Judith Dornstein’s Post

Spotify’s new rules see ‘premium’ artists and ‘premium’ content financially prioritized over so-called low-quality tracks and creator accounts with low engagement. Amongst those rules are that tracks on Spotify must have reached at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months in order to generate royalties on the platform. Only 19.16% of artists on Spotify had over one thousand monthly listeners in 2023. Spotify’s monthly listener count represents each unique individual who has streamed an artist’s music at least once in the last 28 days. Therefore, even if an individual listener streams a song over and over again within the last 28 days they’re only counted once as a monthly listener. https://lnkd.in/dYPidBPp

How to Upload Music to Spotify: A Comprehensive Guide

Great commentary on a really interesting phenomenon in the music industry 🔽 I think whatever anyone feels about this, it's a clear breach of the trust / informal handshake agreement musicians have with the DSPs. We obviously know we're in competition with other artists; that's always been a difficult part of the work. But there's no comparison between an indie artist desperately trying to be heard and a platform-owned ghost writer or producer making music to deliberately take up space on their editorial lists, satisfy an algorithmic need or feed into another business objective. There's a clear financial incentive to playlist one and not the other, regardless of quality. As Drew says, it's an on-the-margins business; Spotify will always say that it can't find more money to pay artists beyond what it pays labels and rights holders already. I think it's an insult to our intelligence as long as these shadow musicians exist and are generating streams in the BILLIONS (with a B). I would call for this to be one of the collective rallying points for us as musicians (alongside low payouts from streaming for songwriters and master rights ownership, the copyright rippoff / stream farming that occurs every day, and what is bound to be a flood-the-zone approach by AI-enabled opportunists) in a push towards streaming equity #streaming #musicbusiness

Chartmetric's Year in Music report for 2023 revealed that only 19.16% of Spotify artists had over 1,000 monthly listeners. Approximately 81% had fewer than 1,000 listeners. Taylor Swift and The Weeknd were the only artists to surpass 100 million monthly listeners for the first time that year. Chartmetric tracks over 9.7 million Spotify artists. Around 7.9 million of these artists have fewer than 1,000 monthly listeners, while just over 1.8 million have more than 1,000. Spotify's monthly listener count tallies unique individuals who streamed an artist's music at least once in the last 28 days, regardless of how many times they listened. #Spotify #MusicIndustry

🎶 Meet Spotify’s Most Played Artist You've Never Heard Of: Johan Röhr 🎶 In the vast world of music streaming, some artists become household names, while others, like Johan Röhr, achieve phenomenal success quietly. Röhr, the most-streamed artist you've likely never heard of, has had his 2,700 songs streamed a staggering 15 billion times on Spotify, surpassing even Michael Jackson in play counts. But who is Johan Röhr? He's the mastermind behind over 650 different artists' names on Spotify, including “Maya Åström”, “Minik Knudsen”, and “Mingmei Hsueh”. His music, primarily instrumental, dominates more than 100 of Spotify’s official playlists, contributing massively to his streaming numbers. The intriguing part of Röhr’s story isn't just his anonymity but the way his music is managed and monetised. Music historian Ted Gioia sheds light on some potentially unsettling practices, suggesting that Spotify's 50/50 royalty deal with Röhr, coupled with his significant presence on the platform, might be a strategy to optimise royalty distributions. This arrangement raises questions about fairness and transparency in royalty payments, especially considering Spotify's Swedish roots align with Röhr’s. This situation opens up a broader conversation about the dynamics of music streaming and royalty distribution. Are streaming giants like Spotify using artists like Röhr to navigate and potentially exploit royalty payment structures? What does this mean for other artists within the ecosystem? 🔍 What are your thoughts on this development? Is this a clever business strategy or a questionable practice that could undermine the integrity of royalty payments to other artists? Let's discuss the implications of such arrangements and how they shape the landscape of music streaming. #Spotify #MusicIndustry #Royalties #StreamingMusic #JohanRöhr

96% of the music added to Spotify everyday comes from Indie/DIY artists. But yet… 95% of Spotify payouts go to just ~200,000 artists. Most of them are major label signed/backed, too. That’s 1.8% of the 11,000,000 artists present on Spotify. This seems a little unbalanced, don't you think 🤔 Here are some of the things you can do to maximise the money you make on streaming, and get closer to the industry heavyweights: 👉 Writing your own music and lyrics 👉 Playing all the instruments in your songs (or at most hiring session musicians as work-for-hire, so that they do not claim any royalties) 👉 Setting up your own distribution company, so you can bypass the middlemen 👉 Setting up your own publishing, so you can collect 100% of publishing royalties 👉 Setting up your own record label 👉 Owning your masters/master rights and not ever selling them, at most licensing them when and where needed 👉 Controlling your mechanical rights (so that you receive royalties from every stream) In short, keep as much as you can in-house, remove the middlemen involved as they always take a cut off the money before it reaches you, and don't leave gates open for people to claim royalties off your work - if really needed, stick to hiring people to do work they get paid for, and part ways with you upon delivery. Streaming isn't all that bad - there are people who make solid money off it without necessarily being signed (let alone signed to a major), it's the multiple stakeholders on every level that end up with claiming money and leaving artists with chump change in the end 😊🤙

Remember the days of unlimited music skips on Spotify's free tier? I bet you didn't know removing it increased paid subscribers 25%. Here's the story: Unlimited skips on free was a golden age for music lovers. → But, for Spotify, there was less gold than they hoped. → So in 2014, Spotify limited skips on the free tier to six per hour. The headlines were: • "Spotify’s free tier just got worse" • "I’m quitting Spotify"    But 6 months later, Spotify saw a 25% increase in paid subscribers. (That's huge!) And, the cherry on top? Churn rate among free users did not go up. How did they do it? • They implemented it as a reverse trial • Users experience unlimited skips for their first 7 days, then hit the skip limit • It was classic, "let them try the premium product first" That’s the power of getting sophisticated with your pricing. You can solve business problems and drive growth.

Spotify’s hard shift toward bundling and its associated loopholes have officially started hitting publisher royalty statements, according to documents shared with Digital Music News this week. So far, it looks like Spotify has taken an extreme turn toward cut-rate bundling recategorizations—here’s a look at the preliminary statements. https://lnkd.in/eUBWJMJK #musicindustry #musicbusiness #musicnews #musicindustrynews #musicpublishing #royalties #musicroyalties

By their agreements with rights holders, DSPs aren't allowed to own music copyrights. Except in very limited & specific circumstances. One way they get around this is with fake artists. Most fake artists are not doing this with Spotify's knowledge, but some are (this is less of an issue at the other DSPs). It was always funny to me when I was doing A&R at Sony Music Entertainment and I'd see some new instrumental "artist" with millions of streams on their very few tracks - and the IP address of their contact would be a mile from Spotify's office in Sweden. The DSPs would *love* to follow the Netflix model - produce and own their own content - but that will not fly with the labels & publishers. So they turn to illicit means to garner some revenue on the margins. Streaming is a margins business, after all. #musicindustry #musicbusiness #streaming #fakeartists

Hi there, I hope you're well. My name is Pedro B, CEO of Laida Music S.L, and I would like to make you a proposal that may be unusual but surprising and real. Have you worked or could you work singing songs as a commission for our company located between Spain and Mexico to do a promotion especially on Spotify, which is the most complex place where there are few in the world who can access it to generate streams, likes , followers, etc...we would pay you approximately $0.0020 for each stream, but we are committed to indexing you 10M annually for each song you sing. Therefore, each song would cost you minimum $100K annually. Now, we also anticipate that the interpretations have to be perfect!! In the case of Spotify, the amount you can expect to receive is between 0.003 and 0.005 dollars per play. Let's say the average is $0.004, which will be more because we geolocate the streams in the countries that pay the most per stream, as in the case of Iceland,Norway,Denmark,UK...,well we could pay you $0.0020 guaranteeing that at a minimum we would generate 10M streams per year, if you do the math it is an incredible business! The only condition is that you have to wait for Spotify through CB Baybe to pay us little by little, so six months is a reasonable time to start collecting your percentage of royalties. What I am proposing to you has one of the best programming and computing engineers behind it, because Spotify has updated its anti-bot system and has very high protection. that very few in the world can achieve, not be "hunted". We can pay you $0.0020 for each transmission, guaranteeing that we would generate at least 10 million transmissions for each song minimum. (in cases where the song in its genre has a positive response commercially, we can generate up to 500M streams) $0.0020 x 10,000,000streams =$20,000 for each song streamed x 5 songs=$100K annually. If you do the math, it's an amazing deal. We do not allow more than 5 songs a year maximum. The songs have to be original, from the artist or from someone else. 100% of the royalties from the song would go to our company. Our business model is new and unique at this time within the music industry. But you decide. Think about it. Everything is false in the music industry. The multinationals do it too to inflate their profits and generate expectations for their artists. Spotify creates its own artists with more than 500M streams and 50M Followers, but then that artist doesn't exist, do you understand me? Waiting for your answer Kind regards Pedro B. Contact:laidamusic@gmail.com #music#bussines 😎 😎