ghost community!)
The first time I took down all my discography from Spotify, I found out before a month had passed that someone re-uploaded it, with slightly different names (something like ZENIZA FANTASMA or something dumb... although I imagine the name of my band would already seem dumb without much help!) and slightly different visual art (and back then there weren't as many free AI tools).
That someone was a DistroKid user (which is a subsidiary of Spotify) and as if by magic they showed up in the best of those curated playlists. They were also trying to monetize on YouTube. Very few of my audience are on Spotify, but there's always that one person who follows you on social media, and on YouTube, so they let me know, it's easier to be notified for intellectual property violations (although that's also a hassle).
They took muuuuuch longer than they did when I asked them to take mine down through conventional means. I'm not saying they monetized a lot, because doing the math, it doesn't seem to be the case, but if I tried to upload my music, it could get flagged as a copyright infringement, because they were basically VERY BAD remixes of my music.
But my audience is small on Spotify. Some band with a larger, younger audience might be more impacted by this.
I must clarify that when I previously wrote "as if by magic they showed up in the best of those curated playlists" I want to elaborate:
I was in a few curated Spotify playlists, and I can actually attest that ONE well-placed song in a playlist can generate much more than the rest of the discography..
The first song I had on a playlist in 2018 made me more money than everything I had earned up to that point over the years on social media.
It happened a couple of times, and that led to a few of my songs being played on a couple of radio stations in the US and Europe, and that made people search for me online, which meant they found me on some streaming platforms..
That's why I say they magically seemed to be on better curated lists (with my music), and that's also why I said that ... I don't think they made much money from it lol, that needs to be followed up on... and that's hard work!
But even so... I did much more on my own. Far overshadowing what I generated from streaming..
So much so that streaming, although it made money passively, only served as marketing for me, that is, to passively and possibly promote my music... but still... I left all of them because it's not the best channel to find my audience.
What I mean by that is that we DO have options.
Yes, it's a tough situation and yes, it's complicated and demands a lot (and things are really uphill everywhere!!! we all have frinds that are super qualified on their own fields, even if those are not artistic/cultural and they are also finding it really tough).
This dude details his path, his journey:
It's not the same as mine, but it looks similar enough. I don't have my music on streaming..
Passive income has financed the radio station and artistic things without having to grab money from the rent, or to stop taking care of myself while I'm in my cancer treatment, I have been able to continue making music... and music has allowed me to keep making music without it eating my lunch or taking my pills.
It's rough.
All of it.
We have to be tougher than the apocalypse.
(discourse-wise, to be honest, if things get apocalyptic, I don't want to be out there killing zombies, what a drag...)
We have to be together.
Building Community.
Celebrate Our Achievements.
Doing activism from care, from affection, alliance, and mercy. And yes, obviously, responsibility, when we mess up, helping each other to take responsibility, but not to destroy and stop, but hopefully to move forward..