I like streaming, I do it. I have actually paid for it. It’s a bit expensive for me but it has its uses. When I can’t afford it I can use the free-tier option and that pays through advertising insuring someone gets payed.
See the biggest reason it is smart is this: I can use streaming to weed out full-length albums that are just not worth my time. Buying and listening to a new album is expensive I cut down on costs this way. I can sample half of it or all of it and get an idea about it/come to a decision about it. If I know it comes with goodies like a photobook, and I like it makes sense I would buy it then.
Another reason, someone else pointed it out many of my devices especially my smartphone fill up with too many files taking up space and slowing down my smartphone. With streaming I avoid that. While you could use the cloud, the cloud, was not made for that. It was made to save your files there and that is it. Not to listen to them right there, sure you can do it, but the interface is not as well-designed as Spotify’s. I want an environment conducive to listening to music.
As to the music artists:
The bigger, music label acts that complain about music streaming services don’t like it because due to their deals with the labels they take most of the money and as is streaming is less revenue stream as other options. I see music streaming services as supplementary to the rest of what music artists can monetize. The music labels especially big ones as middle-man more than likely take most of the revenue accumulated from streams and these big label signed music artists do not like it. Too bad, you made a deal with them. They should see it as the cost of doing business instead.
Smaller music acts: They more than likely make more money from music streaming services because printing CDs is far more expensive and when they rack up those music streams since they do not answer to a big music label they keep most or all the profits.
I guess at the end of the day it’s about realizing that everyone has different circumstances what works for one music artist might not work for another. TK (Ling tosite sigure) actually is ok with music streaming so I don’t think all Japanese music artists are opposed to music streaming.
For my daily listening I tend to use Spotify unless what I want to listen to isn’t on there because it’s seamless, across my devices and I find putting together playlists easy and enjoyable. I really enjoy being able to access other people’s playlists too, and have found all sorts of music I never would have come across, curated by people who are passionate and knowledgeable about a particular scene.
It also means I don’t have to store absolutely everything on my computer, just what I’m missing. I have less than zero interest in buying an external drive to just to rip CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays, so this ends up meaning I end up purchasing yet again, just digitally this time.
Trust me, it’s not that simple when it comes to make money from it when you’re a small band. Putting our music on streaming services costs 40$€ per 1-3 tracks release if we want to keep 100% of the income.
After 2 digital releases, it brought us… approximately 5$€ for a total of 1600 streams. So that’s a huge loss on us. I’m gonna let you calculate how many streams we need to make to start earning money. And I won’t even speak about the needed time to create video supports for yt or even artworks from nothing. I’ve spend hundred of hours all combined, free of charge ofc, when we could have called someone else to pay to do the same, still, that’s non cost-effective. But that’s an other issue.
About printed digipack costs, when we’ll release our physical EP (which will be the sooner at the end of the year the later in the 3 months of next year if you care about lol), we’ll make more money from it than we do with the streaming outcome : for a 200p order, it’s about a cost of 2/2.5$€ for a 8/10$€ sale. Which you can up to 15$€ if it’s a full album.
And when you come to release MV for yt which gives you nothing but visibility because you need to make live your release, a professionnal but simple shot like this one (a couple of color leds, a smoke machine and a bunch of camera angles) won’t be less than 1500/2000$€.
As I said, not that simple. It’s a bit more complicated when it comes to evaluate the whole cost of the full package that comes with a digital or physical release
(sorry, I wanted to keep it short, but I know you all enjoy the drama story bts things )
If you actually sell it, that is. I mean a band must know if they think they will be able to sell their CDs or not
But i wonder how many bands ended up in financial struggle because they pressed to many CDs and ended up stuck on them.
Thanks by the way for giving us I view on the artist side.
Let me add this part. Spotify has a delayed payment (if they pay at all, i remember reading of indie artists struggling sometimes to get any payment at all)
Tbh for me it feels logical that they first accumulate some money from streams before they pay an artist out, even if that feels shitty from the artist view
So i took a little trip through bands and the countries they have up on spotify with their most listeners
Accounting that i quoted Bitoku already several times, lets take a look at Sailing Before The Wind
They have quite some listeners outside of Japan, and i am quite sure a lot of these people didnt buy albums from them.
Going on with Kizu, Why? Well here is why
Kizu’s top 5 are all cities in Japan. How many of these actually bought the album and still use spotify because its convinent?
With the amount of japanese listeners do they need to cater to streaming services even?
Well… apparently streaming had gotten more popular in Japan itself too, at least amongst younger folks.
Lets take another Band into the round Nocturnal Bloodlust
Looks a bit similar to Sailing Before The Wind, just that they have clearly more listeners.
And now lets take a band who had their top 5 cities in spotify completely ranked by oversea fans
Crystal Lake
Those are just dumb numbers i threw out but one thing i think is for sure:
If streaming is a win or not, depends heavily on the bands themselves and what kind of audience they have.
That’s precisely where streaming services beat it, @Rena. Because importing as a listener and exporting as a band physical releases from Japan (or elsewhere, depends where you live) is often a nightmare AND expensive for many reasons. We cannot bless more the ability to stream that stuff worldwidely.
I don’t love streaming as a general thing. I’m only 29, but that’s old enough to have grown up with tons of physical media just before everything started being cloud/server/streaming based. I really miss having used CD stores all around the city and being able to just go in, get something cheap based on album art, and try and discover new artists that way. I still buy physical media of my favorite artists (just picked up a La Dispute vinyl at their Wildlife 11th Anniversary tour!), though admittedly not as much as I used to (though part of that is budget constraints).
I do use one service though. I have a Tidal subscription, chosen partially because of the bigger artist payout, partially because of the higher quality. But I definitely don’t use it as a primary method of music listening - I typically only use it when building playlists, and sometimes to listen to smaller artists even if I already own a copy of their music just to give them a tiny bit more revenue.
I do think it’s great that smaller artists and bands are able to use streaming as a way of getting their name out there in a low-risk way. It’s definitely cheaper to get a Distrokid account or similar than it is to press a bunch of CD’s. But the way in which most services handle artist payout is abysmal.
Desktop version of spotify, just go to artists profile and scroll down. There is the “Information” part, click on it and a new window opens, you need to scroll slightly down and you will the the top5 cities the artist is streamed in
Subscription/streaming services have had a profound impact on the music and arts industry, and the topic does spark a lot of discussion, with a variety of perspectives from artists, music lovers, and the industry. Here are my main thoughts:
Artist’s stance:
Mixed reviews: Some artists are optimistic about streaming services, arguing that they provide them with a global audience and potential new fans. But some artists, especially independent artists, have criticized the services for not getting paid enough from the streaming platform.
Convenience for independent artists: For smaller, independent artists, streaming platforms offer a relatively easy way to enter the market without signing to a record label. Such a platform can help them build an audience without having to worry about logistics or distribution costs.
Music lovers’ standpoint:
Convenience: Subscription/streaming services provide music lovers with a convenient way to access music. You can stream music anytime, anywhere without worrying about storage space or the price of a physical CD.
Diversity: These services offer a huge selection of music, from artists across the globe to different musical styles. This allows music lovers to explore new music and discover new artists and albums.
Cost-Effectiveness: For people who buy music frequently, a subscription service may be a more economical option because you can access a large amount of music for a fixed price.
Overall, subscription/streaming services have brought changes to the music industry, but there are still some issues, such as the issue of artist compensation. This is an area that continues to evolve and may require more discussion and improvements to ensure that both artists and music lovers benefit. Ultimately, choosing whether to use these services comes down to personal preferences, needs, and values.
To add to this point as a old school person myself. I prefer to download my music as well. Mostly from services like otoyto because of the hi-res option and also helps support the band more.
Part of the reason why bands don’t get enough money is because of music sharing on release in general.
Overall I find it very unfortunate that bands don’t make enough money on their own music
I subscribe to Spotify and Apple Music for some reasons…
Spotify is great for discovering new sounds and making my own playlists for Western artists and bands. I understand that in my mind Western artists will always have their albums and singles available on streaming platforms.
But since we know that streaming is not acceptable in Japan, I see the need for physical media. There are several factors that we know about, for example: Consumption of physical media is a big driver of a country’s economy.
Japan really needs it in this case, in my opinion. I have the feeling that buying a physical CD today is strange for people who don’t consume Japanese or Korean music. But for those who do, like our community, I have the feeling that it’s something valuable. Buying a CD for me is unique, it’s special because in addition to touching the work/art of an artist and understanding the details of the CD booklet, it’s magical for me at ALLLLL.
(I think people felt the same or something similar before the internet existed)
Back on topic, I’m sure that having a physical Japanese CD in your hands is a guarantee that you’ll always listen to the music and have your physical and digital library of the CDs you’ve bought. But relying entirely on streaming services is very unstable for those who consume Japanese music, because you can’t be sure that the artist’s discography will be around forever and have been cases where albums are no longer available on streaming services and so far they haven’t come back.
That’s a problem that can happen if the label/artist can’t afford to pay for the service or if label company has sold the rights to the songs or withdrawn them because it’s no longer making a profit. What we’re left with is the physical media, which lasts forever no matter what happens on streaming platforms.
I support physical media at this point, because I consume and I understand that having a single with 4 CDs can be something redudant, but it’s very nice to have as a collector in my case.
It is thievery,
I hope we get boycotts/protests like with the writers strikes.
Beyond that, for vkei often I will see some Japanese fans upset if certain things are uploaded as it ruins the value of buying the CD,
Kachikan<- the value of it, gets degraded by being out there.
Streaming as a format is not bad, the shitting all over small artists with 0.001 cent payouts and then the labels double dipping in profit, just a continuation of the situation of pimping out artists. It needs to change but it wont because the consumers and artists accept their system.
If I am getting like 1$ for thousands of plays id rather just put stuff on youtube or even have fans rip those uploads until they can buy a cd or download.
I use free Spotify from time to time. But I use youtube most when listening to music digitally.
Rant incoming
I wouldn’t mind streaming if the applications were clean and simple to use, but apps like Spotify seem to get worse over time. It’s often times buggy and the UI is annoying to navigate. For example, I wish they didn’t display albums, singles, and other compilations/misc all together. Yes you can filter for a specific category, but you have to click it EVERY time. I don’t like that it defaults to popular releases.
They used to have a “feature” where once the album you played finishes, a bunch of recommended music starts playing. And I hated that. It’s annoying for people that like to scrobble their listens but only want to scrobble things they intended to listen to. Thankfully, you can turn that off.
Recently they implemented an agonizingly annoying side bar that shows up when you start playing music. You can disable that too thankfully. But they keep adding clutter with each new release and make the app annoying to use.
There’s other inconveniences too like only being able to add to group playlist via their app. It’s clearly a way to get people to download their app because I see no reason why you couldn’t do that on their web version. Speaking of which, your search history doesn’t sync between your app and web sessions, which is mind boggling.
Streaming services CAN be great to discover new bands that are similar to your tastes. But ultimately, for me they’re not reliable and they are cumbersome to use.
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I hate this era of personalization where every company feels the need to shove recommended content in all their user’s faces. At least let me choose if I want that or not. But in most cases, these digital experiences are designed around keeping the user in their product for as long as possible. And I don’t like this greedy desire to monopolize on people’s time.
Give me something simple like foobar to play music and build playlists over a complicated over designed product like spotify any day of the god damned year.
38 million tracks, or 104,000 tracks a day, have never been played. Not a single click. Spotify has a massive catalog, so I’m not sure how this is happening except if these “personalization features” erect a walled garden it’s hard to break out of.
I could see that being the case. I haven’t actually sat down and looked at all their personalized content. A lot of it honestly looked redundant though. For example, they would create playlists for me based on artists or songs I’ve already listened to. Or they’d bubble up new tracks released by artists I already listened to.
In terms of new or small artists, I can’t really recall any attention being brought to them. I mean, spotify is big and it’s a popular space to listen to popular music. So it’s likely that true no-name indie artists are gonna have a really hard time breaking through on the platform.
I find platforms like bandcamp to have more potential for small artists. Often times small independent labels will sign on or do physical releases for these small unknown artists. In combination with twitter or instagram, these artists get more attention than they ever could trying to upload music on their own.
There’s a ton of what I like to call micro labels that support smaller artists of a particular genre, and they all have a certain sound they focus on. So you might find, for example, tons of shoe gaze on bandcamp, but each label looks for different kinds of artists and all have their own flavor. And it’s pages and pages of this.
A lot of labels even end up featuring different works from the same artist. So if you listen to a single on label A’s bandcamp, there’s a high chance you’ll eventually stumble across label B whole did an album release for the same artist. Then you’ve opened up a whole new library to explore.
The thing about these micro labels too is that, often times, they’re just one person or a handful of people that just want to release music they find cool. So the interactions they share with artists are more approachable and down to earth (based on some interviews or twitter posts I’ve read from artists/labels with this type of business relationship anyways). So they also get more buzz and hype based on the excitement from the label.
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