Bandcamp is a good option for directly supporting artists for the time being, especially if you queue up all your purchases for a Bandcamp Friday, where artists/labels receive all the money rather than BC taking their 20% cut.
Not just a good option, but the best option I know of. If you buy an album for $5, that’s equivalent to the earnings for thousands of plays on Spotify. And that would be assuming the artist even gets enough total Spotify plays to qualify for their payout under the new rules.
They are stealing from artists who bring business to the platform, and using the guise of protecting themselves from bot streamers. Oh, and they recently raised the subscription price by 25% in my country. Spotify was the most satisfying subscription to cancel that I have ever cancelled.
They’re also being accused of pushing their own AI-generated slop music so that they have to pay out even less to real artists. Fuck Spotify.
It’s not confirmed afaik, but there is big motive behind it for Spotify to flood listeners with artists they don’t have to pay.
There’s also the apparent problem of third parties uploading AI slop. Spotify is putting in minimum listener requirements to supposedly deal with this, but what it will do instead is it choke out real small artists, and the AI artists will just get botted above the minimum pay threshold. To me, this gives Spotify even more motive than before to dilute all artists on the platform with their own AI music. They already make deals with large labels and podcasters, they don’t care about the other 90% of artists who eat at their bottom line.
“Spotify … anticipates reaching profitability for the full year in 2024, which would mark the company’s first full profitable year since it launched 18 years ago.”
Interesting that they anticipate a full year of profit when there is this “AI problem” plaguing them. How convenient it would be if it turned out to be their own AI artists they don’t have to pay.
"Ek said moving forward, Spotify will be more disciplined about how it spends money. “You should not expect that we’re going to go back to 2021 behavior. We want to be very resourceful,” he said. "
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/13/spotify-projects-first-full-year-of-profitability-ever
This video shows some AI artist profiles and talks about it more:
Da Colinata - Spotify’s MASSIVE Fake AI Scandal