Then they should ditch their stupid payment pool model and have each user’s money go to the artists they actually listen to.
If someone with a free account listens to one song a hundred times in a month, and I listen to one track from my favorite artist, it works like this:
Spotify pools my money and the ad money from the free user. Then they divide that amount by the number of plays, and that’s how much each play gets paid.
But this means the hundred plays from the free account, get paid for with my money, instead of it going to the one artist I actually listened to.
Spotify’s payment model means you can literally steal from the artists by either botfarming plays, or doing shit like this podcast, that game the algorithm into racking up tons of plays. Another example are these playlists of good music, but stolen and uploaded by someone other than the original artist. If the playlist gets recommended and people mindlessly put them on, and the playlist just racks up plays like mad for that one “artist” who posted tracks they didn’t even make. Once the playlist gets traction, IIRC the creator can even bait-and-switch the content.
Then they should ditch their stupid payment pool model and have each user’s money go to the artists they actually listen to.
If someone with a free account listens to one song a hundred times in a month, and I listen to one track from my favorite artist, it works like this:
Spotify pools my money and the ad money from the free user. Then they divide that amount by the number of plays, and that’s how much each play gets paid.
But this means the hundred plays from the free account, get paid for with my money, instead of it going to the one artist I actually listened to.
Spotify’s payment model means you can literally steal from the artists by either botfarming plays, or doing shit like this podcast, that game the algorithm into racking up tons of plays. Another example are these playlists of good music, but stolen and uploaded by someone other than the original artist. If the playlist gets recommended and people mindlessly put them on, and the playlist just racks up plays like mad for that one “artist” who posted tracks they didn’t even make. Once the playlist gets traction, IIRC the creator can even bait-and-switch the content.