Welcome to the era of only Spotify Plays matter - let’s take a look at the underbelly of streaming scams affecting independent artists.
Welcome to the era of only Spotify Plays matter - let’s take a look at the underbelly of streaming scams affecting independent artists.
A long time ago, you could go to a special store and trade government paper for music disks and tape that you got to keep forever.
When I discovered that it was possible to buy and download drm free lossless flac-files i went back to buying music again. Never looked back tbh.
Where do you buy them from?
Dunno about the user you asked, but I’ve used Bandcamp for that.
Im gonna guess bandcamp?
Well hey old man, go to bandcamp and pay a quarter or an eighth of the price of that frisbee to get lossless audio files that you can download and backup to your heart’s content.
Spotify was always for chumps.
Alright, I got an eighth. How do I trade it for music?
Come to my house and I’ll play you some of my CDs
I remember that time and it was kind of awful. It was brutal in terms of packaging, and lugging around all those cds sucked. It was way more expensive and the money still all went to record companies, not to mention how terrible it felt to pay full price for a mostly garbage cd just for one song (singles existed though but not for everything).
Records companies also had final say on who we listened too and completely controlled the whole scene essentially.
I get the nostalgia but it was 100% worse both for artists and consumers. Well it has always been rough for artists tbh, I don’t know if it’s harder right now or not.
The contracts that steal music from artists haven’t changed one iota. Unless you’ve got juice like Paul McCarty, Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, and even then it can be a fight that takes years.
I have a feeling it’s easier to put your music out there as an independant artists. There’s always someone taking a cut but the contacts are optional and there isn’t much gate keeping like before.
This 100%. Just because capitalism makes streaming unethical doesn’t mean we need to go back to old studio system of other capitalist bastards to serve as gatekeepers of art.
[glances at shelf in corner]
Can confirm.