holy fuck spotify scam batman

Executive summary: a weird shady company - that is kind of connected with Spotify - is putting music on Spotify with artists that don't really exist - those artists have millions of streams and show up on official playlists. End result is that "real" artists end up getting less payout from Spotify because of how the $$$ per one stream is calculated.

Yeah, this is kind of Spotify's business model.

I don’t get it. 

tl;dr version is spotify runs a grey area con where they pay a lot of royalties to themselves.

  On 1/15/2021 at 1:00 PM, sheatheman said:

I don’t get it.

the esoteric happy mealification of hype has become exoteric

I've said this from the start... fuck Spotify. 

https://www.inputmag.com/culture/spotify-is-letting-scammers-rip-artists-off-in-plain-sight

 

  Quote

On June 26th, Brad Petering and Jason Wyman of the popular indie band TV Girl checked their Spotify artist page and found that they’d uploaded a new single.

The song, which had been posted that morning, had triggered a notification for each of their 119,000 Spotify followers, urging them to check it out. It also appeared in the “Release Radar” — an auto-generated playlist that populates with new releases from artists in your library — of their over 1 million monthly listeners.

Right away, Brad and Jason were confused. They hadn’t greenlit a new single, and the cover art, a hi-res stock photo of two hands clasping, was a far cry from their usual two-tone, film-grain aesthetic.

Baffled, they listened to it and even more red flags went up. It was obvious, at least to them, that this wasn’t a TV Girl song. Instead of the hypnotic bedroom pop the band built its following on, this was generic, sanitized EDM. Like the cover art, it felt stock — less like an actual song and more like background music for a YouTube ad.

They had questions. Had someone hacked their account to troll them? Was a scammer making money by impersonating their band? And if that was the case, why a mid-sized band like TV Girl? Why not Billie Eilish, or Post Malone?

It wasn’t until Brad and Jason looked around online that they realized they were a part of something much bigger. The rogue single was far from an isolated incident. Rather, it was a part of an industry-wide hijacking — one that had targeted at least a dozen artists that week alone.

Searching through online music forums, they managed to find 11 other artists who’d unwittingly uploaded EDM tracks to their Spotify pages, all on either June 25th or 26th, all with the same oversaturated, flowery-aesthetic cover art.

Among those targeted were some big names in the indie rock scene: Foxygen, Frankie Cosmos, Pond, and Crumb were all victims. Perhaps most notably included was Her’s, a British duo whose quick rise to fame was abruptly stopped short last year after both members died in a car crash.

..........................................

[Read the rest in the article]

Expand  

  On 1/15/2021 at 1:43 PM, Squee said:

https://www.inputmag.com/culture/spotify-is-letting-scammers-rip-artists-off-in-plain-sight

I think that's because anybody can somehow upload stuff to other people's artist pages. Happens to Bladee all the time where some third party will upload one of his old singles to spotify and it'll disappear after 3 days.

Anyway I found some of these fake accounts the other day under the names of 'Drake' and 'Ed Sheeran'. I hope Spotify take the accounts and their respective tracks down.

Spotify should just go away or pay the artists what they ought to be paid.

  On 1/15/2021 at 1:56 PM, Squee said:

Spotify should just go away or pay the artists what they ought to be paid.

I feel like the proper way forward with these central content repositories is to either nationalise or regulate the royalties and the whole process, because right now its bullshit.

  On 1/15/2021 at 1:53 PM, milkface said:

I think that's because anybody can somehow upload stuff to other people's artist pages. Happens to Bladee all the time where some third party will upload one of his old singles to spotify and it'll disappear after 3 days.

Anyway I found some of these fake accounts the other day under the names of 'Drake' and 'Ed Sheeran'. I hope Spotify take the accounts and their respective tracks down.

That's not what this is about, this is about Spotify's long-term practice of contracting with companies that produce music and manufacture nonexistent artists to package it with (not a new practice on its own, that's been happening in some form or other as long as the record industry has existed), artificially promoting them via curated lists which gives them a bunch of plays, which boosts their position in the Spotify agorithm hence even more plays, so the artists getting the most royalties paid out are disproportiontely these fake artists, royalties get paid to the rights holders but oh surprise the company that Spotify subcontracted to is owned by the same company that owns Spotify so they're paying themselves.

Also a lot of the high visibility, mainstream real artists on Spotify are given lower payout-per-play in exchange for higher visibility as part of negotiated deals with spotify, which means that even within the tiny fraction of artists on Spotify who get the majority of royalties, the payouts tend to skew in favor of the fake artists.

Before the Internet, distributors had to do this by physically unloading unsold records from the backs of trucks and warehouses and selling them to the mafia or whatever was handy so they wouldn't show up on the books and royalties wouldn't have to be paid.  Electronic distribution has made it much more efficient, you dont't even need to have artists anymore at all.

Given how known all this is, I wonder why aren't big labels and artists publicly raising a stink about this? Is it because the big industry players are doing similar scams of their own and would not want to be under scrutiny?

Wow I get it now. I have hated Spotify ever since 2009 man. Remember how good music YouTube was then? I would find artists there and then buy their stuff.

discogs is still good for that 

  On 1/15/2021 at 5:18 PM, sheatheman said:

Remember how good music YouTube was then? I would find artists there and then buy their stuff.

discogs is still good for that

2011 youtube deepdive music finds was peak internet crate digging aesthetic. i agree that discogs is also still pretty good for finding new stuff. soulseek as well. kind of excited to see what emerges from the currently ongoing explosion of peer-based networks

random side note: I hope nothing ever goes wrong with bandcamp. that's pretty all I use these days to listen to and buy music.

i recently switched to apple music. not sure if they're any better, but fuck spotify.

apple has essentially every artist that spotify has and pays the artist more (allegedly)

  On 1/15/2021 at 2:17 PM, TubularCorporation said:

That's not what this is about, this is about Spotify's long-term practice of contracting with companies that produce music and manufacture nonexistent artists to package it with (not a new practice on its own, that's been happening in some form or other as long as the record industry has existed), artificially promoting them via curated lists which gives them a bunch of plays, which boosts their position in the Spotify agorithm hence even more plays, so the artists getting the most royalties paid out are disproportiontely these fake artists, royalties get paid to the rights holders but oh surprise the company that Spotify subcontracted to is owned by the same company that owns Spotify so they're paying themselves.

Yeah but in Squee's article it says that the song was added to TV Girl (an actual band)'s page as opposed to a new artist having been created to upload the songs.

maybe should be merged w/the other spotify thread?

  On 1/15/2021 at 5:59 PM, mister miller said:

i recently switched to apple music. not sure if they're any better, but fuck spotify.

apple has essentially every artist that spotify has and pays the artist more (allegedly)

I really enjoy Apple Music. Music was always my main reason for liking apple. 
 

also yeah I’ve heard about people using soulseek. Didn’t it get taken down completely a while ago or something 

  On 1/15/2021 at 8:31 PM, sheatheman said:

also yeah I’ve heard about people using soulseek. Didn’t it get taken down completely a while ago or something 

i believe youre thinking of what.cd 

  On 1/15/2021 at 7:19 PM, milkface said:

Yeah but in Squee's article it says that the song was added to TV Girl (an actual band)'s page as opposed to a new artist having been created to upload the songs.

Right, but the bigger problem is what I was talking about.  There was a big expose about it a year or two ago and nothing hapened of course, probably linked somewhere in the other thread.

Another thing I heard is that Distrokid is owned by Spotify now. Which means I am going to probably get off Distrokid and give Soundcloud's Repost thing a try.

  Quote

The revenue (or lack thereof) from streaming services has long been a sore subject for anyone who isn't a record label or, y'know, the aforementioned streaming services. British singer-songwriter, Gary Numan, recently told Sky News that he "had a statement a while back and one of my songs had had over a million plays, million streams, and it was £37 (around $50). I got £37 from a million streams."

In another instance, Numan tried printing out his entire recent streaming statement, which although amounting to over 100 pages, netted the artist barely $150. "It was barely worth the [paper] it was printed on, and it took nearly half an hour to print," he said.

Expand  

Musicians are still getting screwed over by streaming services (Input)

Don't use them. Just don't. Please.

Doesn't that have something to do with his label contracts? 

  On 1/23/2021 at 7:01 PM, dcom said:

Don't use them. Just don't. Please.

Tell that to the musicians. If they pull their music from these streaming services they become worthless.

  On 1/23/2021 at 9:44 PM, chim said:

Doesn't that have something to do with his label contracts? 

I wonder what the hell sort of label contracts are cool with accepting 50 bucks for a million listens. At least from the article it seems to say that he directly got some receipt from the service.

I agree though all this sounds sketchy as fuck.