Spotify is beginning its next stage of rot.
For the better part of 15 years, Spotify has been the top dog of streaming music services while slowly doing what big companies do, look for any way to make money—at any cost to the product or users—from adding in annoying video to leaning into podcasts with people they thought they could leverage, to hiding the fact that they just don’t pay that much behind the guise of “the rights holders are the ones hording the money.” Now it seems they’ve started the next stage in their contribution to the rot economy.
The latest from Spotify, written up for Variety by Jem Aswad, stems from the service capitalizing on a 2022 settlement in which it was ruled that streaming services could pay out less royalties for a bundled music service than with a standalone music streaming app. Of course Spotify got to work immediately looking for a way to bundle something with their music that wouldn’t cost as much as just paying out full mechanical royalties, and the audiobook business must have fit nicely for that. In 2024 they began to bundle audiobooks with premium subscriptions, and was then sued by the Mechanical Licensing Collective, a non-profit that works to get artists their full royalty payouts. Their claim was that adding 15 hours of audiobooks a month was not a bundle of services, but have just recently lost that fight to Spotify in court.
Despite the judges ruling, we all know what Spotify is doing here. They automatically enrolled everyone into the “bundle” knowing many people won’t notice and will keep letting their sub re-up every month. One dollar isn’t much, but across all subscribers that is a nice little extra haul, added with the fact that they’ve classified it as a bundle so they don’t have to pay out as much to artists, and you’ve got a scummy, backhanded way of adding to the bottom line and making everyone at the top a little more rich. These things add up, and executives know it.
I am a Spotify premium user but I just don’t feel like streaming is going to get better for artists over time, with this news as well as other things I have concerns about I may write up another time. It has been clear from the beginning that the best way to support artists is to buy from them directly when you can, but not everyone can afford to do that and money is certainly only getting tighter for most Americans now. The convenience of streaming services may have never been worth it though, and these types of stories have me thinking about where I spend my limited funds.
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