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?
Qbittorrent
That pays exactly $0 per stream to the artists.
Tell me you don't know how Qbittorrent works without doing so. It's not a streaming service. If you're redownloading on BT each time you want to listen, my god, are you wasting disk space.
You know what I meant, don't deliberately misunderstand.
You can donate to the ones who deserve it and still have access to the drm free music locally
That doesn't solve discoverability of new content, which is one of the good features of Spotify
That's slowly being replaced with "AI content", Spotify is literally becoming more shit by the day.
I don't really use it myself, but you can scrobble to services like last.fm and get recommendations that way.
And if you want to sponsor your favorite artists, just go to their concerts or buy some music or merch. You're paying them way more that way than your plays on streaming platforms ever will.
Is it though? Seems like their algorithm gives everyone the same shit.
Do you want payola? Because that's how you get payola.
Wdym listening to new music
This is a "those 10 good tracks on repeat" household !