Deezed

2y

btw before i continue, i wanna say i appreciate the discussion

only thing left i can say is you are right. pure sales should count more than a stream, and they do.

you gotta stream an album 1500 times to count as 1 sale, you only have to buy it one time and never listen to count as 1 sale

brainstorm for a second, close your eyes, and think about an album you listened to the past year a good amount. something you definitely spun enough times to where you rap a long or sing a long every song

maybe you played the album in full 30 times. which is a lot. lets say it had 18 songs on it, average song time of 3.5 minutes, thats 63 minutes run time, or lets just round down and call it 60 minutes aka 1 hour.

30 times, 1 hour play through, thats 30 hours of YOUR TIME listening to this album. you know every song. you start getting sick of it, you slowly stop playing it, and boom one day its out of rotation. but still, if someone asked u about the album, u respond "ya thats a great album i listened to everyday at one point"

now the thing is, you didnt buy it, you streamed the album the entire time, and at the end of it you gave that artist not even 1 album sale. not 0.75. not 0.5.
you gave that artist, after 30 hours of listening, memorizing songs, a solid one third of an album sale

30 spins * 18 songs = 540 listens
540/1500 = 0.36 of an album sale

i think there is an equal balance between pure and streaming sales because of this, in my opinion

TheFader

2y

Certified Lover Boy out now!

provider

2y

Taylor Swift having "barely any widely recognizable songs"

TheFader

2y

This is wrong on so many levels.

Streaming is the biggest fraud job in the history of the music industry.

Not only can it be so easily manipulated, botted, and faked, but what other industry do you know of where products get tracked and paid out per use?

Do film studios get more money every time someone plays a DVD? Do book companies get paid every time someone re-reads a book? Do video game creators get more revenue every time someone boots up the game?

It’s a ridiculous and stupid business model and all it’s done is dilute the value of music.

You can’t even argue that the artists are benefitting from it either because they get, quite literally, less than pennies in this system

Midzy

2y

You're on a music forum. Majority of people aren't going to a specific album/artist and choosing specific songs to listen to.

Back then you heard the single on radio, tv, word of mouth, reviews etc, then you made an actual decision to go purchase the CD for yourself.

Streaming is glorified radio, people click on a song/playlist, then whatever comes next is up to Spotify. Here's a recent example:

Tate Mcrae dropped '2 hands' which debuted #8 on Spotify - she bundled it as a single album, which included her previous single 'it's ok i'm ok'. The latter jumped' (+89) spots on Spotify Charts because it auto-played after people checked out her new single. I didn't decide to play that song, and I promise you majority of the people didn't either lmao.

mangotflu

2y

this is insane considering all the crazy fraud labels have done with pure CDs in the past lol, so many artists sales were incredibly overinflated due to it

TheFader

2y

Streaming is inherently set up to benefit the biggest artists only. I think it directly correlates to the dilution of the album in the past decade.

Artists are no longer incentivized to drop the best body of work, and instead have every motivation to release as much music as possible in an effort to maximize streams.

Artists are not trying to earn the listener’s dollar, they are trying to command their attention

Valentine

2y

And a classic album

mangotflu

2y

How is this a problem though? Spotify only counts streams if you've listened to 30s, so anyone that made the decision to skip its ok im ok didn't even count. That's entirely up to the artist. it's literally the same as dropping an album where the next song autoplays

before that was all controlled by radio. you'd have labels paying stations money to play their artists music. now the artists have far more control yet you guys are trying to say that's bad?! lol

TheFader

2y

I also feel like streaming killed the deep cut, but that’s a whole other discussion

provider

2y

Mendes missing the top 20 dude was a star

mangotflu

2y

how is it setup to benefit the biggest artists when it has caused probably the biggest avalanche of new artists we've ever seen.. and artists are also hitting that level below superstar faster than ever

you've got artists like Sabrina Carpenter coming out of basically nowhere completely dominating a superstar like Ariana Grande

Dawn FM did 1.078b streams in 11 months
Eternal Sunshine did 1.35b streams in 8 months
Short n Sweet has done 2.13b in 3 months
Sabrina literally came outta nowhere and has basically over doubled The weeknd + ariana's latest album streams combined

DiamondsFlooded

2y

expand on this

TheFader

2y

My point is that Sabrina was probably making literal pennies for ten years on streaming before she blew up big this year.

Is it easier for artists to blow up now? Sure.

But it’s still such a long shot chance, that for all of the smaller artists or the artists that never really breakthrough on a major level, streaming is not benefitting them in enough of a financial way

mangotflu

2y

so do you think there's less artists making 2x the national average salary from purely music (no tour) now compared to 20 years ago?

TheFader

2y

There used to be a clear distinction between what a single was and what an album cut was.

Singles were heavily marketed, released with music videos, pushed onto radio, crafted specifically to appeal to the masses, and worked for a while. Album cuts, on the other hand, were different. Usually the more “creative” cuts on an album and not made to appeal to a mass audience.

Nowadays, with streaming, that still exists to a certain extent, but it’s much different.

Any song can blow up now. Any song can top the charts, whether it’s the week the album released or two years after it released. We can see the performance of any song released, all the time.

I feel like artists being aware of this changed how they approach filling out an album around the singles now. And it’s also why album drops without a single are so commonplace now.

Look at some of the biggest blockbuster rap albums of the past few years: Certified Lover Boy, Her Loss, Utopia, For All the Dogs, We Don’t Trust You.

All of them basically dropped without a single (with the exception of Utopia and FATD which dropped with one single a week or two before each album).

The biggest songs from those albums were not singles that were released before the albums did. The songs that got pushed after the fact were the songs that were naturally getting the most listens.

Streaming lets the audience decide what the single is, for better or for worse, and with that comes the idea of a “deep cut” being obsolete, as it has essentially blurred the lines between a single and an album cut