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Spotify and Prosperous Cheats

Higgs Boson • Apr 24, 2019

To anyone over the age of 50 ish, the music business has changed beyond all recognition - and things change at an alarming rate too. In fact it's become very difficult even for youngsters to adapt; and that I'm afraid is the key to it all - that and an immense amount of luck, and some talent!

Back in the good old days when MySpace reigned supreme and I was the number one jazz fusion act on the planet for three years in a row, ah those were the days, I was selling albums to Eskimos in Alaska. I had 150k active MySpace followers. These days I would be lucky to top a chart in my own house! Now, there was a reason for my success - I cheated, a bit, I used a bot, a simple program that automatically sent friend requests (usually abt 250 per day) together with a short message which made a very effective marketing tool. With this simple program I could target the fans of any band with ease. The potential fan/victim would see said request, hopefully click on it, play a few tracks and even comment. One of my tracks 'Big Technology' had 48,000 plays and 15,000 genuine comments. Other more successful artists such as Jean Luc Ponty were nowhere on Myspace compared to me. Anyway, back to the here and now.

The above links to Higgs Boson on Spotify

Spotify - to be listed you have to go through a third-party distributor, which is a pain. On this network I am quite literally nowhere. To be fair though, it is early days. Anyway, a cursory glance at other artists reveals an alarming disparity between myself and other bands. So, Ive done a mini study and something decidedly weird is afoot. Jean Luc Ponty for instance has 54,000 monthly listeners, 34k followers and most of his tracks have half a million or so plays. Ok, fair enough but, take a closer look at his fan-base, most of which are from South America - Santiago to be precise. Now, a few weeks back I boosted a Facebook page post and received 750 likes, all from Brazil, so l looked at other acts on Spotify and something quite interesting was revealed - even Pink Floyd's main listener base is South American, where? Well, Santiago of course, where else? I smell a rat.

Further, Ive been drilling-down into some of those numbers - do I sound like an important executive yet? Anyway, the numbers are as you might expect, not exactly encouraging. Certainly not good for a nowhere boy like me. To start with, an artist is purported to get abt £4 per thousand streams. That means to recoup my recent £40 ad splurge on Facebook I'll need 10,000 streams. Only 9,500 to go then...worth noting it's taken me abt 4 weeks to get those 500 plays and has earnt me £2. Actually the news is grim - Spotify are only paying me £1.17 per 1000 streams. I have asked my distributor Ditto Music to explain but they remain silent on the issue.

In conclusion, Spotify is basically a cartel, a protection racket configured to heavily favour big multi-national publishers - not unlike the BBC, which is tax-payer funded. Sure, you can advertise - they've launched Ad Studio but there's a catch - you need to be VAT registered - I don't personally know any VAT registered musos, most live hand-to-mouth. In any case, to justify the kind of expenditure suggested you would need literally tens of millions of streams. Take the recent spat between Peter Frampton and Spotify. Apparently, 55 million streams of 'Baby I Love Your Way' he only got $1700. I worked out that for me to make 1700 on Spotify I would need approx 1.1m streams - so although signed acts are paid a higher rate, they fair much worse. That is because they have to share the royalty with the record company, the publisher, and any co-writers.

Ditto Music have now told me that depending on the territory the average royalty rate from Spotify is abt £3.00 per 1k streams - not sure how they determine that when my own rate paid through them is in fact much less. The problem is that you hear wildly different accounts. Digital Music News DMN reported that a “successful indie artist” who owns 100% of his publishing and masters reportedly made “€3,765.01, or $4,432.58” on a million streams. Don't tell Peter Frampton, or me for that matter. They must be attracting those elusive Sultan of Brunei streams?

So, do cheats prosper? Answer, it depends. Yes, you can buy followers. plays, monthly listeners etc. but the cost is prohibitive e.g. £4.99 for 1000 streams when the royalty is only £1.17 per thousand. The reality is that it's simply not profitable for the musician whether he/she be signed or not. They offer "organic" promotion = bollocks. They offer "viral promotion" = is it f**k. As for "genre specific playlists" truth is your stuff is mixed with a plethora of explicit material, and not only that; once Spotify get wind of it you'll either get banned or removed from their algorithmic system - meaning that you will languish in obscurity forever.

If you can find a promoter to get you 1k genuine streams for £0.50p, you'll be in the zone - good luck with that. Alternatively you could spend several lifetimes networking on social media, begging people to play your stuff - good luck with that too. There's always Facebook ads, a great facility, has some really good tools for targeting specific people in any given location. However, I reckon it would be easier to sell one-way tickets to the Dignitas clinic than get them to migrate from one platform to another.

The fact is that promoting your own music online is thoroughly soul destroying and that is exactly what the big publishers want - indie musos losing the will to live and a cartel protection racket rigged in their favour.

Tootle-pip

Higgs

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Made in England

by Higgs Boson • 17 Jan, 2022

For some strange reason I feel uncomfortable with the title 'Made in England' - I've been brainwashed into thinking that it's a phrase only used by racists and bigots. Brexit certainly brings into sharp relief that which has largely been ignored - making stuff and methods of manufacturing. A while back my wife wanted to send a gift to a relative in Japan; she wanted something that was specifically 'Made in England'. Our search went on for days and much to our dismay almost everything was, well, made elsewhere basically. She was very disappointed, as was I. This negative experience was not helped when I casually asked a shop assistant "got anything made in England"? It seemed this question was almost deemed to be slightly racist - why? Comedian Stewart Lee famously made a joke about it, saying that a taxi driver said to him "call yourself English these days and you get arrested and thrown in jail" to which Lee repeatedly replies "what, arrested, in jail"?' The taxi driver ends-up giving-in and has to admit he's wrong - the joke being an exaggeration for comic effect. However, as far as I can tell, that joke is now actually not far from reality. In Japan it's the exact opposite, although to be fair, a lot of stuff in their shops is also made in China or Korea, but it wasn't anywhere near as difficult to find something Made in Japan. Of course, they, the Japanese, are proud of their ability to make stuff, and rightly so. Anyway, I suppose we've known for some time that our manufacturing base has been lost, so perhaps I shouldn't be so shocked. In a way, Brexit has highlighted the issue of where stuff is manufactured. Cars for instance; its various component parts are made all over Europe and having to cross the channel 3 to 4 times before final assembly only to be exported back to Europe. It's hard to see how this chimes with the alleged sentiments of the Paris Climate Change accord, that President Trump gave the finger to. And what sort of country can't even make its own sandwiches without recourse to foreign interference? I have purchased the odd sandwich from various Supermarkets and I thought, in my naivety, that they were built onsite, or at least in some shed down the road, but no - I had no idea just how pathetic Britain has become. It would appear that we are totally dependant on the EU. Of course, to an ardent Europhile this is all par for the course, perfectly normal, music to their ears bla bla - but to those of us with only the smallest semblance of national pride left, it is a source of acute embarrassment mixed with a realisation of the sheer insanity of it all. There is now such a gulf between those who believe in the EU and those who do not, the divide has manifested itself in what I like to call a Tower of Babel syndrome - everyone talking a different language and nothing, as far as I can tell, is going to bridge that chasm. Whatever your view 'Made in England' is now a thing of the past and, as far as I am concerned it's a very sad state of affairs indeed. I recall my grandfather having a huge sense of national pride about the quality of almost anything Made in England. To him, it was a benchmark of excellence. Unfortunately, it would appear that politicians have sold us down the river to a bunch of unelected corporate bureaucrats in Brussels - whose main purpose in life is to spread the work about at the behest of the multi-nationals - companies, who wouldn't actually exist were it not for the efforts of people like my grandfather. Higgs Boson