Quitting Spotify, ethics, and pay per stream

There's been a lot of growing momentum behind the "Quit Spotify" movement, mainly driven by artists removing their music from Spotify due to their CEO investing money in military weapons, serving ads for ICE, the growth of AI music on the platform, and a whole host of other issues that have accumulated over the years.

Over the weekend, I stumbled upon the How to quit Spotify 🔗 post that was making the rounds, which shared a journey of figuring out which platform to move to... and they ended up with a service I recently tried and liked: Qobuz. I wish they had an API for the Crucial Tracks app and I did contact them to no avail so far...

Beyond the technical details of moving services, the article mainly focused on the library experience and the amount the service pays per stream. Data I was already well familiar with, so I didn't pay too much attention. I was just glad that more people are taking the need to get off Spotify seriously.

Then today I read a post from Matt Birchler called Pay per stream is a messy metric 🔗 where he comments on using pay per stream as a reason to call Apple Music an "ethical" choice.

But I find the "Apple Music pays more per stream" argument endlessly frustrating because it's horribly misleading. Yes, it's a single data point, but it's telling a sliver of the full story.

and

By a similar token, if Apple Music added a free, ad-supported tier today, many people would start using that, and pay-per-stream would go down to Spotify levels. Or maybe you think that would be a terrible thing, and you think there should be no way for people to stream music without paying $10 or more per month, but let's talk about that then and not about how choosing Apple Music is the more "ethical" choice.

I don't think it's ethical to use Apple Music, but I DO think it's unethical to use Spotify. I don't think the "How to quit Spotify" article made any point other than finding a more ethical alternative to Spotify, which isn't hard... and yes, pay per stream has to be a part of that equation.

The whole point of sharing the "service A pays more per stream than Spotify" is to shift the thinking and encourage people to move to services that better serve artists. If you are paying for a music service, the rate they pay artists should absolutely be a factor. And if you aren't paying for music, what are you doing?

I get that bands currently make more money on Spotify in total, but if bands/fans/etc. keep advocating and the listening behavior switches to better paying services (or forces Spotify to pay more), then that's a good thing.

As an example, here's a post from the band Los Campesinos! 🔗 with raw payout and stream data for an entire year. They would basically double their streaming income if everyone used Tidal, for example. And receive about 33% more than current if everyone used Apple Music. Regardless, the amount they made for 9.3 million streams was only $42,000, which is definitely not enough for a full band...

So please make sure to buy merch, records, and pay to see live music (artists of all sizes!), as streaming is definitely not a sustainable source of income. And my goodness, PAY for streaming. It's $10 a month for seemingly every song that's ever been created... that's beyond a steal.

Just my 2 cents. I know I advocate for Apple Music on Crucial Tracks but only because there's an API that allows me to do what I need the site to do... as I said above, I've contacted Qobuz to no avail (if someone at Qobuz is reading this, hit me up!) and I am also investigating the Tidal API as well.

I'm all for more and better ideas to support music, so if you have ideas of how I can better do that with Crucial Tracks, let me know!

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Updates:

Based on some conversations on Mastodon, here are some additional points I'd like to add:

• The latest numbers I could find on free vs premium Spotify is 58% of users have free accounts on Spotify vs 42% using Premium. Premium generates 90% of the revenue for Spotify. So that's how much premium subsidizes the free stream payouts to artists... and why the overall pay per stream is lower on Spotify, though they generally pay 65-70% of the revenue to rights holders vs Apple Music's ~52%.
• Pay Per Stream is the easiest metric to use to comprehend the impact of streaming on artists. As shown in the Los Campesinos! article I linked above, artists have two metrics: number of streams on the platform and the payout they receive from the platform. Calculating the rate they get from each platform is a simple way to compare platforms since all have different payment models, size, and focus.
• With no change in the marketplace (cost, same payment models, etc), advocating users move to a service that pays artists a better rate is a good thing for artists... and that primarily means using a service that does not offer a free, subsidized tier.
• The whole "Spotify offers more exposure" argument is treading dangerously close to spec work and "do it for free, for the exposure" lines we see in other art and creative work. Let's value art and creativity, people!

Second update:

Matt Birchler posted an update with even more insane stats on Spotify... of the 42% Premium I mentioned above, only 1/3 of those users pay full price. The other 2/3 are on some kind of discounted or promotional plan. Insane.

And according to this data, only about 12% of their revenue comes from advertising. Put another way, 58% of Spotify's users account for 12% of the revenue. Put still another way (and if my ballpark math is right), if a Spotify subscription is $10 per month:

A third of the premium subscribers are paying $10

Two-thirds of premium subscribers are generating some amount less than $10

Free users are generating about $1