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Spotify Is Testing ‘Spotify Plus,’ An Ad-Supported $0.99 Tier

Spotify Royalty Rate 2020

Spotify Plus is currently available to a limited number of users, but that may change in the near future.

Spotify is currently testing a new preimum membership tier that will cost subscribers $0.99 per month. The ad-supported membership option is currently available to a small number of users, but the streaming giant may expand their testing field in the near future.

According to multiple reports, the ‘Spotify Plus’ plan still features ads like Spotify’s free tier, but it doesn’t impose any limits on the number of tracks you can skip per hour. Users are also free to pick which specific songs they want to listen to, rather than mostly being limited to shuffling within albums and playlists.

While the $0.99 price tag sounds enticing, it may not be the final cost. Spotify’s approach to testing involves offering the new plan randomly at a variety of price points to gauge user interest. The most popular price is not necessarily the one a company will use. Instead, Spotify is seeking a sweet spot between “this is too much” and “this is a steal” where consumers can be convinced to part with a few extra dollars a month in the name of control.

Spotify’s free tier has existed in its current form since 2018. It doesn’t let users skip more than six tracks per hour, and only lets them pick and listen to specific tracks from 15 select playlists, ranging from editorial-selected playlists to algorithmically generated collections like “Discover Weekly” and “Daily Mix.” Any listening that takes place outside those two playlists must use the shuffle functionality. Spotify Plus would reduce those restrictions without giving users complete freedom (like the current $9.99 tier).

Ads for Spotify Plus, which is currently available to a small batch of users for testing purposes.

“We’re always working to enhance the Spotify experience and we routinely conduct tests to inform our decisions,” a spokesperson said. “We’re currently conducting a test of an ad-supported subscription plan with a limited number of our users.”

However, Spotify cautioned that there’s no guarantee that the new tier will launch in its current form. “Some tests end up paving the way for new offerings or enhancements while others may only provide learnings. We don’t have any additional information to share at this time.”

Spotify has a long history of publicly testing major developments long before they reach the public. For example, the company’s long-discussed ‘car thing‘ has been in various stages of development for years. A hifi streaming option that could rival the lossless audio offered by Apple Music and Amazon Music was available to a small batch of users for testing earlier this year. To date, Spotify has not provided any timeline for the release of that streaming tier.

As much as we like to see Spotify continue evolving, the elephant in the room remains: How will this latest development, which has the potential to generate millions in revenue, benefit musicians?

Stay tuned.

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How Many Song Streams Does It Take To Earn Minimum Wage in 2021?

As the competition among streaming music platforms intensifies, many continue to wonder whether or not artists can support themselves on song streams alone. 

The current federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 per hour. The minimum wage may vary from state to state, but $7.25 per hour is the lowest an employer can pay unless the employee works in food service. Waiters and waitresses typically make far less, and the sooner you learn that the sooner you will begin to treat them better.

When you crunch the numbers, a person working full-time for minimum wage grosses roughly $1256.67 per month.

Most musicians hate to think about money. Artists like to believe that their pursuit of creative endeavors is pure. Many will tell you they are not in it for the money, but let’s be honest: it all comes back to money. You may be the greatest songwriter ever to live, but unless you can pay your rent and feed yourself, your career will only last a short time. 

Consumers don’t understand money as it relates to the music industry. They know that there are record labels and people in positions of power with millions of dollars to spend, but they also know that many artists are broke. The industry sells music as a lifestyle brand where everyone lives their best life, complete with jewelry and the latest tech. Still, most industry professionals live quiet lives that look nothing like what is sold in marketing campaigns. If you were to ask the average listener how much money their favorite act makes, they would tell you a figure rooted in their love of that talent. “Jack is so good,” they might say, “so I assume he’s doing well.”

In reality, Jack is living couch to couch whenever his band isn’t on the road. Jack doesn’t have health insurance, and he cannot remember the last time he saw a dentist. Jack is barely scraping by, but he doesn’t complain because he’s living his dream.

With more people than ever choosing to stream music instead of purchasing it, we recently began to wonder how many streams it would take to earn minimum wage. Finding the answer proved difficult because every service has its own royalty rate, and many streaming platforms use a sliding scale that fluctuates daily. After checking several sources for the most up-to-date rates, we ran the number and found the answers. Check it out:

A solo independent artist keeping 100% of their streaming revenue needs at least 100,534 streams per month (on Tidal) to earn minimum wage. On Spotify, the current most popular streaming service, that same artist would need 287,568 streams to see a similar return. 

Remember: The number in the chart above are for solo artists. A four-person band would need more than a million monthly streams on Spotify to earn minimum wage. Depending on their management and label cuts, that figure may be even larger!

Artists around the world continue to fight for higher per-stream royalties, but as of right now, no service seems likely to budge in their favor. Stay tuned. 

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New Platform The Van Hopes To Disrupt The Streaming Marketplace

The Van hopes to separate itself from its streaming competitors by emphasizing artist compensation over company revenue.

The van is a new worldwide music streaming platform exclusively for indie artists & labels, that enables & encourages listeners to support artists by compensating them directly. The platform encourages bands to make a contribution to the artists they enjoy without requiring a subscription fee or purchase minimum. It is perhaps the first streaming platform to truly place talent before its own interests, and it’s now available worldwide.

For listeners, the van removes the usual commitments & requirements that impede their ability to compensate artists flexibly, equitably and directly. For artists, it offers another means by which to monetize their creative work, on a non-exclusive basis, free of platform fees — while allowing them to upload & manage their music independently (without third-party distributors).

PayPal powers all transactions, and U.S. listeners on the mobile site can make contributions using Venmo. Funds from the artist’s share of a support transaction are deposited into their PayPal account immediately, subject to no holding period.

BUT. There is a small catch.

Artists and labels are personally invited and approved by The Van admin. Curation is managed by human programmers highlighting a limited array of releases at any one time and foregoing the use of algorithms that tend to filter out as much great music as they corral.

Does the world need another streaming service? It’s effortless to say that it does not. After all, the vast majority of all recorded music is available on every platform, and the number of unique benefits any platform can offer is limited.

The world needs a streaming service that emphasizes the importance of compensating artists instead of celebrating algorithms. Musicians worldwide are unhappy with how Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon music compensate talent. These corporations are making billions while artists make fractions of a cent, and no amount of picketing or complaining online seems to convince those in power to change their methods. The Van may not prove to be a perfect solution, but it is attempting to find better ways of compensating artists and highlighting their talent. That’s better than nothing.

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Spotify Will Not Offer Penny Per Stream Royalties To Artists

Following massive global protests at the company’s many offices, Spotify has responded to demands that they make a significant increase to their per-stream royalty payments.

Artists everywhere rely on streaming revenue to pay their bills. That is more true now than at any other point in time. With touring still on hold for most of the world, streaming revenue makes up the bulk share of an artist’s earnings from recorded music. Demand for higher royalty rates will probably always exist, but recently, one such demand actually received a response from the leading music streaming service.

In March, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) organized the protests for higher royalty rates and additional transparency, including a demonstration outside of Spotify’s World Trade Center offices. Many individuals turned up at the latter event, photos and footage show, with the vast majority of the participants appearing to have either played an instrument or carried a sign.

Among the many demands being made, the loudest and most widely shared is a drastic increase in per-stream royalty payments. The current model offers musicians roughly $0.004 per stream, which many believe is too low. Artists present at the protest want that rate raised to $0.01 per stream. It’s a rate anyone can understand, but it would mean a significant hit to the streaming giant’s revenue.

In a response to UMAW, Spotify denied the request. 

The UMAW detailed the company’s formal follow-up in a lengthy chain of tweets, indicating first: “Spotify has issued a response attempting to address some of our demands. We are pleased that Spotify has recognized the legitimacy of UMAW and the artists around the world who are demanding better payment and treatment.

The union’s response continues: “However, Spotify has failed to meet any of our demands. The company consistently deflects blame onto others for systems it has itself built, and from which it has created its nearly $70 billion valuations.”

Spotify also responded with the launch of a new site aimed at increasing transparency. That site — Loud And Clear — provides insights into how the company works and how many artists earn a livable wage through the platform. 

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Soundcloud Introduces ‘Fan-Powered Royalties’ Plan To Pay Artists More Fairly

Soundcloud is onto something revolutionary in the world of streaming: Give listeners’ money to the artists they listen to and not those they don’t.

Calculating the amount of money an artist is likely to earn from streaming is far more complicated than most would assume. No service, including Spotify and Soundcloud, pays based on stream counts alone, and none offer a consistent royalty rate per stream.

Generally speaking, subscriber money is traditionally placed into a large pool that streaming services then pay to artists by comparing their streams for a month to the total streams on the platform.

Here’s an example: If Taylor Swift gets 5% of all streams on Spotify in June, she and her label will get 5% of your monthly subscription fee, even if you never listened to one of her songs.

Soundcloud has a plan to change this, and it begins with fans.

According to an announcement made on Tuesday, March 2, Soundcloud will soon begin using what it calls a “fan-powered royalty” system to compensate artists on its platform.

Under the new model, if a user paying $10 a month only listens to five artists, those five artists will get an equal split of that $10 — after SoundCloud takes its cut — no matter how many times the user listens to each of them.  

Users paying to support the artists they listen to instead of every artist on a platform may sound like an obvious notion. However, Soundcloud is the first mainstream streaming service to attempt such an effort. Others may follow suit in time, but it seems unlikely to happen unless artists and labels work together to push for change.

Soundcloud’s “fan-powered royalty” system goes into effect on April 1.

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Deezer Reveals “Search By Lyrics” Feature For Subscribers

Popular subscription streaming platform Deezer has a new search feature that its competition would be smart to copy.

Spotify and Apple Music are the gold standard in music streaming subscription services, but they’re not the only platforms on the market. With more than 16-million active users, Deezer is a rising global competitor, and their latest development is turning heads throughout the industry.

Deezer users can now search for songs based on lyrics. The feature, which debuted earlier this month, is unique to the French-owned company. Users can look up any song using lyrics alone as long as they know four consecutive words in that track.

Deezer’s new ‘search by lyrics’ feature in action

“Music fans have millions of songs at their fingertips. Recalling some of the lyrics is often easier than remembering the actual name of a track. Our job is to make sure that listeners get to the tunes they want quickly and easily and our new advanced ‘search by lyrics’ feature delivers on that promise,” says Matthieu Gorvan, Deezer’s Chief Product and Technology Officer.

Deezer is also ahead of Spotify on spatial audio, supporting Sony’s 360 Reality Audio format. There are only a handful of tracks that support the new format, but that collection is steadily growing. Deezer’s SongCatcher is also built-in, whereas Spotify has nothing similar. Apple Music users get Shazam for their music discovery.

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Spotify Patents Tech To Monitor Your Speech and Infer Emotion

Spotify wants to know its users better, but its plans to do so are causing a stir online.

Have you ever opened Instagram or Facebook and saw an advertisement for something you were recently discussing in conversation? You never looked for the product on those apps, yet they seem to know what you want? If so, you’re not alone.

Many people believe big tech companies are spying on users’ behavior to create smarter algorithms that serve targeted ads. While that hasn’t been proven, it is eerie to see how well the algorithms currently in use understand your wants and needs.

Spotify’s latest patent is fanning the flames of spyware conspiracies, and it’s not hard to see the connection. The company filed a patent detailing how it could use microphones to determine people’s “emotional state, gender, age, or accent,” according to Music Business Worldwide.

The patent application was submitted back in 2018, but it wasn’t awarded until January 2021. The proposed tech would use its inferences about users to make listening recommendations. If it thinks you’re angry, for example, it may suggest a heavy metal playlist. If you just got dumped, maybe some Juice WRLD will soothe your broken heart.

The company also intends to throw in environmental sounds to the mix, like “vehicles on a street, other people talking, birds chirping, printers printing, and so on,” allowing for context-based recommendations. For example, if the algorithm believes you’re in Los Angeles, it will recommend songs and artists that people visiting the West Coast typically enjoy.

Many questions surrounding the patent have no clear answers. It’s not likely that Spotify will reveal more information about its plans until their tech is ready if such a product ever exists in the first place. Patents are often a legal cover for ideas or experiments a company considers but may ultimately never use.

But if the day comes to pass when Spotify introduces its listening tools, you can be certain some users will be upset. People will want to know when the app is listening, and they will want the ability to opt-out of sharing their life with a tech giant.

It’s important to remember that most of us already share more data with tech giants like Spotify than we realize. Our phones know where we are, what we look for, who we speak to, what we listen to, what movies we plan to watch, and we’re hoping to purchase. Similar information is known by countless websites that we visit, and many share their data with others to build smarter algorithms to keep us hooked on their products. You can call it insidious, or you can call it smart business. Either way, our data isn’t really ours anymore.

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How To Avoid Fake Spotify Playlists

In a world where playlists are influencing culture, musicians everywhere are prey for scam artists hoping to make a quick buck.

Spotify playlists are the new music discovery platform. The right placement on a popular playlist can do more to help an artist’s career than a dozen posts on various music blogs could hope to accomplish. TikTok teens using music in their videos might have more influence on certain demographics, but playlists cater to a wider audience and can play a significant role in generating money for artists.

When someone finds a way to make money or have influence, there are always others who see that opportunity as a means to prey on the wishes of the desperate. Far musicians are hoping for playlist placement than there are playlists with great influence. As a result, people create fake playlists to con artists out of money and generate undue revenue for their music. 

Spotify does its best to prevent scam artists from thriving on their platform. Still, with a global user count numbering in the hundreds of millions, there is no way to police every individual’s activity. The good news is, with a keen eye and the tips shared in the video below, anyone can learn to spot fake playlists. Your career, your wallet, and your sanity will thank you.

A few key takeaways:

  • Never, under any circumstance, should you pay money for playlist placement.
  • You should avoid paying for access to playlist curators as well. If you do, you will likely find many people on the list ask for money in exchange for placement. Again, don’t give in. They’re only asking for money because they believe they are owed something for making something that people enjoy that costs them nothing.
  • Watch out for fake followers. When you find a playlist that interests you, click on the profile of the creator. If that person has multiple playlists with roughly the same follower count, that’s a red flag. They may be using fake followers to boost counterfeit streams.
  • Before you contact a curator, watch their performance. Check in over two weeks to see if the follower count changes. Monitor the songs that get added, how often the tracks change, etc.
  • To discern the legitimacy of a playlist’s influence, we recommend using what we call the ‘small artist’ trick. Find a playlist that interests you and search for an artist with a relatively small amount of monthly listeners. Look at that artist’s “About” page to see where their most is most popular. If they’re an artist from the United States, their top cities will likely be somewhere in the Us. If the top cities are remote parts of the world that are unlikely to know the artist, that may indicate that there are fake streams.
  • Speaking of fake streams, fake followers, and how playlist curators use them to get ahead. Using that same small artist, check to see how many plays they’re getting for whatever song is on the playlist that interests you. If the song is only on that playlist and the playlist has 1000 followers, then it shouldn’t generate thousands of plays. Most playlist subscribers don’t stream the same playlist multiple times per month, nor do they typically listen to the entire playlist each time they put it on.

Watch the video for more tips. 

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New COVID-19 Stimulus Bill Makes Illegal Streaming A Felony

The latest pandemic relief bill from Congress does more than help boost a declining economy, and we have the details.

The United States Congress has finally agreed on a second pandemic relief bill that will pump billions of dollars into the nation’s economy. These stimulus efforts include $600 checks to every citizen and billions to help independent venues. The package also includes a bevy of new laws and acts, including one plan to make illegal streaming a felony in the US.

Among the various proposal included in the latest relief deal is a proposal from Senator Thom Tillis (a Republican from North Carolina) that would make illegal streaming a felony, with penalties of up to 10 years of imprisonment.

When Tillis released a draft of his proposal earlier this month, the open internet/intellectual property nonprofit Public Knowledge released a statement arguing that there’s no need “for further criminal penalties for copyright infringement,” but also saying that the bill is “narrowly tailored and avoids criminalizing users” and “does not criminalize streamers who may include unlicensed works as part of their streams” — instead, it focuses on those who pirate for commercial gain.

In short, the bill proposes to amend US copyright law by adding a section that allows streaming piracy services to be targeted. It is tailored towards services that exploit streaming piracy for commercial gain, leaving individual streamers out of the crosshairs.

Commenting on the bill, Senator Tillis notes that pirate streaming services are costing the US economy billions of dollars every year. The new legislation should help to change this without criminalizing regular streamers.

“This commonsense legislation was drafted with the input of creators, user groups, and technology companies and is narrowly targeted so that only criminal organizations are punished and that no individual streamer has to worry about the fear of prosecution,” Tillis said.

Lawmakers received input from rightsholders as well as the CCIA, which includes prominent members such as Amazon, Cloudflare, Facebook, and Google. The CCIA has previously been critical of streaming felony bills, but it will now remain neutral.

The same applies to the civil rights group Public Knowledge, which also helped in shaping the new bill. While Public Knowledge isn’t in favor of adding criminal penalties for copyright infringement, it sees the new proposal as a reasonable solution.

“[T]his bill is narrowly tailored and avoids criminalizing users, who may do nothing more than click on a link, or upload a file. It also does not criminalize streamers who may include unlicensed works as part of their streams,” says Meredith Rose, Public Knowledge’s Senior Policy Counsel.

Senator Tillis’ bill will likely be a hot topic of conversation in the months ahead. Stay tuned for more.

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Streaming Music Consumption Rises (Again)

After taking a dip in the wake of COVID-19, new data shows that streaming music consumption is on the rise yet again.

Trauma is a strange beast. You never know how you will react to traumatic situations, and sometimes, you don’t even realize you’re experiencing trauma until days, weeks, months, or even years after the fact. A perfect example is the headline-making moment coronavirus had in mid-March. Maybe you felt fear in that instance, or perhaps you didn’t feel the stress of a disease with no cure ripping through your lived ones until much later. Either way, you were experiencing something traumatic that more than likely influenced your behavior.

One change we can find through reviewing consumption data is how the lockdowns that followed the COVID-19 outbreak in the US impacted streaming. As Billboard reports, streaming was measured at 9.4% below average in the week ending March 26. That change can be blamed on a shift in consumer habits as much as a general sense of distraction. People were commuting less because their employers were closed. People were worried about their bills instead of the latest singles. Several big releases got delayed.

For a moment, the industry was scared this downward trend would last as long as the coronavirus itself, but new data says otherwise. Audio streaming rose to 0.9% above average in the week ending May 7, the latest period for which data is available. Music video streams have increased each of the last seven weeks and were 12.5% above average during the week ending May 7.

The report had some other interesting data as well. 84% of people who added a new music subscription service in the previous two weeks said they are likely to continue paying for it after COVID-19. As musicians’ touring income has been gutted during the pandemic, 43% of consumers said they are willing to buy merchandise or music to support artists, up from 36% the week of March 23. One in five consumers said they’ve watched a virtual concert since the lockdown began, although only 29% of the general population and just 17% of teens said they are willing to pay for one.

What does all this mean? The short answer is, the music business is resilient. Life may look nothing like it did before March 13, but that doesn’t mean people have stopped caring about entertainment. If anything, music has proven to be a great sense of comfort. It reminds us of a simpler time while simultaneously helping us cope with the chaos happening outside our homes. People are leaning on music to get them through, and the business is reaping the reward of being able to be there for people who may have no one else.

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