Last week, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers petitioned Spotify for better pay per stream. Spotify has clearly heard those complaints and is now offering a way for artists to get potentially get discovered all while getting paid even less than they are now.
According to Spotify, they're introducing a new mechanic that will allow any content creator (podcasters, musicians, etc.) to get in front of more listeners for free. To engage with more listeners, you can buy Spotify streams. All you have to do is agree to a "promotional recording royalty rate for streams in personalized listening sessions", which in regular folk-speak means any music that comes up in radio and autoplay.
"To ensure the tool is accessible to artists at any stage of their careers, it won’t require any upfront budget," said Spotify in a portion of their statement. "Instead, labels or rights holders agree to be paid a promotional recording royalty rate for streams in personalized listening sessions where we provided this service. If the songs resonate with listeners, we’ll keep trying them in similar sessions. If the songs don’t perform well, they’ll quickly be pulled back. Listener satisfaction is our priority—we won’t guarantee placement to labels or artists, and we only ever recommend music we think listeners will want to hear.
"We’re testing this to make sure it’s a great experience for both listeners and artists. To start, we’ll focus on applying this service to our Radio and Autoplay formats, where we know listeners are looking to discover new music. As we learn from this experiment, we’ll carefully test expanding to other personalized areas of Spotify."
Spotify's payout to artists has been a hot topic over the years. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek places the blame on artists, saying you can't release music "every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough" (which didn't go over well), while folks like ex-The Dillinger Escape Plan vocalist Greg Puciato said the conversation isn't so black and white. Then there are bands like Sumac that are just refusing to put their new record on Spotify in protest of the platform.
