Kcap

54k for me too, weird.

I have a Dyson smart air purifier / heater combo in my room. It has a mostly real time app that shows whether the air is healthy or unhealthy. One night I was laying in bed and felt some gargantuan ass thunder brewing, so I aimed my cheeks toward the Dyson and watched gleefully as my air quality went from green to red. Technology is amazing.

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Giddy up!

The English Patient. Sex in a tub? That doesn't work!

I'd argue though that talent is subjective of course. You said, let's give them money for their talent, making music, but how do we quantify that? If someone write 200 songs real quick but they're all hastily and crappily done, does that get rewarded with money if they themselves argue, hey, I'm talented, this is what I do full time, and I made more songs than other people, so I deserve more? The current way we have to quantify this is by number of streams unfortunately. That doesn't mean of course that T Swift is more talented than that super sick jazz band you like who have all spent their entire lives being classically trained etc, but it's what has garnered people's interest and unfortunately that is the game as it stands today.

To be fair, I worked in the music industry for over a decade booking and promoting shows. I've also worked for two different festivals as well as 5 years managing a radio station, so I have some idea how this all works. It being oversaturated is the point. Just the top 50 artists on Spotify have received over 3,000,000,000,000 streams combined.

I'd love for every talented musician to be able to make a living doing what they love, but people are sheep and will listen to what they're sold and in a crowded space I don't see how that's tenable. When someone comes up with a better system, I'll be on board, but until then I'm gonna keep supporting the bands I love by seeing them live, telling my friends, buying their t-shirts, and encouraging them.

Hope you had a good Christmas too man, cheers

We're probably on the same page of billionaires should not exist. The argument gets convoluted all the time though and reduced down to rich guy makes more than starving artists, which is misleading in my opinion.

The CEO of Spotify hasn't taken a salary in 7 years. In 2024, he sold $320 million of stock which is only a fraction of his $7.5 billion net worth. Realistically, much of his net worth has likely come from investing his payouts into other things that have nothing to do with Spotify.

The Spotify market cap is $100 billion. Which means investors, retail included, keep pumping money into the company because clearly users keep using it. So is the real issue one guy? Or all of us who want a lot for a little, whether it be unlimited music access, or for our $200 on Robinhood to become $300.

To my original point, in a crowded field of nearly 10 million bands/artists streaming their music on these services, if you care about their success as a consumer the best way to support them currently is live shows and merch. It's okay that you're not into either of those, but even if you could choose which artists your monthly $10 is allocated to, it wouldn't be enough for everyone to get fed with all the competition out there.

Tidal, which is currently the 'best' in terms of streaming payouts pays 3x higher to artists than Spotify. The problem is likely scalability though. If people left Spotify en masse and went to Tidal, their server costs go up, they need to hire more staff etc. They'd end up probably very similar to Spotify on the long run.

And I'm not trying to give you sass or argue, but I feel like your comment supported my point. You said you have hundreds of artists in your favorites, that you don't prefer to go to shows, or want to buy merch, all of which is fine and your choice. But when you extrapolate your hundreds, against my hundreds, against the 9.8 million other bands/artists on these streaming services, $10 a month minus the operating costs of the company that provides that service to us, of course it's not enough. So again, yeah, fuck billionaires, but like, one dude is not the end all be all problem and all I was saying was it's a reduction argument that is overused.

Honestly, I'm kinda sick of the artists payouts argument. The music industry is incredibly saturated. Like more saturated than anything else we consume daily by far. Having a few million streams sounds really impressive until you realize that the top 1,000 streamed artists all have more than 2 billion streams, and you've probably only even heard of a quarter of them. Some generic singer songwriter dude I went to high school with has a couple million streams, but in the broad scope he's absolutely nobody compared to the big dogs.

It's a competitive field. Physical albums can still sell to collectors, but not like they used to. So if you want to make a living as a band, you have to get creative and find other ways to profit. My personal favorite band realized touring is where they get paid the most, so they do well over 100 gigs a year, all over the world, and they've been doing it for 30 years.

The biggest reason I use Spotify personally is for music discovery. I've discovered countless bands because their algorithm is great and knows what I like. The amount of money I've spent on concert tickets, t-shirts, beers at venues etc all because I heard your song a couple times thanks to an algorithm is lost on folks making the streaming payout argument. If your music is good, it will get me to come see you live. If your live show is good, I'll come back and bring a friend.

Recorded music in my opinion should be an entry point, your argument for why I should come see you instead of the literal 9.8 million other artists on Spotify. Again, it's a competitive ass field. Not to be confused with a 'competitive ass' field which sounds fun.

Just did a quick google, apparently it's a non profit, and you can buy all their stuff online: sdotm.com

I live in San Diego, and my best friend lives in Cincinnati. He sent me this exact logo on a shirt and I was like, um, what? How? Apparently it's a store there and all they sell is that logo on every kind of merch imaginable.

Sucks to be Matt Gaetz. I don't say that in relation to this news really, I bet it just sucks to be Matt Gaetz like every day.