I’m disgressing a bit here on my way to consume musics and a recent thinking I had.
Streaming
Since a few years I moved (probably like many others) to Spotify to listen my music still by financing the artist after trying Deezer for a moment but not finding (at that time) all the musics I liked.
The question of the finance
I recently took some time to look more closely on the actual financial system to retribute the artists under spotify. But it looks a bit ugly to me with an impression (maybe wrong) that the top artists (or their managing compagny) percive most of the money, the others getting very few in propotion with a few centimes per listen.
What I would have expected
Personally I would have expected a fairly simple system (maybe it is still not fair), which could just be :
- As a user I pay ~11€ per month
- I listen let says 10 different musics this month (form 6 artists for example, many track for some artists). I’m not accounting here how many times I listen each.
- Each artist percive (11€ * {nb_track} / 10) from me for this month.
We can also just account listen by artist and not the per track details, to be seen what is more fait. At the end, I would say that it is good if everybody gets enougth to live.
How I can compensate ?
As a simple Spotify user, I have now way to contrôle this (why not providing us the choice on how to spread our money with several policies available ?).
Every year I starts a new playlist in which I add days after days all the tracks I discover in the year an like to listen and listen again during this year.
In order to be more fair with the artists I liked, I’m trying now to force myself along the year to by the MP3 for those tracks which finance a bit more the artists (I hope). I’m still not totaly happy because, then I still just by 1 track when they built an album, but this is a step forward.
In addition I get a backup if tomorrow Spotify disapear.
MP3 stores
I searched a bit to find a way to buy my MP3 without falling down in Apple store & Amazone & Youtube Music.
In this search, I fainlly found something which makes me quite happy for most of the cases by playing over two platforms to get what is missing on the other one:
I sill miss some tracks for which I currently have no solutions.
Costs
With the number of musics I add per year in my yearly-list (~120-150 tracks) it in practice cost me ~130€ per year if I will substain that path. It means doubling my music budget accounting the Spotify per month price.
As I’m not anymore a student, it looks to me quite fair even still not perfect.
I currently try to by tacks by batches to feed ~10-15€, which means I will try to restrict myself to by regularly my musics in order to make the artists getting money not only at the en of the year.
Lets see
Lets see if I succeed to sustain this over time. Lets hope for the artists who I need to thank for making my days greater.
Notes about logos license
This article is under CC BY-ND 4.0 as the rest of the blog, but not the two logos present on this page (7digital & Qobuz & BandCamp) which are not covered by this license.