Breaking news from Spotify: starting in 2024 (less than two months from now), they will no longer pay any royalty on tracks that fall below a minimum 1,000 streams a year. These tracks will still earn royalties, in theory – but those royalties will not be paid to their rights holders. Instead, they will go into a pot to be divided among accounts that garner more plays.
This is akin to a regressive tax – reducing payments to those who already receive less, in order to boost payments for those who already receive more, increasing the divide between haves and have-nots. It is, on the face of it, the ugliest of ugly capitalist cash grabs.
And yet Spotify will try and sell this as “artist-friendly.” It is to reduce fraud, they say. But how precisely it would reduce fraud they do not explain. You can buy 1,000 fraudulent streams to beat this cap just like you can buy 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 streams to artificially boost a track now. …
