Recent news revealed that Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek has been investing heavily in military tech companies, which adds another ethical layer to a platform already criticized for how little it pays musicians !
Spotify only pays artists about $3–5 per 1,000 streams, using a pro-rata model that directs most money toward major stars... By contrast, Qobuz (≈$18–20 per 1,000 streams) and Tidal (≈$12–13) pay far more fairly!
However Tidal is far from ethical. Most of its revenue is controlled by private investors and founders and small artists still earn very little...
More fair-minded platforms like Bandcamp, Resonate, Ampled, or SoundCloud’s fan-powered royalties prioritize musicians over investors.
With these more ethical alternatives available, why do we keep using Spotify?
I'm not really worried about whether a label or corporation deems me to have the "right" to listen to their music. The only thing I'm concerned with outside of consuming the art is the artist who made it. I highly doubt any artist would genuinely care if someone pirated their music but still payed them through other means (like buying merch, tickets, etc).
I think the argument of who gets paid what when you buy merch is irrelevant when you consider the alternative being the artist gets virtually nothing. I would have to listen to an artist 200 times for them to maybe get a singular dollar from spotify. If whoever is handling their merch store is giving them less than that for each sale of a shirt then it's the artists fault at that point for still working with them.
That's literally what happened with Napster. Metallica were rather pissed, and Napster shut down, leading to the fun P2P days of Whac-a-Mole.
"This is Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Metallica. This month he was planning to install a gold plated shark tank bar beside his pool, but thanks to people like you downloading his music, he must now wait a few months before he can afford it."
My late 20s partner has no idea what Napster is and it breaks my heart.
Fuuuuuuuuck Metallica of course it was one of the grotesquely wealthy ones that tried to kill sharing. Maybe the entire industry eat itself and collapse !