Shadowing Practice: The Music Industry is Broken - Learn English Speaking with Video
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The music industry is in an interesting place right now because on one hand, it's more accessible than it's ever been.
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It's more democratic than it's ever been.
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And if recent trends continue, it will soon be more profitable than it's ever been.
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But also, doesn't it kind of feel like it's completely falling apart?
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Last week, six of the top 50 trending songs on Spotify were AI generated.
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If I was my daughter's age, if I'm looking at what musicians are doing now, I wouldn't want to do this.
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If you have a business model and that goes up 10 -15%, you're in a lot of trouble.
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Well, it's doubled.
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But there is a refusal to offer even the semblance of a sustainable revenue source.
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I'm owed $30 ,000 in music royalties that I will probably never see.
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A lot of bands that you love, they're gonna call it quits in the next, like, two years.
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The industry as a whole is raking in more and more money every year.
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But as with so many things in life, the majority of that is concentrated at the top.
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Record labels, tech executives, and monopolistic middlemen make billions while the bottom 80 % of artists are forced into a deathmatch with each other.
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As their costs go up and their revenue goes down, many smaller acts are starting to get priced out of the industry altogether.
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I want to talk about all the things that are causing this, but let's start with Spotify,
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since nobody has been more influential to the current state of music than the company
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that fundamentally changed the way we listen to it.
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My main source for a lot of the information in this video is this book by Liz Pelley called Mood Machine.
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And I would say my biggest takeaway is that
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Spotify has never, at any point, cared about artists.
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In fact, they've routinely done just about everything they can to both undermine and replace them.
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I think it's important to point out that the company wasn't even founded with the intention of being a music streaming service.
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The plan from the beginning was just to make a website that could sell ads.
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The content used to drive traffic to those ads was almost completely irrelevant.
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Should it be product search or should it be movies or audio books?
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And then we ended up with music.
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The only reason they eventually decided on music was because they felt like there was a market for it.
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I'm pretty sure if they thought they'd sell more ads on pictures of feet, then that's what they would have done.
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And maybe I'd still be subscribed and i don't bring this detail up
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because this is my first day on earth and i'm just now learning
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that businesses like to make money i know that's usually the case i just like to point this out
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because it annoys me how much spotify's founders have tried to retroactively apply
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this nobility to their cause i did this not
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because i thought we could make a ton of money i did this
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because i cared about the problem right i cared about music and i cared about compensating artists uh fairly.
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The problem was to distribute music, not to give you money.
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Guys, we were never trying to profit.
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We just wanted to save the music industry.
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And I swear, we're going to start saving it any day now.
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Now, to be fair, it's easy to overly romanticize the time before music streaming apps,
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as if back then everything was working perfectly and artists were just raking in revenue left and right.
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20 years ago, the industry was struggling.
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Piracy had become a huge problem.
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Once people realized they could download a band's entire discography for free, why would they keep of spending 99 cents just to buy one song.
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And unless the plan was to arrest millions of teenagers for using BitTorrent,
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the most realistic way to counteract this was to create something just slightly more convenient in comparison
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so that people would see the value in paying for it.
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The problem for Spotify was that even while that income grew exponentially throughout the early 2010s,
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they just weren't able to keep enough of it for themselves.
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Sure, the only reason people use the app at all is to listen to the music that artists put on it,
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but that doesn't mean they should get most of the money.
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I won't rest until the guy who said, what if we put Napster on phone is worth $10 billion.
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Oh, cool.
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I guess I can rest now.
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Now the way monetization works on Spotify is
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that about 70 % of the revenue that's made from subscriptions and advertisements are paid out to music rights holders,
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while Spotify pays their expenses with the remaining 30%.
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Now I want you to remember those two numbers because I'm gonna refer back to them a lot in this video.
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And I'm gonna show you how that graph has slowly been morphing in the opposite direction.
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But let's start with the 70%.
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It's a common misconception that artists on Spotify are paid per stream, when technically that's not true.
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People often throw around a figure of like 0 .3 cents, but that's just an estimate, and it changes all the time.
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In reality, there's a fixed pool of revenue
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that gets distributed every month based on the total number of streams across the entire platform.
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So if an artist were to have 1 % of all the streams, they would be owed 1 % of all the revenue.
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This means that while there's obviously a correlation between the amount of plays a song gets
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and the amount of royalties that artist receives,
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it's not as if a third of a penny gets deposited into their account every time you press play.
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Spotify is a zero -sum game.
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So unfortunately, the more artists who succeed on it, the more the revenue pool gets spread thin.
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This is where I think they should be taking a much harsher stance than they currently are on AI -generated music.
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I don't care how much the technology is improving, AI Slop is soulless, it's completely unnecessary, and more than anything else, it's theft.
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The only way it exists at all is because it was trained without consent on decades worth of stolen data.
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And yet, it is rampant online.
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Hundreds of thousands of songs are uploaded every single day, and over 40 % of those are estimated to be completely AI -generated.
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Now, I don't want to see AI content anywhere.
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I have no respect for the people who use it, and I cannot wait for all these companies to run out of money.
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But at least when, like, an AI YouTube short blows up, that doesn't financially affect everyone else on the platform.
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On Spotify, though...
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It does, because again, there's only a finite amount of money to go around.
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According to a website called SlopTracker .org,
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just the top 10 songs from just 50 AI artists are responsible for millions of dollars being taken away from actual artists.
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And this is a very small sample size.
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Now, some people have tried to theorize
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that these songs could be a low -cost way for Spotify to attempt to recoup some of the royalties they owe.
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Because if there just so happened to be a song on the platform
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that spotify owned the rights to then
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that percentage of stream share would get redirected right back into the company
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and i'm not accusing them of that
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but at the very least they're certainly not doing anything to stop it
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and even if they don't agree that ai art is inherently theft the way
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that these artists have become so prominent is extremely suspicious there's another website called song stats
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which for pretty much every artist shows a graph of how their spotify playlist reach has fluctuated over time
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you probably noticed
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that these tend to be all over the place for real
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musicians trying to get their work listened to it's a roller coaster it is completely unpredictable
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and now let's take some of the top ai artists and look at theirs
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that's an interesting shape
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that doesn't look like the other graphs this is enli who currently has about 800 000 monthly listeners
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and look at some of the playlists she's been in blues mix morning glow.
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These are official Spotify playlists.
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Here's one of the biggest ones I found, Breaking Rust, whose music sounds like it was trained on 30 hours of Chevy truck commercials.
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Just a few weeks after they released their very first song, they were already on playlists seen by 3 million people.
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What about the Velvet Sundown, who a lot of people were debating about last summer?
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Day one!
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The day they put their music out, they were already in these giant playlists.
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How is that possible, right?
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How could anyone look at this and say that it happened naturally?
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Whether or not
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Spotify is personally responsible for making these things,
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their immediate and completely inorganic rise to fame is suggestive of something that should be against their terms of service.
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I mean, they remove the music of legitimate artists all the time, usually for much less nefarious statistical anomalies.
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So why is it
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that specifically with the velvet sundown they turn the other way
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i don't know i'm just asking questions follow -up question can you guys watch
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Messaging apps, social media websites, and even a built -in music player that syncs with all the biggest streaming services.
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My favorite thing about this is that since it's integrated into the browser, or it'll automatically pause your music when you start watching a video.
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In the early 2010s, in an effort to increase engagement on their app, Spotify began a heavy push towards something they call lean back listening.
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The idea that music isn't so much a piece of art to be intently listened to,
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but rather just like a constant hum that plays in the background of whatever you're doing.
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So they began to curate and promote playlists based on activities or vibes.
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Are you studying?
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We have a playlist for that.
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Going to sleep?
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We have a playlist for that.
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Breaking the news to your cousin that even though there's undeniable chemistry between you,
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the two of you can never be together simply because society deems it wrong.
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Believe it or not, playlists.
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The popularization of playlists and the opportunities that emerged for all the artists
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that got picked to be in them actually changed the way a lot of music got made.
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Artists would start reverse -engineering the writing process to appease the algorithm.
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Songs got shorter, they got simpler, they would start with the most interesting part because as long as people got through the first 30 seconds,
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it would count as a play and then your stats would go up.
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It's too risky to have a slow -burn intro because you're just giving the listener more opportunities to skip it.
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And if they skip it, it tells the algorithm that your song sucks.
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And then they're never going to put on a playlist
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and no one's ever going to listen to it and you're never going to make any money, and you're going to be working at Popeyes forever.
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But while artists were busy trying to figure out how they could navigate the system,
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Spotify was hard at work pulling their own strings in the background.
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In 2017, the same questions started getting asked by more and more people.
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Who's making all these random -ass songs?
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Why are they ending up in so many playlists?
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Artists with a stock photo as their profile picture, with no bio, no website, no contact information, nothing that would indicate...
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They're a real person trying to become a working musician.
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And yet some of them have songs with tens of millions of plays because, like a lot of the AI artists of today,
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they were snuck into official Spotify playlists.
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Again, no proof that
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Spotify's behind any of these.
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In fact, I've even seen one example of them outright denying it.
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So I'm just going to take their word for it.
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But I will say they also denied similar allegations in 2017, and that turned out to be a flat -out lie.
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No, we don't game the system.
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Bad people do.
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And we're good.
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Turns out, no, actually.
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Several musicians have since revealed that they used to have a gig with Spotify where they would just record a bunch of,
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like, two -minute -long instrumentals that then
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Spotify would upload to their platform under random pseudonyms.
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Just a bit of investigation revealed hundreds of artist profiles accounting for millions of dollars in royalty payments that
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Spotify gets to keep because they're the ones who commissioned it.
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And it's not like people were going out of their way to listen to these songs,
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Spotify has the power to force them in front of as many ears as they want.
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Former Spotify employees have talked about how strongly they were urged to prioritize these songs while curating playlists.
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Liz Pelley in her book uncovered internal documents that showed they even had a name for this, perfect fit content.
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And by 2023, hundreds of these massively promoted playlists were filled almost exclusively with these kinds of songs.
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Even weirder though, the source of a large percentage of this music, a company called Firefly Entertainment,
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is owned by someone who has a lifelong personal relationship with one of the higher -ups over at Spotify,
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and he's made hundreds of millions of dollars in streaming revenue the past couple years?
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That's one hell of a coincidence.
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Now, an important detail here, and what I hate to admit makes this kind of a smart move on their part,
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is that the playlists they did this on tend to serve as background noise.
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So not only are people less likely to notice if a song is not as high of quality, but by nature,
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these playlists are designed to be listened to for way longer than you would an actual song by an actual artist.
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Let's say one of your favorite bands just released a new single and you love it.
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Over the course of a couple of weeks, you listen to it like a hundred times.
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But also every night to fall asleep, you put on a gentle ambient piano playlist and let it run for eight straight hours into the morning.
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Well, unfortunately, that means that at the end of the month, about 99 % of your subscription revenue has contributed to a bunch of anonymous,
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faceless stock music that you weren't even awake to hear.
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And the remaining 12 cents goes to your favorite band.
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For them to spend however they want.
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It's not like real musicians don't make this kind of music.
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They used to get picked to be on these playlists.
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This used to be a huge source of traffic and revenue for all of these small independent artists that
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Spotify pretends to care about, but now they've all been cast aside.
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They used their music to popularize these playlists before slowly replacing them with songs that they own the rights to.
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In 2018, they wrote a blog post about this instrumental guitarist named Lance Allen,
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whose life was changed when one of his songs got picked up by Spotify's Peaceful Guitar playlist, and within a couple of months,
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he had started earning enough revenue from streaming to pay his mortgage and even buy a new car.
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He was propped up by the company as an ultimate success story, a personification of this new era of self -sufficient musicians.
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Now, they ran this blog for two reasons.
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One, it makes them look good.
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It helps them brand themselves as the artist empowerment company.
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Remember when we saved music?
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Remember when we did that?
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But the other reason they posted this is because it's an advertisement.
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If it can happen to this guy, it can happen to you.
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You just need a little nudge to get started, and we can provide it for you.
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It was around this time that
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Spotify started rolling out more promotional features specifically targeted at artists.
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Marquee ads, playlist pitching, this entire campaign kit that's often presented as more of a necessity than a luxury.
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They know that a lot of struggling artists are desperate for a break, and by using people like
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Lance to show that a better future might be possible, they're now able to monetize that desperation.
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They have made millions of dollars off of independent artists by selling them on a dream.
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Just a few years after this blog was posted, after using these kinds of stories to advertise their promotional tools,
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Spotify had all but abandoned people like Lance. In 2023, he took to Twitter to express how impossible
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it had become for him to compete with the stock music farms taking over the platform.
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And today, when you look at the same playlist that once helped jumpstart his career, there doesn't seem to be a single real person on it.
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The final evolution of Spotify flexing their muscles in the face of independent artists was a tool
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they released in 2020 called Discovery Mode.
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By opting your songs into it, you increase the likelihood of having them recommended across the app.
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And in exchange, Spotify gets to keep 30 % of your revenue.
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Pretty quickly, a lot of people in the industry were comparing this to something called payola,
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a common practice in the 1950s where labels would bribe DJs under the table to play their songs on the radio,
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gaming the system and making people think they were way more popular than they actually were.
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Payola became the subject of a bunch of lawsuits, investigations, and even arrests before being outlawed in the 1960s.
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But like a lot of things that used to be illegal,
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just give it enough time and someone will find a loophole to make it okay again.
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The argument that
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Spotify makes to try and differentiate their program is that you don't have to pay any money up front.
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You pay on the back end, so...
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it's different.
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But it works exactly the same way.
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The order of the transaction doesn't really matter
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when they've gone on record to brag about how many artists they've gotten to sign up for it
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and how many hundreds of millions of dollars they've retained as a result.
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But first, let's talk payola.
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That's pay for play.
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You cannot buy your way onto a playlist.
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If anyone offers you pay for play to get on a Spotify playlist, it's a scam.
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Hey, you can't give money to some website to end up in a playlist.
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That's wrong.
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If you want to get in playlists, give that money to us.
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It's a scam.
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Now you might have been thinking through the past couple sections, Drew, this is all very interesting, and you're looking weirdly handsome today,
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but I don't listen to Spotify playlists, so none of this affects me.
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And it's important to point out
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that the algorithmic boost given to these songs applies to every method of discovery across the app.
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So that could be autoplaying after you finish an album, any radio mix from a song or artist, your Discover Weekly, your daily mixes,
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hell, even if you just accidentally click the shuffle button twice and turn on this stupid feature, you are being served songs at a disproportionate level.
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Even though Spotify has long been putting less emphasis in their officially curated playlists and more in their individually generated ones,
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they're all still made using the same algorithm.
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An algorithm that is increasingly being influenced by pay -to -play.
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It's honestly kind of crazy that
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Spotify is able to monetize the same product in both directions.
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Listeners have to pay in order to hear music that artists have had to pay in order to be heard.
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They created a problem in order to sell you the solution.
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Discovery mode is often described as a win -win for everyone, even though that's literally not possible.
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Because it's not creating any more revenue, it's just distributing it differently.
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If it was truly a win -win for both artists and Spotify, well then everyone should sign up for it.
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But then what would happen if every single artist did?
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Whatever algorithmic boost they received would then be offset by the fact that somehow everyone else needs to get boosted too.
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Effectively, nothing would change.
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Except, of course, that
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Spotify would get a 30 % discount on every single song that ever plays algorithmically.
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And from looking into it, it kinda seems like this is already starting to happen.
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I'm wondering if they reached a point where too many artists signed up for the program,
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and now it's not able to do anything because there simply aren't enough plays to go around.
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Don't worry though, I can almost guarantee that in the next couple years they're gonna put out some revamped discovery mode.
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A higher tier of visibility for just a little bit more.
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Wait, you're still only giving away 30 % of your revenue?
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Yeah, good luck with that, buddy.
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Everyone else is giving away 80%.
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In the early days, Spotify was able to use their giant pool of investor money to inflate artists' payouts to make
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it seem like it was worth putting their music here.
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And so, they did.
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Everyone did.
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And now, they don't have to overpay to convince people anymore.
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Artists are gonna come here no matter what.
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They have to.
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The industry runs through Spotify.
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Their subscribers have multiplied to unfathomable numbers, while the cost of that subscription has increased every 14 months like clockwork,
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and yet, individual streams for independent musicians have never been worth less.
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And now we're at the inevitable part of every
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Tech Endeavor's life cycle, where the priority moves from gaining market share to strictly profitability at all costs.
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So they will continue to cut corners and underpay for content, and inshittify their product, hoping you're too loyal to take your business somewhere else.
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Meanwhile, their CEO, who is richer than any musician in the history of the world,
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has used that fortune to invest over half a billion dollars into a company that makes strike thrones for the military.
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In a world full of terrible corporations run by awful people, Spotify seems determined to vault themselves up to the top of that list.
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And yet, when it comes to music, they're still not even the biggest source of evil.
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Historically, music has always been a top -heavy, exploitative industry.
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Young artists would get signed to aggressively long contracts
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that they didn't fully understand until years later when it was too late because they were trapped in it.
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In the 1990s, Prince went through a years -long public dispute with Warner Brothers over creative and monetary disagreements.
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It got so bad that in protest, he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol.
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The label tried to use his publicity stunts to frame him as this like spoiled crazy diva,
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but he was just fighting to be paid what he was worth.
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Sure, he was making a lot of money, but it still paled in comparison to what
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Warner was profiting off the back of his labor.
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And when he was finally able to get out of that deal and self -fund and self -promote his own work,
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he proved that he had been getting screwed over
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because he made infinitely more money even on tours and albums that were less commercially successful.
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In 2007, after their record label was unwilling to renegotiate with them,
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Radiohead put out their In Rainbows album online using a pay -whatever -you -want model, even if the amount that you wanted to pay was $0.
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And yet, they made more money distributing it this way than they had from all of their previous records combined.
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But it does beg the question, what the hell kind of deals were these guys signed to where they could sell millions
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and millions of albums and barely see any money from it?
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Well, for starters, it wasn't uncommon for artists to be owed a single -digit percentage of the revenue made from their work.
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Not that they owe 5 % of it, right?
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That's how much they get to keep.
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Even on the high end, that number tends to be about 50.
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When you first sign that deal, though, you're not worried about that, because the label is going to lure you in with a number
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that blows your mind at a time in your life when you're probably broke.
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So when they offer you an advance of, say, $250 ,000, you're going to say, do you have a pen?
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Where can I sign?
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And you're made aware that that money isn't actually yours to keep, that it's just a loan that you have to pay back, blah, blah, blah.
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Whatever, you'll figure all that out later.
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For now, what matters is you're confident in yourself, and that number represents legitimacy.
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You made it.
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You are a professional musician now.
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So you go and record the album while renting a lifestyle that you're not yet able to afford.
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And if you're lucky, that album does well.
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Really well, actually.
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You sold half a million copies.
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Your music has already generated $5 million.
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Great, I'll take my 15%, I'll deduct the advance, and I got a pretty sweet payday for myself.
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Well, not so fast there, Rockstar.
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We're not done subtracting.
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The advance wasn't the only loan.
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Every single resource we provided to you needs to be paid for as well.
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The deal was you had access to them, not that you get them for free.
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So we're just going to make a few small adjustments, and before you know it,
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you somehow owe more debt than the amount we loaned you to start with.
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With each subsequent album, you only fall deeper and deeper into financial ruin.
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And you're one of the successful ones.
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But as bad as this is on paper, it's usually even worse in practice. Because oftentimes,
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the other companies that you as an artist are forced to do business with are also owned by the record label.
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So per the contract, we're able to deduct certain production costs before we calculate the amount that you are owed.
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Well, the thing is, we actually own the factory that produces all your CDs.
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And so the price for that is, how do I put this?
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Whatever we want it to be.
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We can say a bunch of them broke.
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We can print and sell records we never even tell you about.
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Dude, we can pull numbers out of our ass.
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The more money you earn, the more deductions we'll come up with to offset.
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And this process is never an accident.
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It's very much part of the business model.
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For example, back in the 40s and 50s, vinyl records were pretty fragile, which made them susceptible to braking or scratching in transit.
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So to account for this, there would generally be a flat, like 15 % reduction in revenue owed to the artist.
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Now, if common sense were to be applied, you would think that as the industry moved away from vinyls and into nearly indestructible CDs and cassettes,
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that this charge would go away.
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It did not.
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Even into the digital era, where we're talking about MP3 files, many of those breakage fees were still incorporated.
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It is total nonsense.
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It is highway robbery.
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An accounting firm that was referenced in this book, who was responsible for thousands of audits regarding hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty,
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could recall only one time ever where the audit revealed that it was the artist who owed money to the label.
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I can't believe they just kept making the same error over and over again, and it always worked out in favor of the labels.
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That's crazy.
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There's so many coincidences in the music industry.
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But we're still not done, because even then, they're not just going to give you that money back.
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They're going to look you in the eyes and say, what are you going to do about it?
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Sure, if you're successful enough,
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you could try to take on a lawsuit and fight a battle that best case scenario could earn you a decent settlement.
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But most likely, you're not going to want to do that.
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Because they have all the resources in the world to outlawyer you
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and waste all your money until there's none of it left.
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So they'll offer a fraction of what they owe you and hope that it makes you stop whining.
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But be careful, you might have pissed them off they might be holding a grudge against you.
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That next album that you owe us, you still have to record it, you still have to pay us for it,
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but we're not gonna put it out.
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I hope you enjoyed making music while it lasted because that's over now.
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This is the kind of exploitation that happens when power gets consolidated at the top,
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when the labels that you can't live without control every part of the machine that you are forced to use.
385
Artists generate so much money for so many people that have nothing to do with the creative process at all.
386
There's no road you can go down that the artist isn't fucked.
387
But things started to change pretty drastically in the 2000s.
388
The rise of the internet brings on Napster and eventually LimeWire.
389
For the first time in decades, overall music revenue is declining.
390
But remember, most of that money was going to record labels.
391
So they were also the ones losing the most of it.
392
You see, I'm not a Napster fan.
393
It seems to me like people are getting ripped off.
394
It's interesting because the artists don't get paid anyway.
395
Piracy may have been bad for the music industry,
396
but in a way, it might have ultimately been a good thing for musicians because it caused a long overdue disruption.
397
It took power out of the hands of people who had been abusing it.
398
Then social media starts to take over.
399
Suddenly fans can talk directly to their fans on MySpace.
400
They can post other shows on Facebook.
401
The labels are now losing their status as the gatekeepers.
402
Many of the marketing tools they offered, the things that they were able to justify taking 99 % of your money for,
403
were kind of becoming obsolete.
404
Fast forward to today, anyone can upload music to a streaming service.
405
Anyone can build a fan base.
406
In fact, a label won't even think about signing you unless you've already built a pretty big following online.
407
But then at that point, it's like, what do you even need them for?
408
You've done the hard part.
409
They're probably just gonna swoop in, take as much of your money as they can,
410
and then drop you as soon as your fans move on to someone else.
411
So then the question is, how are they still able to get away with it?
412
I thought we democratized the music industry.
413
How do the labels.. still have so much power.
414
Well, this is where record labels and Spotify intersect.
415
Now, when you talk about record labels, there's a whole bunch of them, but there's really only three conglomerates that matter.
416
Sony, Universal, and Warner, sometimes referred to as the majors or the big three.
417
Thanks to their obsession with gobbling up every single thing they come into contact with,
418
they now own about 70 % of all recorded music in history.
419
I cannot emphasize enough that anybody who tried to do what
420
Spotify did, which was to put every song ever made in one place for a small monthly fee,
421
couldn't have made it even one inch without bending over backwards for the record labels.
422
It doesn't matter how good their user interface or algorithm is
423
if they didn't have the music that people want to listen to.
424
So the majors have always had extraordinary leverage over them, and they've maximized the hell out of it.
425
They negotiated massive advances from Spotify, with no guarantee that any of that money would trickle down to their artists.
426
They got a bunch of free ad space that they would typically just sell,
427
with no guarantee that any of that money would trickle down to their artists.
428
And they also received a significant amount of equity in Spotify, about 18 % total.
429
I think maybe the most insane detail I learned about while making this video happened in 2018.
430
At the time, Spotify is quickly becoming the industry stand.
431
Their user base is growing every year,
432
the company's getting bigger, but they want to open up the floor to more investors so they're ready to launch their IPO.
433
But around the same time, their licensing agreement with the big three labels was about to expire.
434
Oh my god, talk about leverage.
435
The labels had
436
Spotify by the balls.
437
They could have renegotiated just about anything because if they didn't like the terms,
438
they could have just taken all their artists off of the platform right before they go public
439
and it would have completely destroyed them
440
because who's going to invest in a music company that doesn't have any music on it?
441
So what did the majors do with all this power?
442
Well, they negotiated their rates.
443
Down.
444
They asked for less money.
445
Why would they do that, you're asking?
446
Are they stupid?
447
Well, we need to refer back to that pie chart from earlier.
448
Now, even though most of these royalties end up going to record labels, some of them end up in the disgusting hands of independent artists.
449
And we hate them.
450
Their greed is ruining an otherwise perfect business model.
451
But then, even the money that does go to the record labels has to be shared with all of our stupid artists.
452
And we hate them just as much.
453
Sure, we've already made it so it's as small of a percentage as it could possibly be, but it's still not nothing.
454
We'd prefer if it was nothing.
455
If only we could leverage their work to make hundreds
456
and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars without having to owe them a cent.
457
Well, here's where that equity comes in.
458
When they lowered artist royalty rates, Spotify became a more valuable company.
459
This meant their stock price went up and the majors could cash out for more.
460
They figured out how to get paid anyway, but with money that their artists have no contractual claim to.
461
But that wasn't the only benefit for record labels
462
because they also have something in their contract with Spotify called the Most Favored Nation Clause
463
and what that means is
464
that nobody else outside of the big three is allowed to negotiate higher rates with spotify
465
so when they lowered the rate for their artists they in turn also lowered it for everybody else even
466
if you don't work with a label they will still find ways to screw
467
you out of money
468
now unfortunately record companies hoarding the majority of the money their artists earn for them is nothing new
469
it's been a staple of the industry for at least the past century
470
but But the good news is live music is thriving, ticket sales are high, and musicians of all sizes are being fairly compensated.
471
At least according to an article I just read from March 9th, 2020.
472
Wait, let me make sure nothing drastic has changed since then.
473
If the record industry is a story of three companies owning all of the music,
474
then the live event industry is a story of one company controlling the entire mechanism by which concerts operate.
475
Since merging in 2010, Ticketmaster and Live Nation have bulldozed their way into a monopoly that controls every part of the transaction.
476
Not only do they own most of the biggest venues,
477
but they've made it so the only way you can buy tickets to those venues is through them.
478
And now that you have no other choice, we can charge all kinds of exorbitant fees.
479
Service fees, processing fees, convenience fees.
480
Come on guys, isn't this convenient?
481
And the monopoly goes in every direction, since most artists are forced to work with them as well.
482
If they want to take 10 % of the revenues and call it a facility fee, they can and have.
483
If they want to charge $30 ,000 for the house nut, they can and have.
484
Some good news, the government sued
485
Live Nation back in 2024, a lawsuit that recently reached a settlement.
486
One of their processing fees, which was revealed to be pure profit and didn't actually cover any costs, is now illegal.
487
The bad news, they just moved it over to a service fee instead.
488
At least with streaming services, you can say that the customer is getting a good value.
489
$12 a month for a trillion songs, and I can listen to the Hours of Silence podcast?
490
The prices aren't the problem, it's just what happens to that money later.
491
But with live music, Ticketmaster's monopoly only drives prices higher and higher and higher.
492
Couple that with a rapidly worsening economy for the average person, and attendance rates are going way down.
493
Some huge artists with massive streaming numbers have had to cancel entire tours because not enough of their tickets were selling.
494
And yet, if you ask
495
Live Nation's CEO, he'll say they're still not ex - Expensive enough.
496
Average concert price is $72.
497
The concert is underpriced.
498
It's like a badge of honor to spend 70 grand for a Knicks courtside.
499
They beat me up if we charge 800 for a Beyonce.
500
One of the biggest causes of price gouging is the resale market.
501
Now an artist might try to set a maximum ticket price on one of their tours
502
because they want as many of their fans as possible to be able to afford it,
503
but unless they have enough negotiating power there's nothing stopping the secondary ticket market from swooping in
504
and ruining it for everybody else.
505
A 2016 law called the Bots Act was supposed to make
506
it illegal for scalpers to use certain technology to buy large quantities of tickets and resell it all for a profit,
507
but Ticketmaster could not give less of a fuck about that.
508
When a ticket gets resold through their website, they get to collect service fees on it twice.
509
One, when the scalper first bought it from them, and then an even bigger fee when they resell it for a higher price.
510
The resale market is a huge factor for why tickets have ended up so expensive,
511
But it's important to remember that any of that profit from a resale doesn't make its way back to the artist.
512
To them, the transaction ended when the first sale was made.
513
So even though they tried to make the ticket more affordable, their fans still had to pay twice as much anyway.
514
Only that entire profit ends up in the hands of Ticketmaster and the person or company who resold it.
515
Which sometimes is also Ticketmaster.
516
The artists lose, the fans lose, but the giant company wins again.
517
Now, these had all been growing problems for years, but where shit really hit the fan was during COVID.
518
The industry got decimated, especially for smaller venues and musicians.
519
But many of the ones that did survive have seen their profits drop to an almost unsustainable level.
520
I wanted to ask some touring musicians about the business side of things, so I drove up to Gainesville,
521
Florida to talk to my friends Sergio and Andrew, who at the time of recording were about halfway through their tour with the band
522
Dance Cabin Dance.
523
Let's break down like a tour.
524
We do two buses, one bus for the band and one bus for the crew.
525
And then we have a semi, because we have production, lighting, and all of our sound gear, all of our in -ear monitors,
526
and then all of our backlines, so our amps.
527
So when you do all of that,
528
now you've got probably $300 ,000 plus right out the gate for a month -plus long tour for just transportation.
529
That doesn't cover gas, which is higher than ever.
530
Let's say, you know, a fan spends, just for math's sake, $100 on a ticket.
531
That's a lot for a fan to spend, but you take all these costs away, and all of a sudden,
532
the amount that's actually going to the band, what percentage goes to?
533
Everyone who reaches their hands in management agent just on our team's side of things 30 % already gone
534
Your live nation your your extra fees things like that.
535
That's usually an extra 10 percent sometimes 15 some cases 20
536
The abstracts would be your expenses usually about 50 % sometimes more on beyond bigger tours
537
That leaves maybe 10 to 20 dollars out of that ticket
538
that goes to the band and then that would be split four ways
539
So let's say it's 20 if there's four members of your band and you're usually getting five points.
540
Now, Dance Gavin Dance is doing well for themselves.
541
They're one of the bigger touring bands out there right now.
542
But by extrapolating this cost structure out to most bands that are a fraction of their size,
543
you can see how it's becoming increasingly difficult to turn a profit from touring.
544
And that's kind of a problem, because historically speaking, that's where most of their money is supposed to come from.
545
I'm nervous for the future of the industry for the same reason that I'm hopeful about it.
546
People are always gonna make music no matter what.
547
It's an intrinsic part of our lives.
548
It's one of humanity's oldest art forms.
549
Most musicians would make music for free.
550
They would do it even if they lost money.
551
It just sucks that a lot of people know that, and so they seem determined to make sure that they do.
552
I think the best way to support musicians, especially if they're independent, is to try to buy directly from them.
553
Bandcamp is a great way to do this.
554
Your money's gonna go a lot further there than it is on streaming services.
555
But also physical versions of music, CDs, vinyls.
556
I love collecting vinyls.
557
I've been doing it since before I even had a record player.
558
Nobody wants to sell you objects anymore.
559
They just want you to sign up for a cloud subscription service.
560
But I like owning physical objects that I can touch
561
and look at and that represent a piece of art that I love.
562
The fact that I can also listen to it is kind of just a bonus.
563
Streaming can be great for music discovery.
564
I mean, sometimes it's nice to just have a machine play a bunch of songs until they find one that you like.
565
I canceled my Spotify a couple of years ago,
566
but I still use YouTube music because it's included in premium and I was already paying for that anyway.
567
And I found a lot of cool bands from it.
568
It's a useful service.
569
But I also don't wanna take it for granted, you know?
570
Just because it was easy for me to discover an album doesn't mean it was easy for them to make it.
571
If someone's music adds value to my life, I wanna try to give some of that back.
572
And I don't think the two cents they're getting for my subscription revenue is gonna cut it.
573
Now, what I wanted to do for this video was secretly put out some of my own music
574
and document the journey of trying to be an independent musician in 2026. But obviously,
575
music takes a lot of time you got to learn an instrument
576
you got to write something you got to learn how to record
577
it you got to put it out
578
you got to figure out what the hell distro kit is it's not the kind of thing
579
you can just pull out of your ass in a couple of months you know um
580
So I decided that if I was going to do it, I should probably start four years ago. In 2022,
581
my friends CJ and Julian asked me if I wanted to go jam with them in a U -Haul storage unit,
582
and I said, sure, why not?
583
Even though I knew why not, because the thought of playing guitar in front of other people made me want to shit my pants.
584
But I also knew that sometimes the only way to grow as a person is to do stuff that scares you.
585
I wish it wasn't.
586
I wish you could grow just by playing on the computer.
587
But pretty soon we started practicing once a week, and then twice a week.
588
Then our friend Kevin joined the band,
589
which meant that Julian and I could both play guitar instead of taking turns pretending to know how to play bass.
590
At that point, we had already written a bunch of songs, so we decided it was time to play them in public.
591
Made me wanna shit my pants.
592
The first show we ever did was an open mic at a Kava bar, where for some reason I wore the shortest shorts that I owned.
593
Our next show was at another Kava bar where we were way too loud,
594
and then we played a hardcore show where we were way too quiet.
595
This show was a nightmare for me.
596
Nobody liked our music.
597
I said thank you like a hundred times.
598
And during the last song, which was supposed to be like our big heavy closer, I was getting so much feedback from my amp
599
that I had to turn off my distortion pedal and then no one could hear me.
600
And since our music is instrumental, it's kind of important that people can hear the instrument.
601
I left that show questioning my entire existence.
602
Maybe I'm not cut out for this.
603
Maybe I should just give up.
604
And then our next show is the best one so far.
605
We did a couple more shows here and there,
606
but then we took a break to focus on our real goal which was to make an album.
607
We had the space to record it.
608
We had started buying the equipment.
609
Kevin was learning FL Studio.
610
We had a bunch of songs.
611
So instead of just dropping like one or two singles and moving on,
612
we decided we're not gonna put anything out until we finish an entire album.
613
Plus how long did it take, right?
614
Three months, six months.
615
Two years.
616
Turns out when you're four adult men with four adult jobs, three if you don't count YouTubers,
617
there are only so many hours a week you have to devote to your instrumental emo band.
618
So finally, after months of staring at the back of Kevin's head, we exported the album.
619
We hired our friend Alexa to do the artwork.
620
The only direction I gave her for this was like, I don't know, maybe something with a bird on it.
621
And then she hand -painted this beautiful masterpiece.
622
It's actually too good.
623
It's better than our music is.
624
For real though, we're all extremely proud of this album and the work that went into it.
625
And we'd love it if you gave it a listen.
626
It's like half the length of this video, so you can't tell me that you don't have time.
627
You could have listened to it twice already instead of watching this crap.
628
Actually, for all I know, you could have already listened to it.
629
We put it out back in March of last year.
630
So here's what the past 15 months has been like.
631
At first, things were better than I expected.
632
We had a couple of the YouTube videos get like 100 views right away.
633
One of the most gratifying moments of this entire process was getting like three comments from people saying, I don't know how I got here,
634
but this is really good.
635
At one point, I saw that somebody shazammed one of our songs, and we talked about it for a week.
636
So everything was going pretty good, and then like a month later, it completely stopped.
637
Turns out it doesn't matter how much time and effort and money you put into music,
638
if you throw it up on streaming services and don't tell anyone about it, it's probably just gonna disappear into the void.
639
There were weeks where I'd get an email from Apple that were like, hey, just letting you know, nobody listened to your music this week.
640
Keep up the good work.
641
It really does feel like we put a drop of water into the middle of the ocean
642
and we're just waiting for people to find it.
643
I guess it also probably doesn't help that our band name has terrible SEO
644
because it's a word that already exists but that we purposely spelled wrong.
645
On some platforms, you can't find it even if you're going out of your way to.
646
But a couple months ago, I decided that it was time to lock in and
647
that I would earnestly navigate some of the artist engagement tools the internet shoves in your face.
648
I'd started using the band's Instagram page more to post about shows and connect with some other bands.
649
And I could tell that already, Meta had all of the information
650
they needed to categorize me into what I can only assume they call their Desperate Artist Program.
651
Because suddenly every single ad I got was about posting banner ads on Spotify
652
or having a website analyze my songs so they could pitch them to playlists.
653
Oh my God, this interface is so predatory.
654
They are doing everything they can to convince you that they're on your side.
655
What do we get out of this?
656
Nothing, man.
657
We just want to help a brother out.
658
um now if you wouldn't mind giving us $40
659
and what the fuck is this your analysis is expiring in
660
10 minutes how what are you gonna forget my trepidation turned to joy though
661
when they told me
662
that my sophisticated arrangement makes me stand out from amateur producers wow
663
I'm flattered they also told me I had a 74 hit potential
664
I had no idea who was gonna tell me I was sitting on top of a goldmine.
665
Out of curiosity, I tried another one of my songs.
666
It's called Golden, and I wrote it for the Netflix original movie K -pop Demon Hunters.
667
And oh my god, the craziest thing happened.
668
They told me almost the exact same shit.
669
Except they only gave this song a 72.
670
That's right.
671
My instrumental guitar band has more commercial potential than the seventh most popular song of 2025.
672
Well, I guess that confirms it.
673
They're just lying to me to try and get my money.
674
Or they're telling the truth and I'm going to perform at the Grammys.
675
Better get my credit card out just in case.
676
Before I fully give up on this website, though, I do want to try one more track.
677
It's kind of niche.
678
It's a little vulnerable, but I'm just curious to see if maybe somewhere out there there's an audience for it.
679
It's called A Thousand Farts, and it's an hour long.
680
And would you look at that?
681
This one has the highest score so far.
682
This could very well become the most popular song ever made.
683
The more I engaged with these ads, the more it confirmed that I was interested,
684
and then any future ads I got seemed like they weren't even really trying that hard.
685
Yeah, we actually don't know anything about your song, but just give us $100.
686
Come on, what's the worst that could happen?
687
You die?
688
I don't think that could happen from this.
689
So just give us $100 out i swear on my life
690
i will try my absolute hardest to get
691
you on top white girl music 2026 songs to sing along best song to listen to at parties
692
and if that doesn't work we could always try one called the best songs ever sure
693
that seems like a realistic place to start the sheer flood
694
of similar websites honestly made me distrustful of this entire cottage industry as whole
695
but for the video i wanted to try at least one of them
696
so i ran a campaign on submit hub now i have no idea
697
if this is any more legit than these other websites
698
but at the very least i think it's been around the longest
699
but just like the ones from the ads immediately asking for 100 bucks this time though i paid it
700
and then for the next several days i physically winced every time
701
i opened my email to see a roundup of the process so far rejection after rejection after rejection
702
Everyone generally had nice things to say.
703
Hey man, this sounds great.
704
You guys should be proud of this.
705
I'd fucking kill myself before putting it on any of my playlists, but good luck.
706
I'll give SubmitHub a little bit of credit for at least being transparent.
707
You can see exactly how the curators listen to your song.
708
The problem though is that in some cases, how they listened to it was barely at all.
709
I also realized in hindsight that I probably shouldn't have let them auto -pick the curators after guessing my genre.
710
And I should have tried to find playlists with music that sounds similar to me and then manually targeted those.
711
But at the same time, the one playlist I feel like we probably had the best
712
chance of getting on didn't even listen to half the song or give any feedback.
713
And this cost me money.
714
I had to pay this person.
715
The low point of this process for me was when SubmitHub emailed me an AI summary of all my rejections.
716
I also could have just copied and pasted them all into Grok, but thanks for doing it for me, I guess.
717
Not really sure what I'm supposed to do with this.
718
None of these people wanted our song.
719
What, am I gonna frame this on my wall?
720
Yes.
721
For a little over $105, I ran a couple of decent meta ads, received entrance into one playlist that will,
722
at best, net us a handful of streams, and I got a ChatGPT summary of everything I'm doing wrong.
723
Now, I'm not saying that my bad experience should discount all of these services entirely.
724
Obviously, it works for some people, some of the time.
725
But it sure seems like this is just yet another opportunity
726
for one more pair of grabby hands to lunge towards your
727
pockets as you try desperately to make waves in an endless ocean of content.
728
The more oversaturated music gets, the more common these kinds of websites will become,
729
and the more people who will try to profit off your optimism before it runs out.
730
Getting anybody to give a shit about our music felt impossible, But at the same time, it didn't really bother me that much.
731
Because we didn't make this music with the hopes that it would, like, go viral.
732
We made it because we wanted to.
733
We wrote the exact kind of music that we like to listen to.
734
This album only exists because we made it exist.
735
And no amount of rejection emails will ever take that away from us.
736
A lot has changed for us the past year.
737
Julian left the band, and we've had to kind of reconfigure as a three -piece.
738
But we're still writing a lot of music, and we still play shows every so often.
739
If you want to see more of what we end up doing, follow us on Instagram.
740
We also have a YouTube channel that I'm going to post some playthroughs on.
741
And I'll probably throw some other random shit out there, too.
742
So subscribe if that's something you're interested in.
743
I do have to mention, though, the, um, incident.
744
On May 27th, we played a show at Will's Pub.
745
We were opening for a really cool band, I Met a Yeti.
746
It was an awesome night.
747
Everyone had a great time.
748
But somebody took a video of it and put it on TikTok.
749
And now everybody knows my secret.
750
I cannot believe that I successfully hid this from the world for four years
751
and then like two weeks before I plan on making a video about it.
752
Someone else beat me to the punch.
753
Not cool, bro.
754
But I guess it just goes to show that everything I said in this video was a total fucking lie.
755
Music's easy.
756
What are you guys whining about?
757
All you have to do is be a YouTuber for nine years, but don't make any music.
758
Not yet.
759
Once you've given it at least five years, you can start a band with your friends, but don't tell anybody about it.
760
It needs to be a surprise.
761
Without the surprise, this doesn't work.
762
Just keep chipping away at it in the background, spend an unbelievable amount of time and money on it, record an album, release the album,
763
make $18 from it each, and wait an entire year.
764
Only then can you play a show at a local bar in Orlando,
765
have it recorded by a random stranger who uploads it to TikTok where it goes medium viral for a couple of days,
766
probably less so because people like the music and more
767
so just because it's kind of interesting you're even doing it at all.
768
And that was my master plan.
769
It may have taken me almost a decade, But it was all worth it
770
when I saw our monthly listeners on Spotify go from a measly 109 all the way up to 175?
771
Wait, is that it?
772
That video got like a million views.
773
Even in just the past four years since we started dicking around in that storage unit, I feel like I've already seen corporate greed price out
774
so many artists from the industry and so many fans from being able to participate in it.
775
But I also realized that there's a thriving local scene
776
that I had no idea about until I started going to shows and meeting all these really cool musicians,
777
a lot of whom are now my friends.
778
Maybe it's not always realistic to spend $300 on nosebleed tickets at a sold -out arena.
779
But who knows?
780
There might be a free show happening right now at a non -profit venue inside a bowling alley.
781
Your new favorite band might be performing at a bar two miles from your house.
782
Music is worth making.
783
And if you feel the need
784
and you feel the burning passion to want to make music or art or in general, do it.
785
Recruit your friends.
786
Get out and meet people.
787
You might not be able to film your own music video,
788
but your friend has a camera and has a film experience and wants to get involved in a project.
789
Develop your friends.
790
Develop each other.
791
Get into a scene of people and build those relationships up from the ground up.
792
I think beautiful things can come with that.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “The Music Industry is Broken”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: artist, spotify, song. This video has 792 sentences and 10149 words to shadow. The speech runs for 47:23. The speaker talks fast, about 214 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| playlist noun | /ˈpleɪˌlɪst/ | A list of recorded songs scheduled to be played on a radio station. |
| label noun | /ˈleɪ.bəl/ | A small ticket or sign giving information about something to which it is attached or intended to be attached. |
| musician noun | /mjuˈzɪʃən/ | A composer, conductor, or performer of music; specifically, a person who sings and/or plays a musical instrument as a hobby, occupation, or profession. |
| royalty noun | /ˈɹɔɪəlti/ | The rank, status, power or authority of a monarch. |
| owe verb | /oʊ/ | To be under an obligation to give something back to someone or to perform some action for someone. |
| percentage noun | /pə(ɹ)ˈsɛntɪd͡ʒ/ | The amount, number or rate of something, regarded as part of a total of 100; a part of a whole. |
| discovery noun | /dɪˈskʌv.ɹi/ | Something discovered. |
| opera noun | /ˈɒp.ə.ɹə/ | A theatrical work, combining drama, music, song and sometimes dance. |
| generate verb | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ə.ɹeɪt/ | To bring into being; give rise to. |
| algorithm noun | /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/ | A collection of ordered steps that solve a mathematical problem. A precise step-by-step plan for a computational procedure that possibly begins with an input… |
| guitar noun | /ɡɪˈtɑɹ/ | A stringed musical instrument, of European origin, usually with a fretted fingerboard and six strings, played with the fingers or a plectrum (guitar pick). |
| subscription noun | /səbˈskɹɪpʃən/ | Access to a resource for a period of time, generally for payment. |
| instrumental adjective | /ɪnstɹəˈmɛntəl/ | Essential or central; of great importance or relevance. |
| rejection noun | /ɹɪˈd͡ʒɛkʃən/ | The act of rejecting. |
| earn verb | /ɝn/ | To gain (success, reward, recognition) through applied effort or work. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| get out of verb | To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of. |
| go up verb | To move upwards. |
| put out verb | To blind (eyes). |
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. |
| go around verb | To move or spread from person to person. |
| go down verb | To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Remember when we saved music?
- Remember when we did that?
- Why would they do that, you're asking?
- What do we get out of this?
- What, am I gonna frame this on my wall?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to drive · used to have · used to get |
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if recent trends continue, it will soon |
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | have been thinking · I've been doing |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | it's ever been · has been · have tried |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 206 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, theft /θɛft/, altogether /ɔl.tuˈɡɛð.ɚ/, thrive /θɹajv/, thin /ˈθɪn/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: musician /mjuˈzɪʃən/, subscription /səbˈskɹɪpʃən/, rejection /ɹɪˈd͡ʒɛkʃən/, transaction /tɹænˈzækʃən/, negotiate /nəˈɡəʊ.ʃi.eɪt/
- Long words — get the stress right: instrumental /ɪnstɹəˈmɛntəl/, monopoly /məˈnɑpəli/, historically /hɪˈstɔɹɪkli/, altogether /ɔl.tuˈɡɛð.ɚ/, negotiate /nəˈɡəʊ.ʃi.eɪt/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like playlist, label, musician.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.