When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
What would be wrong with a model where artists had their own website where they could distribute their music? That’s what Faircamp does. Then people could actually download it, rather than use a companies crappy client with DRM.
I was referring to the sharding that happened with video streaming services. It used to be Netflix had mostly everything, in the start, similar to Spotify. Now there are services per publisher that contain their own catalogues.
Fuck. That.
So you’d rather a monopoly?
No, dude… Spotify doesn’t have exclusive streaming rights to its music
They were talking about how each publisher was making their own streaming service as if the solution would be to have them all under one roof aka a monopoly.