How Spotify Screws Over Your Favorite Artists - Cracked Explains (Taylor Swift, Adele)

hi I'm Alex MIT and Spotify is the newest music killing t1000 unless we Schwarzenegger Tom York is the lead paranoid android of Radiohead a band from the future that hates the futures guts and when Radiohead released a new album in 2016 they tried to release it every way there is except Spotify because Thom Yorke hates Spotify in 2013 he pulled his solo work off it he called Spotify [ __ ] a mind trick and the last desperate fart of a dying corpse and other artists call Spotify a smelly banana a creative content sucker a machine too valuing music itself and are they right they are and aren't both both things they are int nope that that doesn't read Spotify is trying to save music by helping record labels become even more evil and by shape-shifting the music industry without anybody noticing it's hard to claim Spotify is killing the music industry seeing as how the music industry died of piracy already but first things first if you've never used Spotify here's how step 1 download it step 2 hear any song you want step 3 paste modify a subscription fee or listen to Spotify Zaid between songs I know nobody wants to do that but holy moly remember step 2 any song you want it's like if somebody put your old stolen LimeWire music library on every device you own made it legal and fix the mislabeled songs for you no more listening to New Found Glory or My Chemical run dance or Jimmy Eat World all thanks to Spotify founder Daniel ACK he went to the record labels and told them they could save their industry by supporting his startup idea his entrepreneurial idea was that piracy wasn't preventable but it was replaceable replaceable if access to any song could be easy legal and comprehensive this three point idea became Spotify a service saving people the trouble of stealing anything and letting the industry earn more than zero dollars for their music Spotify is legalized piracy pirates even built it Daniel X previous job was running Utah rent a site a hundred million people use for file-sharing of varying legality eken his first staffers hail from Sweden home to indestructible copyright flaunt ur Pirate Bay home to a piracy based political party and a land where 2/3 of folks aged 16 to 29 steal media neck also brought in Shaun Napster Parker as an early advisor for Spotify hired the guy who built utorrent software to build Spotify and wenneck demoed Spotify software for the record labels it's temporary demonstration purposes only music library was made of Spotify staffers personal pirated music collections pooled onto a drive said Eck we a Swedish so we've already taken it those pirate demos one the labels over Spotify launched in 2008 with rights to nearly every song there is and eight years later Spotify has convinced over 40 million people to buy monthly subscriptions to that library Plus around three ad based listeners for every one of those subscribers which means Spotify hundred million users have no reason to steal songs it's like if the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie opened with Jack Sparrow taking an office job yes it's not as exciting as piracy but it'd save us from years of horribly wasted energy piracy is tiring and Spotify is handing us all of music for cheap so cheap Spotify loses money every year and they are losing less money each year but they're giving the record labels an estimated 70% of their revenue along with ownership of a lot of Spotify the company which is not exactly the savviest scrooge mcduck iasts way to hang on to your what whatever swedish currency might be models lingonberries and i don't know either way Spotify is burning away the rest of their Scandinavian funny money on research and development improving the product to make your life better Spotify hired a team of 32 music experts to curate over 4,500 free playlists Spotify spent a hundred million dollars on a start-up called echo nest to improve Spotify as music recommendations and help build discover weekly an algorithm based weekly playlists individualized to every Spotify user and celebrated with fancy webby awards they also launched personal new music lists in August and their mobile app has features like Spotify running which sing your workout with exclusive pump up jams and I know making their product better helps them make a buck I know but Spotify took itself from idea to all the music to exciting way to experience all the music and if Spotify became that by bankrupting itself how can anybody say Spotify is bankrupting musicians okay well there you go Spotify has become an amazing part of the music industry the trouble is they might become the entire music industry with the addition of the Beatles last Christmas Eve Taylor Swift became the only major musician Spotify doesn't have their mitts on Spotify Smiths also have most streaming music listeners Apple music Spotify his closest thing to a competitor but it launched eight years too late with an unpopular interface and an unnecessary radio station today Apple music has less than half spotify subscriber base even though the world's favorite gadgets promote Apple music every time you listen to them it's like if Sarah McLachlan became the world's biggest celebrity and still couldn't get anybody to save a puppy and I respect your gold Sarah bear but my landlord flips out when I have guests Spotify zone lis other real competitor is title streaming service from jay-z's musical Justice League which can't find a long-term CEO can't live on Beyonce alone loses more money every year and his praying Apple will put them out of their misery so maybe Daniel ACK is right maybe streaming music is growing fast enough to replace what record labels lose and downloads and album sales but if Spotify conquers the streaming music world and that's the entire music world what can artists do but take what Spotify gives them and even if Spotify is handing out billions of dollars in royalties by the way that 2 billion dollar figure you're seeing is from back in 2014 art musicians still screwed if too little of that money reaches them according to The Wall Street Journal Spotify pays a per stream royalty of point zero zero six dollars less than a penny which goes to the record companies who give a fraction of the fraction of that penny to artists who have to give lots of their fraction of a fraction to management the government groupies hangers-on watching that royalty shrink is like watching Gordon Ramsay chop a vegetable because it's kind of terrifying how fast they can obliterate it but you gotta give him credit cure and be terrified of them all at one it's very its company and Spotify must know how terrifying the record companies are getting because most of Spotify Eckerd company contracts are under amps but the verge got a hold of Spotify contract with Sony and they published it and it says Sony has no contractual obligation to pay a specific percentage of Spotify royalties to its artists and since record companies have a track record of taking anything from their artists that isn't bolted down it's hard to expect Spotify generosity to get past this century's cigar-chomping music moguls even worse Spotify is uninterested in changing that business model remember Thom Yorke the the angry robot from before it turns out he was willing to put Radiohead's new album on Spotify the same day it came out everywhere else if Spotify only let Spotify paying subscribers stream it and withheld it from their ad-supported kind of freeloader users Spotify refused to do that and Thom Yorke caved because he isn't a down in 2011 she gave Spotify York's same offer for her album 21 Spotify said no a Down boycotted Spotify and she sold millions of albums without them twice in a row but Thom Yorke won't sell millions of his sadness pot records a moon shaped pool went live on Spotify the same day it was in stores because two musicians on earth are Spotify proof good job millions of people buy their albums people even leave their house and it's crazy they leave their house and they go to a store to buy a physical copy of it without stopping halfway down their driveway and asking themselves if they're a historical reenactment endears but every other megastar has to cave into Spotify or set piracy records their choice and if you're a kind of famous band like grizzly bear or portishead some of the people watching this video recognise your band's name when I set it just now so you're famous enough to supplement your crummy Spotify revenue by going on tour by selling t-shirts even by tricking a couple people into buying fragile wax versions of your album like their historical reenactors for the Kennedy years but even though famous artists complain the loudest about Spotify Spotify does the most damage to the nobodies because Spotify made music discovery their biggest selling point and every users home page it's where we find bands now so new bands depend on Spotify algorithm and if it points listeners a bands way they get fractions of pennies one time it's like if all bands had to make a living as street musicians and they can only play in one creepy alley chosen for them by robots and passerby could make their pocket change this horribly specific so if Spotify replaced piracy by making a life in music even worse isn't that a disaster for our future will we even have professional musicians anymore alright remember in the Terminator franchise how Skynet was supposed to keep us all safe but it killed us all and then it didn't actually kill us all because some of us survived through ingenuity and grit well music history is a series of technological advances that skynet musicians ruining their livelihoods I don't know where but somehow every time the people creating music Sarah Connor their way through that disaster and thrive becoming scarred but tougher and capable of more visually impressive antics than ever before that metaphorical process goes all the way back to the invention of recorded music records were supposed to destroy all musicians because before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 music only existed in its live meet space form somebody sings or plays an instrument preparatory you hear it when they do it show's over but according to this amazing Smithsonian piece the phonograph caused mass music world panic people thought concerts would die out and folks would get addicted to record listening bandleader John Philip Sousa said recordings of great musicians would discourage children from learning instruments hey fellow modern people remember how Pokemon once only existed as cards and gameboy games but then Pokemon go spread them worldwide all around us and convinced the olds that Pokemon caused car crashes and walking off cliffs while music was like that spreading it worldwide in a recorded form changed the world it created record companies who immediately screwed over artists particularly minorities and live concerts they're monopoly on good songs but music mutated to keep up music recordings popularize jazz because as people got sick of records they started to value improvisation also people still go to concerts and Sousa was wrong the phonograph sparked an increase in music students best of all according to UMC historian mark Katz early wax cylinders could only hold two to three minutes of music so artists created songs that work within that time constraint and that's how we invented the pop song I'm telling you every technological leap since the phonograph has made music more accessible more modern and not dead cheap radios bootlegs on cassettes privately recording broadcasts sampling other artists all those things expanded the world of music they all paid financial dividends one way or another and they were scary because a lot of the financial dividend sources changed and yes some of the payouts shrank but don't panic about today because if only Adele and Taylor can still go platinum and only Adele can still get richer than God from album sales the way every collection of five goobers and cool shirts once could just buy frosting their tips and firing up the studio magic console that change just means the music industry needs to mutate again and however evil Spotify might be it's as evil as the record companies have been for a long long time however Spotify aims to be with us for a long time by conquering the world they're expanding their service to offer videos and podcasts so they can be everything and Daniel Eck is the kind of person who refers to Facebook's mr. Zuckerberg as mock and then feels guilty about it like he admitted he and M dog are world government buddies and why wouldn't mr. Eck get a seat at the Illuminati super table his techno child Spotify took over worldwide music listening within a decade but there was a time when an iPod loaded with an iTunes library was the world's mightiest music gadget there was a time when Blockbuster Video and Microsoft were getting sued by the government for being too dominant and powerful and we were alive for all of that so if we want an alternative to Spotify we might find it soon in the next big thing around corner also if you're watching this in the future and Spotify his murder robots at me on trial for crimes against Robo manatee I was kidding let me check that again I was kidding okay let me take it I was kidding damn my honesty run future Alex hi thank you for watching please do all the YouTube things below and in the comments let us know if there are any other like big topics in the world you think we'd like to see like this or how dope the Terminator movies are you know I want I want everybody have something so big big issues where to go after Genesis

Channel: Cracked

Views: 668,413

Rating: 4.7326927 out of 5

Keywords: Taylor Swift, Adele, Radio Head, Apple Music, Tidal, Spotify, Music, Terminator, illegal downloads, iPod, Thom Yorke, Bands, records, cds, pop Music, Cracked, Cracked.com, Cracked explains, funny, spoof, humor, infotainment, sketch, comedy, parody, satire, taylor, swift, music, spotify premium, spotify playlists

Id: _MIPQNa8uhg

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 23 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/elratic]

I can definitely see where the music industry is coming with this argument. But, being a Spotify user and a former music pirate, I can honesty say that what Spotify has to offer is too good to give up.

One point they made that I think could be a potential solution to the problem is to offer better benefits for the premium users, and start to strip away some of the benefits from the free users. At the very least, start to incentivize users to become Premium members. I liked the idea they had of releasing albums for Premium members. Seems like a win - win.

[u/IComeBaringGifs]

Seems like people love to shit on spotify just because it's become to popular. Hipsters enjoy bashing the mainstream, but spotify honestly seems like the best thing to happen to music. If we could place constraints on how big a slice the record companies get, then people wouldn't even be having this discussion, and people would be flocking to the platform like nobodies business.

[u/grizzly8511]

Honestly I don't see how any of this is Spotifys problem. Isn't it up to the artists to sign agreements with the labels which in turn makes a deal with Spotify? Maybe I'm missing something here but I have my own business. The product I sell is me. If I don't get payed enough I start looking for other companies who are willing to pay me more money than the current company. But if I simply can't find a way around this problem I need to take action. Perhaps go back to school or change tactics, you know. And I have a difficulties feeling sorry for Adeles and Taylor Swifts finances even if they were connected to Spotify. And poor radio head, probably only made several annual salaries for a blue collar worker per month in their glory days.

[u/auctor_ignotus]

Couldn't focus. The Nile flows into the Red Sea.

[u/homeboy422]

Your "Favorite Artists" are under no obligation to got to Spotify.

[u/TheTravisaurusRex]

Heard it, don't care. I freaking LOVE Spotify. I haven't downloaded an album in over a year. I can listen to what I want, when I want wherever I want. I have discovered so many new bands I have never heard of and also because of that, have gone to concerts I would have never gone to because I did not know the band existed. They get most of their money touring and I have supported that buying tickets and merch. It is missing some old school stuff here and there but over all it's perfect and I literally use it 10-11 hours a day.

[u/veryrandomcomment]

Sorry, but this is bullshit.

[u/ThxBungie]

Oh no, the poor pop music industry.