We know this because Weird Al used his year-end video to make the world aware that, in return for his tens of millions of streams, he got around $80.00 from Spotify for a whole year.

How does that work? 10 million Spotify streams should pay more than $20k in royalties.

And included in half the staff was every member of their union bargaining committee. The workers got done dirty when that sale to Songtradr happened. I’m not even sure if Songtradr has recognized the union yet. They had just won their election (overwhelmingly) and the sale happened right after that.

Yeah I agree with all of this. Shame there isn’t a better option at the moment, but they’re the lesser of a bunch of evils - so I guess I’m sticking with them for a bit longer.

Oh, my bad: I thought bandcamp was part of the major services. Shows what I know 😅

I have some music on streaming services, and get a couple of coins every month. If you pirate my music instead, I’ll get nothing.

Thanks but maybe I’m a bit slow, how does that work?

Say I use mplayer or aplay to play from my local ~/Music/ directory, or even VLC to play from my minidlna server on my RaspberryPi. Say I play a tune named tune.ogg which has metadata saying “Tsunami” by the artist “R3HAB” and it ends. How could my player then pick the next song, from my library or elsewhere, not randomly but rather because it’s related somehow to this song?

I’m not sure where you get the information that it’s not DRM free

They explicitly say you can download songs while not mentioning the inclusion of any DRM

I’m curious where you found that

Even if we assume there’s an achievable rate of growth that can consistently outpace owned plays at any given time, as with every business, there will come a day when growth slows. And at that point, they’ll be forced to solve the problem.

And then there’s all the questions of, can I download my tracks to play offline? What if they go out of business? How many artists/labels are even going to agree to this? What about tracks I buy outside of their platform? And what does “own” actually mean given that you never “own” music you buy physical media for, you don’t have any copyright, you can’t play that media for profit, you just have a license to listen to that copy personally. By default the artist “owns” their art. But do they have to give that ownership up to the co-op?

It’s going to be tough to convince people who don’t care to switch away from spotify, and there’s no reason for someone who can self-host to use it unless it’s somehow more effective at funding musicians than just buying their tracks directly.

I wish them luck making the idea work, but I think they have their work cut out for them.

That’s fair, just…for this to scale, it needs to be competitive with existing streaming services. And if the experience for a listener is the same whether a democratic panel raises prices, or greedy enshittification raises prices, there’s not going to be an upside.

To me, the potential upside is identifying the problems with their revenue stream now out in the open, and addressing it now, rather than trying to build a captive audience now and pivot to something more sustainable later (as is the strategy for capitalist startups).

I would need to buy a lot of CDs at this point and I’m not doing that anymore.

This is how the music industry is screwing artists.

Think about it. Hollywood is union, which ensures money and jobs make it down to every blue collar worker involved in every Netflix-funded project. But music isn’t union, there’s just a bunch of random bands, and middlemen who will gladly take everything. The record labels and streaming services turn a profit, pay their execs, and get away with sending fractions of a cent per play to the artists. Most artists don’t post to streaming services for the money, they do it just for the convenience of fans.

Giving money directly to an artist in exchange for their tracks or merch (CDs, Vinyls, etc) is the best way to fund an artist. Bandcamp is another middleman that enables this, but at least they have Bandcamp Fridays periodically, which is where they waive their cut and give the bulk of your payment directly to the artist.

IMO buying tracks on Bandcamp Friday + self-hosting Plex/Jellyfin + using Plexamp/Finamp on mobile is the best way to support music right now, and also future proofs your library.

It also kind of forces you to consume music in a more focused way. Instead of cycling through hundreds of songs in a few minutes you are forced to preselect what you really want to hear. Which has both its pros and cons, but I enjoy the “slow pace” when discovering new songs.

Yes. They’re pretty good

Btw, afaik we are now at a point where artists earn next to nothing from streaming and make the bulk of the money from tours, shows and the like.

Most of the money from your streaming subscription goes either to the service provider (Spotify, Apple etc) or to the major label.

Trump and his party are ruining that horrible country rapidly so it’s normal a great part of the world likes that.
The slightly less fascist dems keep their regime’s fascism and horrible abuses for their many many foreign wars so the imperialism keeps running like clockwork because their voters who only care about themselves aren’t bothered by what they do elsewhere and don’t need to complain as they do now.
They are here every day crying about how they want to get back to their perfect democracy.
Genocide, regime changes, wars, kids in cages were OK right up to Trump, as long as it didn’t inconvenience them.

Its an Australian company founded by this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wiltshire and this guy https://www.songtradr.com/helge

Songtradr is a fairly boring ecommerce platform for music from what I can read. Boring is good though, I don’t see any dramas / issues in my brief web traipsing.