Technology

After several of my favorite songs disappeared from Spotify, I've adopted a different approach to music.

If I see on on a band show merch stand, I buy a cassette. It's more of a novelty item and a way to slightly support the band. While I do have a portable tape player, I only rarely take it out. I switched from LPs to tapes because of the costs and huge effort associated with playing or storing them (that is, if you do it right are are not OK with fucking up your LPs), but tapes are cool and don't have that many storage or playing problems.

Other than that, I've stopped paying for any kind of streaming services, and save the 10$ per month to just buy one or two (new or old) albums from my favourite artists on Bandcamp, that I've spend the last month listening to the most. The albums I buy I add to my NAS library, which usually replaces stolen copies of said albums that I've previously got from Redacted.

This allows me to keep a pretty expansive library, by just stealing what I need, but with a promise that I'll eventually buy the album (using the money I saved on streaming services), if it's something that I've listened to extensively. I'm also not at mercy of streaming services, that can take away my music whenever they decide to.

So far I've been doing this for a few years, and even increased my budget for just buying albums if I can't immediately find them on Redacted.

You know what, this makes me feel a lot better about using an ad-blocker when using their site. Although, I would prefer if the artists I listen to didn't exclusively use Spotify for some reason.

I have some questions about the royalties and the collective bargaining:

1. Are the payments from streaming in addition to payment for being a songwriter via ASCAP or whatever royalty facilitator is used?
2. If you have not signed to a label, or had a previous contract, is there anything stopping that person from collective bargaining? It seems to me if there is no contract, then they are not a supplier unless they want to be.

I don't use Spotify or any paid service, they rarely have the music I listen to anyway. I do give donations to SOMA FM for groove salad, but I imagine they too are paying the bare minimum - a radio type royalty. But I also tend to buy physical music from the musicians I like and I do go out to see performances. By the way, although I don't know Galaxie 500, I do recognize the Ornette Coleman reference; I do listen to Ornette live music from time to time.

There are a lot of issues here. I think you should have the right to own the company (streaming service) if you could be allowed to collectively get musicians to create a co-op or something like that. On the other hand I find it confusing when compared to my own work, where the company owns the code I write. I do not get paid every time it runs for the rest of my life, so why should you? But I get that the music industry corporations are ruthless, exploitive and chew up talent and spit them out, and are using the streaming services for their own benefit.

Some people might say what are you complaining about? You have a platform that is freely advertising your music, it is up to you to convert that to money. Other people might say that without your music, there would not be a platform. So once again, it seems the only way out is to have your own musician ran platform. So I support that, thanks for the shout out to the issues you face in collective bargaining, and the current legislation in the US.

Someone mentioned Faircamp recently. I haven't had a chance to look into it properly but it looks great!

Why are you not moving to a different distribution model where you'll get what you're worth? I'll go where the music is. If you keep putting it on Spotify then I'll play it on Spotify.

I don't even like using Spotify or Pandora, it's full of ads and I can't play what I want to play. I just go to YouTube or download what I want. Their structure sucks.

This is one of the reasons I use soundcloud when listening to music.

Stop using spotify. Start using Vimusic, innertune