#MuteSpotify
We watched as they heralded the death of the music industry. But the music industry is thriving, it's the music that's terminal.
"Obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can't record music once every three to four years and think that's going to be enough..."
Daniel Ek, CEO and co-founder of Spotify
This dick thinks he can dictate the musical direction of artists?
Spotify has created a monolithic culture of teenager playlisters begging for nu music pleez as hundreds of proffessional musicians fawn over these nobodies for one more lousy stream that gets them nowhere.
The results are in: Spotify sucks. And the other streaming services are not much better.
Which brings us back to the anti-Spotify. It's becoming more common, especially among younger bands, to eschew Spotify altogether and post their digital music files on Bandcamp exclusively. [Ed. note: We've been noticing, anecdotally but with increasing frequency, that many new releases we'd like to include on our playlists don't make the jump from being posted on Bandcamp to appearing on platforms like Spotify.]
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903547253/a-tale-of-two-ecosystems-on-bandcamp-spotify-and-the-wide-open-future
The anti-Spotify: How online music company Bandcamp became the toast of the COVID age
“Spotify didn’t do anything to actually improve the financial situation for musicians out of their own pocket,” Swift said. Indicting Spotify’s billionaire founder and Chief Executive Daniel Ek as what she called “a morally reprehensible human being,” she added, “the music industry is in a really unfortunate situation where artists feel like they have to use those platforms or they’re not going to get their music heard.”
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-09-22/bandcamp-anti-spotify-streaming
Since the coronavirus pandemic put the live music industry on pause, Bandcamp has waived its usual 10 to 15 percent share of revenues for two full days to support the artists on the platform. May 1 was the second of these Bandcamp Days, which have already helped direct a total of $11.4 million toward musicians.
Bandcamp’s small-scale success has run counter to the mainstream narrative. Founded in 2007, the company has helped artists earn $518 million through sales of digital albums, vinyl, cassettes, CDs, and assorted merch. In addition to being artist-friendly, Bandcamp can also seem more empathetic than streaming services. In August 2017, the company responded to the Trump administration’s proposal to ban transgender people from the military by donating its revenue share to the Transgender Law Center, an Oakland nonprofit focused on transgender rights. And in response to the recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other black Americans, Bandcamp recently announced an annual Juneteenth drive during which it will donate its share of sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. For this week’s Bandcamp Day, several artists and labels will also be donating their proceeds to organizations like Black Visions Collective and various bail funds, as highlighted on the platform’s homepage.
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-earn-from-bandcamp-compared-to-spotify-apple-music-youtube/