Spotify Threatens Price Hike While Continuing to Pay Nothing for Music They Use

Permalink

Follow me via:

---

Text-to-speech support required

I'm sure most people are aware that Spotify is a streaming giant, and maybe even to some people, you're confused about this, right? iTunes came way before Spotify's rise, and it even offered a way to buy your music, and back it up. And then there was the whole iPod craze.

The iPod I still use to this day.

And then ... suddenly, Spotify, and the idea of no longer owning your music, just ... took over. Because, reasons (because it was easy, and a lot of people like the feel of things being easy peasy)?

Flash forward to 2024, well after Spotify vowed to stop paying artists who don't reach over 1000 streams per month, and the megalomaniacs are once again talking about reaching for your wallets. Much to the surprise of people who refuse to use anything else for their musical entertainment, of course. Because it's totally not like we haven't been through this with Spotify before.

In July 2023, Spotify increased the price of its Individual offering to $10.99. It also increased the prices of its Duo plan, Family plan and Student offering to $14.99, $16.99 and $5.99, respectively. The company said the market landscape has “continued to evolve” since Spotify launched, according to a release at the time.

Ashley Capoot, CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/03/spotify-price-increased-again.html

But I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, with people who stopped using Spotify back when they decided the people who provide content for their platform shouldn't be paid.

What I am here today to talk about, or offer to you, is a solution.

Bandcamp.

"But Nova! If I buy stuff on Bandcamp, I have to use their proprietary software in order to listen to my music!" You might say, having not really investigated all that much. But that's not true at all.

Once you buy an album on Bandcamp (and usually for extremely cheap prices), you can download it, sync it to your old iPod, or even better, upload it to your Mac, or iPhone, and then sync it with Apple Music! Voila, you can return to owning your music, without commercials, or ads, or shitty mega-corpos who refuse to pay artists, and rest easy.

And you absolutely should be buying music directly from artists on Bandcamp, because even if they are being paid by Spotify, you would need to stream their music something like one thousand times to equal the cost of a single album. As an individual.

You may have caught me there in the last couple paragraphs, including Apple in a statement about those who DO pay artists, and that's because Apple does pay artists. And while it's only .01 cents per stream, that's still more than what Spotify was paying, before they decided to stop paying most artists on their platform.

You're probably starting to feel like you should ditch Spotify, and you're right! You should!

If you're like me, and you own a Linux PC, a Macbook, and an iPhone, and you want your purchased albums from Bandcamp to be available to you at all times, here's how to get them onto the cloud, and into Apple Music, fully synced.

First, copy your albums to a folder on iCloud (if your collection is somewhere other than a Mac), then navigate to your Mac, be it a Macbook, or an iMac, and open Apple Music (you need to be subscribed for music match to work, I believe, but subscribing to Apple Music is now cheaper than Spotify).

Now, with Apple Music open, click "File" at the top left, and then "Import...", and then simply select the folder where your digital music collection resides (even if it's on iCloud).

Once Apple Music finishes figuring out what volume all the music should be, click "File" again, and then scroll to Library, and in the pop-out menu, click, "Update Cloud Library."

When that finishes, whip out your iPhone, open Apple Music, and then check "Recently Added."

You can thank me later.