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Music streaming industry discussions (soundcloud, mixcloud, spotify, youtube etc)

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Friends,

 

Let's discuss the music streaming, artist royalties, advertising etc.

Youtube, Mixcloud, Spotify pay royalties to artist, but how fair are they?

- Would be interesting to hear from artist what do they think about the income from these services

- Would be lovely to hear from streaming users why they prefer certain services over others 

From what i see now, streaming wil notl give appropriate amount of money to artists, so if you like something you listen via streaming and if you wish to thank to the artist, try to purchase something or donate to artist. or in worse case spread word :)

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one of the hot subjects now in internet is about the future of music streaming services for dj's. Soundcloud is getting a weird direction now, and many dj mixes have been removed recently for copyright claims.

what i find interesting is that soundcloud remove mixes from their service, for copyright violation of 1 track. But meanwhile you can find "full albums" on youtube.

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As a listener I love spotify and most of my music comes from spotify. I have also collection of CD`s and couple of donations/bought digital copies but mostly i prefer streaming + donations. 

 

My love for spotify is becouse of couple of reasons:

1) I have it on my phone, laptop, ipad and i have all my liked, stared files, list of all artists that i follow, the news feed about updates from them.

2) Related artists (maybe not always the best) helped me discover awesome music based on fact that have known FSOL and Peace Orchestra (yeah, i ended up with psybient based on those 2 + Astral Projection:)) 

3) Start radio from - also awesome for creating random playlists of tunes from specific genres and styles (its doing preaty good job of guesing tracks based on thumbs up/down feedback in player).
4) Offline mode and saving localy files. 

5) links to web player or spotify player - i ofter talk to my friend on skype/gtalk about music and our inspirations and stuff like that and easy pointing to track is awesome. 

I hope that spotify will grow and one thing that i would love to have in spotify is the ability to go outside spotify (links to home pages) and option to donate to artist in spotify. Other thing is that for me the 10 $ (in poland it is even cheaper) is a joke for high quality streaming and i would be able to pay around 20$ for this service monthly just becouse i`m so happy about it. 

 

One other thing that is missing is the ability to have flac or other loosless compresion for offline mode/saving playlists but i can understand why at least for now they dont have this option implemented. 

From the "producer" point of view, i actualy dont know becouse i`m just starting my journey, and i will probably never "live of music", as I`m software developer and music is my hobby but becouse of lack of time i wont probably achive anything money worth. One thing i know that both me and some of my friends found artists on spotify and then bought physical copies of albums or donated to artists so besides revenue from streaming there is a promotion aspect that is very important and people should not ignore it (thats only my opinio of course). 

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Yeah, probably not, but keep in mind that I`m just starting my journey trought trance/chill/ambient genres (well maybe not starting, but last year i started to go deeper into those genres) so for me at least for now there is so much music to discover and i actually dont know when i will listen to all of this :)

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As a listener and music collector I like Bandcamp the most. It provides free streaming, and the ability to buy albums and individual tracks - somewhat - directly off the artist.

Artists can choose their pricing, including giving tracks away free. I really like this micro-payment model, and it would be nice if this could be expanded for example via direct peer-to-peer payments (avoiding paypal fees for the artist).

 

I don't think Spotify has all the artists I'd like, but I've never really checked to be honest. The ~160 kbps streaming is not for me. I prefer to have the lossless formats on my hard disk or media player.

 

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As a dj who does a monthly show, Soundcloud was immense help in the beginning to helping my show gain some following. Now, like Gagarin says, they have changed somewhat, even taking down one of my early shows that had been on for well over a year. Mixcloud works fine but not fantastic as most fans want a download option. I like the youtube format with the ability to put video to the music but my skill in that regard is only at beginner stage.

 

I'm not sure soundcloud is going to be useful for dj's in the future. But its like all things in this modern world, rapid change and development of new things.

 

Pax!

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As a listener, streaming services are the future. As Mr. UPGrade wrote, its super convenient and the quantity of artists and their music grows daily. Couple that with well thougth out mixset services live mixcloud and you really don't need much else...

 

As a producer, things are really frustrating right now. Digital sales are plummeting, physical sales have reduced to a small niche and streaming royalties are a joke. The music industry is going, once more, through a paradigm shift. 

 

I believe that, in a couple of years, streaming will be all-prevalent and the indie labels that won't find new clever ways to balance their income in other ways will be out of business. We all know that sales won't feed an artist anymore, the music acts as a promo to attract live gigs (not the other way around) so one possible way for a label to survive would be to act as a booking agency for its artists. Of course, that would mean publishing fewer artists and applying tighter quality standards (while now you can find labels releasing 4 - 5 digital EPs a month, each month!!).

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As a producer, things are really frustrating right now. Digital sales are plummeting, physical sales have reduced to a small niche and streaming royalties are a joke. The music industry is going, once more, through a paradigm shift. 

 

 

i see also a possibility of crowd-funding albums/labels, this way we pay (advance) money to artists/labels before the album is ready, once they gather some sufficient money he release album.

if the final work is vety bad future works will be harder to finance, if he succeed then the chances that he (artist) will be funded again are higher then before.

 

also this can be done on the label level, so we can finance labels and let them choose the releases for us.

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Do you believe this plan would work for an unknown artist / startup? Usually you need either a clever idea (the way you can see crowdfunding work in games or tech) or a relatively established name (eg. Ott had no problen crowdfunding his album). Who would fund my album, for instance? So, I tend to believe that a minimum amount of recognition is a prerequisite for crowdfunding to work (unless you have a really innovative idea to propose).

 

The same would be more or less true for a label, I guess. A small, indie unknown label would have a hard time fund a record.

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Do you believe this plan would work for an unknown artist / startup? Usually you need either a clever idea (the way you can see crowdfunding work in games or tech) or a relatively established name (eg. Ott had no problen crowdfunding his album). Who would fund my album, for instance? So, I tend to believe that a minimum amount of recognition is a prerequisite for crowdfunding to work (unless you have a really innovative idea to propose).

 

The same would be more or less true for a label, I guess. A small, indie unknown label would have a hard time fund a record.

 

You and Gargarin make valid points. It seems possible the future (at least for small genre like ours) that artists will have to fund their own ways, supporting their works as best they can and doing it all for simply the love of it.

 

Pax.

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Interesting beatport isn't even on the list...

 

Yeah. Beatport would do well to have an ambient or "electronic" category. To be fair, they do have a "chill out" category, but it sounds just like everything else on Beatport, just <118bpm. Same w/ the electronica category - very Beatport. I know they're firmly entrenched in the dance world, and if you're making house music or its variants, Beatport is the place to sell your music, but no one service is perfect. (Except Bandcamp!)

 

That Spotify article is spot-on! Thanks for posting that.

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Beatport is in my opinion one of the shittiest platforms. Overpriced, only 50% goes to artists/labels. Stopped shopping there many years ago.

 

However, that is irrelevant to the topic. 

 

In any case I agree with many of the points made in the article posted by Gagarin (this one: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/staff-editorials/12136/spotify-royalty-payment-model/ )

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just noticed that bandcamp limits the number of time you can listen to a "unpurchased" album.

i was abusing Don Peyote last album, and after 2-3 full plays it blocked me proposing to purchase.

 

i think is good move - beneficial to artist :)

 

p.s.

the "cheat" solution is to clean cookies, or open browser in "private" session.

the good solution is to "purchase" :)

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