I have music on Spotify that I will be removing as well because of their decision not to pay out small artist streams under a certain amount.
I pay a distributor (distrokid) to send out music, and do not have a direct agreement with Spotify. As far as I'm concerned, monetizing my music without my consent is theft.
Their argument is that the stream amount is so low it ends up not being worth the transaction. On a moral level, I'd argue that it's their responsibility to pay out the money generated even if it costs them money to do so for a small number of streams.
This is estimated to generate $40m annually for them (which they've said they will be distributing to other artists instead), which isn't deeply significant, but this is money that is only generated because of small content creators that have uploaded their content to their distributor (which they pay for) which then distributes to spotify.
If I were to upload directly to Spotify for free, I'd consider the terms different, because I'd expect distribution as the exchange in the relationship. But in this case I pay a distributor, who then sends to spotify, who then decides to offer my content for free and pocket the money. Not acceptable for me.
(note: I consider this relevant to the original article because it is mentioned, as well as because it is one of the variables involved in music purchasing/accessing)
edit: corrected the $40m statement to show where money was going.
You're right, it's not outrageous, but I'd argue theft at any size is still wrong.
I think it's likely they kept this number very low specifically to keep people arguing about whether or not the amount was important, versus if it was OK to be doing in the first place.
It’s basically a <= $3 publishing fee that’s refunded if minimum success is achieved. Professionally producing a track typically costs thousands (I have musician friends).
It's not really about the $3 to the artist. Spotify gets value from having all that material in their inventory, and doesn't pay anyone for it, and it wasn't a natural resource that they harvested, someone had to create it.
Actually worse, they say they do pay someone for it, they spread it among the other creators who they ARE paying.
You could try to think up ways to rationalize it like "publishing fee", but I don't see any reason why anyone should.
I honestly fail to see why it’s wrong for Spotify to adjust their commission structure to slightly favor more successful artists just because you have paid a third-party multi-channel distributor. Ask your distributor to renegotiate (over $3)?
The positioning is wrong though, in my relationship, Spotify is the third-party.
A third-party that used to pay for streams of my music, has decided to, instead change their terms, and use my music to generate more revenue (which in this case they are using to pay other artists, which is very strategic of them, because now they don’t have to pay those other artists more from their own pockets).
I negotiated with my distributor, distrokid, And paid to have my music distributed to services that pay for streams of my songs.
Suddenly one of these services altered their terms to the above.
And just to clarify, I’m not trying to be difficult. The fact of the matter is that my content has been taken by a third-party, and instead of paying out based off of an agreement, they have decided to take money from the content, creator, and instead use it to pay other artists (it is my strong suspicion that they did in order to not have to pay for transactions, even though this was all part of the arrangement from the beginning).
They have effectively saved themselves $40 million and more popular artists feel better because they are making more money, and the only people that lose out are people that have no real leverage in the situations.
I completely agree three dollars is very little money and is pretty insignificant. But it doesn’t change the fact that this was very strategic and the money that is generated is coming from creators, who have paid to have their content hosted, in exchange for money generation.
If you remember how big of a deal limewire was, this is a similar situation for songs under 1000 streams per year. It is distribution of music, without the consent of the artist, and worse off the platform is monetizing it and the artist does not get that money.
This is a very different situation than something like YouTube ad sense paying out after 1000 views, given that a content creator directly uploads content to YouTube and agrees to their terms.
Well, when you published your stuff you have certainly signed a contract saying that terms may change in the future. Hell, Spotify may even shutter in the future.
The argument that this is only benefitting “popular artists” and hurting small artists is really quite misleading here. It invokes the Taylor Swift against everyone else image, but it’s really not that. This friend of mine is very far from a big shot, but when she publishes a new title, she posts it on social media, and within the hour, probably minutes actually, the 1000-stream threshold is hit. And they’re giving a year… I don’t have stats but I have a feeling that this is going to primarily hit borderline plagiarizing (or actually plagiarizing) content mills than real artists. Not passing any judgement on you naturally, I don’t even know if you’re quitting out of principle or practicality.
1000 stream per year per song. 2/3 of all music will be demonetized. There’s very successful artists with lots of songs in their back catalogs that don’t hit that threshold.
And pointing how low the royalties are is not a valid argument for not paying artists anything!
A small correction, from the article mentioned in the post, the $40m is not going to Spotify, it is going to the other artists with more than 1000 streams annually.
Unfortunately, this is actually a problem because of the legacy format of distribution for music. In order to add contact to classic music sales platforms like iTunes, you needed to go through a music distribution platform. CDBaby is a good example of an older 2010s company that offered similar services.
When streaming became an option, music distribution platforms that appeal to a lower barrier of entry became more popular.
If the industry were refreshed today, it would make more sense to directly upload content directly to the streaming platform, like Apple Music or Spotify, just like we do with social networks.
Unfortunately, this put Spotify in a weird position because while they are a distributor, they are a secondary distributor. Unlike YouTube, or other platforms that directly host the content. (yes, I know they're hosting the audio files, but they are still secondary, because distro kid is primary).
Again, I pay for distro kid, everyone who uploads music to platforms, pays their distributor. So unfortunately, it's more complex than monetization and ownership rates around content on YouTube or something like that.
I’d only argue that Distrokid and other distributors are part of the problem though. They should be advocating vigorously for their clients and I haven’t seen any of them put out any kind of statement about this.
I'm sure they'll miss you given you weren't even breaking their pitifully low stream threshold for payout. If you don't like the platform's terms, don't choose them as a place you want DistroKid to put your music. This comment is so entitled and pathetic.
Music consumption has basically never been in a better place. What Spotify pays artists, and how many employees at Bandcamp get laid off are minor, in the big picture.
My music consumption goes something like this:
1) Queue up a known band on Spotify. See what else similar to them Spotify puts into a playlist
2) Listen to the new music, decide what I like or don't like
3) Head over to Bandcamp or Discogs with the stuff I really like. Buy it in vinyl and DRM-free digital. Put it in my Subsonic server.
4) If it's not available, head to P2P app of choice - they always have it.
Yes, Bandcamp and Spotify might be ephemeral, but Spotify did wonders for discoverability - there are a lot of albums from tiny tiny bands I'd never have bought if it weren't for Spotify, and Bandcamp helped re-establish the market for physical, DRM-free media.
Music has never been in a better place. I finally get to have my cake and eat it too. What people are complaining about (Spotify not paying enough to smaller artists) is conveniently ignoring that I'd have never even heard of those artists 25 years ago, because they couldn't have paid for distribution. Spotify didn't reduce what artists make, they redisributed what I spend across way more, but smaller, bands.
I have to agree. I’m 66 years old. When I was in my late teens, I was intensely into music and doing my best to explore and learn about a variety of genres.
It was hard. I couldn’t afford to buy many albums, the music played on the radio was limited, and the only way to hear obscure music that I had read about was to go to a large public or university library and hope that they might have the records in their collection.
Now I can listen to nearly any music I want to with just a few clicks. There are also many great streaming channels for discovering music I didn’t know about—I particularly like BBC Sounds, especially Radio 3. My 19-year-old self never could have dreamt of such riches.
I’m the same age, and totally agree. Sometime in the late 80s or early 90s I decided to figure out what electronic dance music was all about. This was early house and techno times. It was essentially impossible. There was no scene in my city. Now I feel like there’s an embarrassment of riches, more than I could ever listen to.
No, you are conflating "music" with "musicians", it's the same in most creative fields, we have more and better, by an order of magnitude, than we have ever had.
Listen deeper, listen more and you will help artists more than cancelling your subscription. I don't know what artists at the new cutoff were making but its not a living wage, and I doubt it's even beer money. The unknown artists will never get paid if you don't listen and find them. That's what Spotify is great at. Once you find the small artist, seek them out, buy some merch, see a show. Drive an hour further than you normally would. That's what supporting an artist looks like, not cancelling your Spotify subscription.
Has it made earning a living even harder though? Before streaming it was much harder to discover obscure artists from places outside of your own local area, usually you'd go crate-digging vinyls at 2nd hand shops to find the true gems.
I don't understand how enabling access to music from anywhere in the world has made earning a living harder to music artists, the industry was always extremely hard outside of a few lucky ones hand picked by labels to be marketed. The local scenes were (and still are) where most artists could grow their audience, sell albums and merch, it's still the same hard work but now you are able to release your music worldwide in an instant.
Streaming doesn't pay enough on any platform to enable earning a living if you are a small act. And it never will, it's basic economics, there's not enough money from subscriptions and ads to support the millions and millions of artists.
Support the artists, that's orthogonal to Spotify or other streaming services. Buy their albums, merch, go watch their shows.
I guess I agree with you (and others making the same argument) but feel like it is ultimately arguing that to support artists, you need to go outside Spotify, which to me implies something is broken about it.
Maybe that's the nature of things but I think part of that argument is there could be something better. Maybe it's beside the point from a practical perspective but I guess I agree with that too. I think finding and supporting small artists probably never has been better, but I'm not sure if that's because of Spotify per se, or social media and the Internet in general.
> I guess I agree with you (and others making the same argument) but feel like it is ultimately arguing that to support artists, you need to go outside Spotify, which to me implies something is broken about it.
Something is broken: the market for music.
People are not willing to spend a lot more for music (not digitally at least), so the economics of it are broken, there's a lot of content, done with passion, and any passion industry is bound to underpay because people will do it for non-monetary reasons like self-fulfillment, expression, etc.
I feel we're entering a 2nd great renaissance of media piracy and torrent sites. Fair streaming services were a great solution. But for a variety of reasons that all has slowly been corrupted and become obtrusive. I've recently cancelled my Netflix account after subscribing for over 12 years. Private torrent sites are reporting a significant increases in active users.
As a South African, it is ridiculous to me that I cannot even legally buy or rent some films that were produced in South Africa, and is about South Africa.
I cannot recall the details now, but this has happened at least 3 times over the last couple of months.
I hate the podcast part of Spotify and vehemently disagree with their choice of high-paid hosts on there and would prefer that money to have gone to artists instead. That being said, I also enjoy some of their innovations and they've expanded my music tastes somewhat (and with questionable B or C artists...but that's also the point). Finally, I'd like to conclude by saying that I hate some of their defaults, wish they would make the UX 10x better and unify across platforms. P
S. They do allow me to download my data from them, which I do regularly. Super cool, no hassles.
The spotify app has become so ridiculously bad I can't use it anymore. I found out about Zotify [1], which can rip my entire collection from spotify. The API rate limits anything faster than real time listening though, so it'll take a few weeks to download everything.
0: "Let me just open spotify to listen to.. NO, I don't want last year's recap... NO, I don't want to follow my friend's playlist.. NO, I don't want to try browsing your recommended audiobooks.. OK, now that those popups are gone, what was I .. Ah yes! This song, here it is. Play. .... No? Play. It's not playing. Maybe close and reopen the app?" <-- this happens often. Spotify Premium, the app that consistently fails at the literal one thing it's supposed to do, play music.
SongShift also works really well in my experience. I only use Apple Music in the car these days because its UX is safer/saner than Spotify's. SongShift makes it easy to keep them synced up.
Does it sync tracks that you Love in Apple Music? I have liked Apple Music a lot, except for one major thing when I realized that there is no way to view tracks that I have marked with Love, and I'm trying to find a way to get that information out.
That, I'm not sure about. I just use it to maintain an Apple Music copy of my "Liked Songs" via what they call a "Full Library Transfer" shift.
That may be what you're talking about, since clicking on the heart icon is how songs end up in "Liked Songs" to begin with...? Note that I only use it in the Spotify -> AM direction, not vice versa.
Sometimes I've felt a bit foolish, keeping my mp3's on a hard drive, as well as backed up onto another drive.
But then, I hear about things like Bandcamp being sold, artists being pulled from streaming sites, etc., and it feels nice to know that in principle, all the songs I've purchased over the decades remain within my power to listen to.
Some of the songs I have, and still regularly listen to, I'm honestly not sure if I could find anywhere online anymore.
Funny, I finally ditched Spotify last week. I just can’t stand the pop up ads, the cluttered interface, and frankly I’m sick of the recommendations.
So far I’ve been trying Apple Music, and have liked it so far. I’ve tried in the past but didn’t stick around long enough to learn how to use it.
Also, I have HomePods as speakers for my living room tv and found that “streaming” to them using Apple Music isn’t streaming, it sends the channel over to the device so you can do whatever on your phone or leave the house and it still plays. Much like Sonos.
I see ads all the time on paid Spitufy. Ads for podcasts are the most common ones. Just because the ad is for an in-house service doesn't make it not an ad.
Motivation: "Spotify doesn’t seem to have the artist’s interest in mind anymore" citing examples of minimum number of listens (1000) before paying out (at 1k, isn't that still in the realm of micropence anyway?), and the podcast thing funding questionable people and being pushed through UI changes.
Alternative: "For now, I’m just back to the weird p2p programs where I can try to find the music I bought or the ones that are just impossible to get."
Result: "listening to music feels more meaningful, not a thing that happens in the background"
I'm still torrenting music like I did in 2007. If I really enjoy a record, I buy it. When a band is in town, I go see them. I don't get hung up on the morality of piracy anymore. Truth is piracy (for me) provides a better experience than most of the alternatives (Spotify, Netflix, Hulu). Gaming is the one area where the paid alternative is usually better than piracy. (Steam, GOG, itch.io)
Very funny seeing this here as I've just bodged an internal DVD drive and SATA-to-USB connector to rip a Placebo CD I bought on eBay. My brother has been snickering about this for quite some time.
Yeah, I thought that part was weird. I have not had too much trouble finding ways to for digital downloads. For Japanese bands I like, I have to do some weird shenanigans to get Japanese sites to let me pay them, but it's not like the digital downloads don't exist at all.
Vinyl and cassette are the most common right now for physical-exclusive stuff. CD sales are very mixed- you can do well or barely sell at all, even for established names, and the startup costs for a pressing are higher than with tapes. And if it's on CD it might as well be a download anyway.
> if it's on CD it might as well be a download anyway
Unless you mean FLAC or something, CD is still higher quality than other formats, and they keep longer than vinyl or cassettes.
Inb4 the "only audiophiles with high end equipment" arguments: if you were around in the days of Blade Encoder tweaking options and trying to fit mp3s onto a 32MB player the size of a cigarette box, you know what digital artifacts sound like.
You don't need to be an "audiophile" or have "high end equipment" to realize that you absolutely want lossless for music archival. How would you want to, say, transcode a collection of MP3 to Opus to fit more tracks onto the same space at acceptable quality without keeping FLACs around?
Although OTOH, people play lossy MP3s over lossy SBC via Bluetooth and don't care, so perhaps the bar of "acceptable quality" is much lower than it seems...
> How would you want to, say, transcode a collection of MP3 to Opus to fit more tracks onto the same space at acceptable quality without keeping FLACs around?
Transcoding 320kbps MP3 to some other lossy codec, once, is really not that bad. LAME at 320kbps is transparent to many people, and while I don't have any A/B test data to back this up, I'd be surprised if re-coding once to Opus at, say, 160kbps, would fare noticeably worse in A/B tests.
> OTOH, people play lossy MP3s over lossy SBC via Bluetooth and don't care
Further evidence that transcoding from one high-bitrate lossy codec to another really isn't that bad :)
I see this as a very reactionary take, and I see the alternatives to streaming as impractical. Spotify is great, honestly it’s really great, I don’t have the free time the author seems to have to make a sociopolitical statement with my choices in music streaming. For me, music is about the music, and the emotional experience thereof. If you don’t like Spotify, just go ahead and cancel it—you don’t need to write a blog about it. I’m also not one to select my products based on their “one [or two] bad thing[s]”; there are dozens of things that make Spotify excellent from my view.
I have reduced my streaming use and switched to listening primarily on vinyl and an iPod with a set collection, and I have really preferred it. It’s very nice to have interfaces that just play exactly what I want and are not constantly pushing advertisements for podcasts and audiobooks in my face.
I’m spending more time listening to the music I love and the massive collection I already owned from back in the day. There’s something about not having unlimited access that helps me appreciate what I do have to a greater degree.
If HN was Spotify client, the add comment button would randomly shift position on every visit and have one of these as the text: create, send, publish, add to thread
And sometimes if you clicked it, nothing would happen
Might as well drop what I use for my music discovery, my fairly poorly documented hacker-friendly set of tools. For instance, you can optionally navigate, sort, skip, pause and label things through MIDI controls, command line hooks, a repl, bluetooth media keys, or even over a network.
I don't think any band out there has any excuse not to spend literally minutes to set up an online store (using Shopify or whatever else) and put their music up for sale directly. If they don't, and rely on iTunes/Spotify etc., or sign with a major label, then you as a fan aren't obligated to go out of your way to still look for avenues to support them.
I didn’t realise Spotify wasn’t paying less well known artists. That’s actually pretty shit.
I love music. I have a deep utter obsession with music of almost every genre and I don’t think I could go without it. I used to just pirate music (because I was a kid that didn’t really fully understand that that was theft), until Spotify happened, so when I was pirating music artists still weren’t getting paid. Spotify became my default for ease of use, but I suppose they’re a middleman that decides who will get paid, and who won’t.
I’ve also got SoundCloud where I listen to artists who don’t seem to be on Spotify, but SoundCloud seems to have a similar structure around paying artists.
What other platforms are there for listening to music, where the artists actually get the recognition and reward they deserve?
Even though I would like Spotify to pay artists decently, I'll keep paying for it mainly for their recommendations and discovery features.
If you only listen to music you already know you like, then sure Bandcamp or whatever is amazing for the artist.
But personally, I just launch my "liked" playlist and use their enrich feature to fill in titles. Or use their thematic playlist generations that use a genre but take into account what I already liked of this genre.
Though if someone showed me an alternative with discovery features that work as good as this and pays artists decently I'd switch instantly.
It doesn’t come cheap, but I can recommend Roon[1] because it allows your music collection to blend between streaming providers (Tidal or Qobuz) and local files.
Their very good recommendation algorithm can expand your horizon and you can buy the music you really like while using the same playback experience (would be nice if they allowed you to buy and download music directly though).
Using which funds? Afaik they pay out quite a lot of the income, they could try to cut costs (the most meaningful thing there probably being to lay off staff) in order to maximize payouts but the only alternative pushes people to competing services that are cheaper and can't pay artists better for the same reason.
One thing they could reasonably do is to offer for people to pay more for their Spotify subscription, where the surplus (anything you pay above the base subscription) goes 100% to the artists, proportionally to the ones you listen to. One can speculate how much that would help the problem. I just find it weird to see people always saying (look up any Spotify-related thread) that Spotify pays so poorly and that people should cancel their subscription altogether instead.
I recently started buying out CDs of bands that I value. I don't cancel Spotify now because I don't have all the music I listen to, but thanks for warning. We have to prepare for big black hole of access to our culture when it becomes no longer mainstream.
At this moment shows I used to watch are removed from all the platforms too, leaving me the only option to "buy" them on Amazon. "Buy" because they will still be in a cloud, and one harsh blow of the wind can make the cloud gone. The wind of changes I mean.
By the way I have an external usb CD player which I use to digitise them and have them on MP3s. But I lack a server to have it streamed to my phone. I wonder if you guys and gals have any solution to this...
Liberal Joe Rogan is "questionable"? GMAB.. I mean he's open to questions so...
I find it to be socially toxic that anyone expects massive companies to tailor their content to one's narrow sensibilities. Furthermore, the complaints rarely if ever go the other way in terms of platforming middle-of-the road personalities that land on the other side of the line. Though, they could in-volume. Man, was it terrrrible when the Smartless crew had Rachel Maddow on their show. Grumble grumble...unsubscribe...grumble
This feels like a disingenuous take on TFA's in-passing reference.
Spotify spending USD$100-$200 million on, say, that particular angertainment professional got a lot of people riled up because a) he's actively, demonstrably harmful, b) they had zero interest in patronising him, let along listening to him, but mostly c) their subscription costs had gone up to cover this indefensible payment.
Like TFA, I get my podcasts elsewhere, partly because the spotify app is unwieldy for music, but just plain user hostile for podcasts - but I'd appreciate a multi-tiered service offering from Spotify where I don't use, and therefore don't pay for, any podcast content from them.
Similar to the different package options for TV services, where live sports were expensive but you could opt out of them.
No it didn’t. It got a tiny minority of a certain insignificant type upset. Step out into the real world and the number one podcast is, by definition, well received.
> It got a tiny minority of a certain insignificant type
I guess how one perceived the reaction to that transaction comes down to one's own biases.
If you wish to discount some people's problem with paying a misinformation-peddler hundreds of millions of dollars while, as per TFA, genuinely creative people are paid nothing because 'it's too hard to handle the transactions' - then that gives us a little more insight into you.
> Step out into the real world and the number one podcast is, by definition, well received.
Number one in the USA, you mean, right?
Podcasts are a niche medium, with extremely poorly reported listening figures, but so far I can tell this guy has an average of 11 million listeners.
That's less than 4% of the USA (around 0.1% of the real world).
I get that anger and controversy are highly saleable products - crime content makes up a surprising amount of the podcast leaderboard.
However, in a country where 230 million people believe angels are real, it shouldn't be surprising, nor held up as an arbiter of quality or sanity, that 11 million people think this guy is credible / worth $200m a year.
I recently said goodbye to Spotify as well. I tried Apple Music and found it sounded significantly better. The muddy quality I am used to with Spotify was gone and I’ve been enjoying music ever since. I really thought there was something wrong with me prior to this. I don’t know if it is the different codecs they use or what. I haven’t even tried the lossless audio yet on Apple Music. So it is just comparing the lossy to lossy.
I’m also glad to be on an app that doesn’t try to constantly push podcasts on me.
Tidal pays more for the artist and has a higher quality streaming option if that matters to you. Qobuz is another good artist friendly stream that historically paid the most to artists but it has a bit smaller catalog than Tidal.
Tidal is great for selection and quality, but not usability like Spotify where I can control it from any device. Tidal works on my receiver and Amazon devices.
Like many home/IoT services, Spotify uses mDNS to enumerate and announce its peers when they are L3 local but they are also controllable remotely by dialing-home to their API albeit with a slightly longer delay. Spotify is hilarious when playing from the Everywhere group (all devices) where desktops, tablets, phones, the thermostat, stereo receiver, and Amazon Echo devices all insist on playing out of time like a crowd of teenagers singing a song.
On a slight tangent, mDNS had turned into an absolute nightmare for me. I must have tried 5 different FOSS Raspberry Pi streaming OSs, none of which did the Spotify cast integration actually work on, until I finally figured out it's because it's using mDNS and my router (despite being purchased in 2023 for $200) didn't support mDNS. There's also a bunch of other services (like Home Assistant) that just assume you have working mDNS and point everything to <appname>.local
I finally figured out where the service file was, and changed it to IP, and now it works.
I use Audials to aggregate internet radio. For curated music I mostly listen to KCRW and some Soma FM channels. Also, I use internet radio for news in German and Latvian to keep my language skills from rotting completely away.
I don't know how recent the feature is, but I recently stumbled upon YouTube Music's parameter-driven personal channel feature "Your music tuner." One of the parameters is how much music outside your favorites it will find for you. That works really well in my limited experience.
I've used Pandora for years but I'm switching to Spotify. Pandora's catalogue is tiny in comparison. And I don't care if they sponsor "questionable" podcasters (A.K.A Joe Rogan). In fact, that honestly makes me want to invest more in Spotify. I can listen to the latest obscure NYCHC and know that my music provider isn't being censored by CISA.
In ATX, but I don't give a shit about Joe Rogan either because he's a moron hit in the head one too many times which somehow translates into a celebrated champion of anti-intellectualism. Censorship, by customers or a platform, is cure worse than the disease.
Another example: Pluto TV (run by Paramount) hosts as much hate as AM radio in the form of OAN, Blaze, Newsmax, and (previously) RT America, OTOH they have Scripps, Cheddar, and Sky News.
Moral purity is the privilege of extremists appeasing their tribe through conformity to closed-mindedness and foot-stomping that they must live in a voluntary intellectual and reality apartheid. The American right and left are both guilty of this, perpetuating a division that was artificially introduced for profit reasons by grifters and widened by different flavors of mass media that promote these spheres of influence.
Qobuz. Amazon's insistence to push podcasts in my face, including in search results, have finally overcame my customer apathy and I switched, just like Google's insistence to push Youtube Music in my face pushed me to go to Amazon Music.
I've seen claims that they pay artists better than anyone else besides Tidal, but I've seen no official statements.
I pay a distributor (distrokid) to send out music, and do not have a direct agreement with Spotify. As far as I'm concerned, monetizing my music without my consent is theft.
Their argument is that the stream amount is so low it ends up not being worth the transaction. On a moral level, I'd argue that it's their responsibility to pay out the money generated even if it costs them money to do so for a small number of streams.
This is estimated to generate $40m annually for them (which they've said they will be distributing to other artists instead), which isn't deeply significant, but this is money that is only generated because of small content creators that have uploaded their content to their distributor (which they pay for) which then distributes to spotify.
If I were to upload directly to Spotify for free, I'd consider the terms different, because I'd expect distribution as the exchange in the relationship. But in this case I pay a distributor, who then sends to spotify, who then decides to offer my content for free and pocket the money. Not acceptable for me.
(note: I consider this relevant to the original article because it is mentioned, as well as because it is one of the variables involved in music purchasing/accessing)
edit: corrected the $40m statement to show where money was going.