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Spotify is making bank on musicians who get jack squat in return. Don't use Spotify.
Should probably suggest an alternative.
Why? Streaming has become a scam and everyone seems okay with it. Like everything online. Everything is an expensive subscription to rent entertainment. My suggestion? Buy CDs. Buy directly from the artists. Or pirate it, at least Spotify won't make any money from it.
How is Spotify a scam? I can probably at most buy one CD per month for the same price as Spotify. Yet Spotify gives unlimited access to good quality versions of almost every song out there. Even with raised prices it's still a way better deal for most consumers than buying music directly.
Personally I tend to also buy a few albums a year, because I like owning them and I like supporting the artists. But the convenience of having every track at your fingertips is hard to beat
that is why spotify is a scam. it may be a good deal for you, the consumer, but it has made it even harder for artists to make money off their work.
Especially if you are a musician. Musicians need to boycott it. 99.9999% of musicians wouldn't even notice if they weren't on it but it would destroy Spotify.
It's not even worth indie and small artists time to put it on there. Spotify has now officially demonetised all songs with less than 1,000 streams: https://www.nme.com/news/music/spotify-has-now-officially-demonetised-all-songs-with-less-than-1000-streams-3614010
I remember hearing about this. And I bet you the reason they ended up with so many songs with less than 1000 plays is because of their own algorithm. Apart from creating money problems for most musicians, they have been actively narrowing our artistic culture by effectively inbreeding modern music. Its really bad. We need musicians (and all other artists) to express and reflect who we are and what we're about. They empower us. I feel like contemporary music has become narrowed down to nothing but hedonism, vanity and self-loathing; largely thanks to the likes of spotify.
BTW if you're interested in something which is good, check out https://radiofreefedi.net/ It's music from artists on the fediverse. I've had some great sessions listening to their comfy channel and discovered some awesome new artists that I wouldn't have otherwise.
I'm familiar. I have some tracks on there. I do metal though, and I have no clue when they actually play it.
Nice, what is your artist name? Maybe I've heard you on it!
Harbinger of Storms. I'm also here: https://darkphotonstudio.bandcamp.com/album/all-of-the-stars-are-dead
Just a heads up to everyone, quitting Spotify and buying / "procuring" your own music and playing it via a music player makes reading this quite cathartic. Do it for the moral superiority and self esteem boost for no effort you come to the internet for anyways.
I feel like piracy and moral superiority don't really belong together
I always try to buy my music first, digital only though. I don't have space for CDs or the like. If the option is not available (not common), the tricorn goes on. And normally I would go through any loophole I can find to get it legally. But damn, the Japanese really don't like doing business with foreigners.
What kind of japanese stuff do you listen to? I might be able to recommend a place
How do you even buy music anymore?
There's quite a few ways actually:
If none of the above has worked, this is no longer an issue about whether you want to pay for the product or not, it's a supplier problem.
I've never seen an artist on Bandcamp that I actually recognize.
Telling anyone to "just Google it" is proof that you have no interest in a good faith discussion.
spoiler
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Also, when it comes to specific platforms, Apple Music is quite good, though they make it rather painful to buy music if you use Linux
It is to be noted that while iTunes is DRM-free at this point (which is very nice and surprised me when I found out) it is unfortunately still lossy compressed audio which the perfectionist in me really doesn't like :P
Come on Apple, sell me your funny ALAC, you have it for Apple Music anyway
Oh, I wasn't aware of that. It doesn't bother me that much, since I personally can't tell the difference in audio quality, but that's still unfortunate to know
I mean same, but I'd still like to have lossless audio regardless :P
Can I play devil's advocate a little bit here, because I was really unaware that this ever worked for anything except indie artists on Bandcamp. So Bandcamp works for them or for discovering new music obviously.
I didn't know artists ever sold digital music on their websites, but that does make sense, so I checked - if I google Taylor Swift and go to her website, there it is, digital music purchase. Great.
I went to U2's website, and the only music I can buy there is vinyl. I don't want vinyl, I want digital. You can buy merch, but I'm after music, not merch. Looking further, there's all sorts of galleries and information about each album and song, but you still can't buy the music.
Other mainstream artists I googled didn't even go that far. Googling them brought up a wikipedia link, social media links, tours. All stuff I don't want. Now your list has "contact artist via social media" - setting aside the fact that it's unlikely a popular mainstream artist will even reply to anyone at all about anything, this is a real point of friction. I don't want to have to contact an artist to find out some alternative way to get their music. If I'm buying something online, there needs to be some way to buy it online and ready to go. If we have to wait a couple of days or weeks for a reply that may or may not come - the process failed.
If I had to guess, they would probably say something like "it's on spotify".
So yes it probably is a supplier problem, but it seems to me that this is happening for the majority of popular artists if a majority of music people like is mainstream. I assume if you like the majority of indie music then that's probably not the case.
I suspect that big artists are making so much from streaming that they're not concerned with direct to consumer. And that's fine because they are the easiest to torrent.
Bandcamp or whatever downloads website for small and torrent for big.
No worries, I'll take your U2 example and try it from my end (I don't listen to them so I can't decide on what album(s) specifically you are looking for). I'm going to be frank, it was a pain, but I did find zdigital (7digital outside of Australia) selling their albums without physical media. But getting there, I had to see that the U2 website/publisher website did not even advertise it. It was like the 5th option on duckduckgo after searching for
u2 digital download
I'm sure you would have better luck if you slide in the specific album that you were looking for.
Important to note is that you aren't googling for that artist or album, you're googling
artist album digital download
I do agree with you that mainstream artists and publishers are going down this route probably due to some deals with streaming services, but unfortunately that is the reality we live in now. Additional work will be required by the consumer to get what they want. If the publishers start completely stopping this at some point all I can say is that I have the disposable income to buy the products I want and I am going to get it. Whether the publishers sell it to me or not is their decision to make.