 Spotify doesn't care about indie artists and they're robbing them once again. That's how a lot of artists feel about Spotify making these massive changes to how they pay artists out. How much money they're paying artists. But they weren't with them in the studio. They're not a part of the process. They aren't the creative. They're just this person behind the scenes taking no part of the music and literally just changing numbers and pushing buttons. That's what it feels like and I get it. However, let's analyze these new changes that Spotify has made so many people have asked us and I think there's a couple of different perspectives and it could be beneficial in some cases, some cases more than you think. So I want you to think through these and see if you might be one of the artists that actually are going to get the positive side of these three massive changes that Spotify is making. This is yet another episode of No Labels Necessary. Let's go. Spotify announced that in Q1 of 2024, each track on Spotify under the DSPs new plans will have to reach a minimum number of annual streams before it starts generating royalties. You will have to get a certain amount of streams before you can get royalties. And by the way, this isn't each artist. This is each track and I think that's an important differentiation because you can drop 100 songs and get a thousand streams, right? 10 streams per song, but they're saying each track. I don't think people are stressing that enough. That's an important, important differentiation and that's going to play out into everything that we talk about throughout this video. Now, with that being said, shout out to Music Business World, not why they're the ones who broke this news. They did what they call a little bit of back of the napkin math, right? They said the economics of the industry sources suggest that each play on Spotify in the US in terms of recorded music royalty currently generates somewhere around .003 cents per month, right? So with that being understood, so this means just for a track to make five cents per month has to be played 17 times, which only amounts to 200 plays a year, which means 60 cents a year, right? So we already know that the numbers are messed up, right? They're low. We get that. It has nothing to do with the changes. That's what's currently happening, by the way. So don't you're already locked in. Yeah. If you get enough more off of that, you're late to that train. We get that continuing on though. It says Spotify says tracks that currently represent 99.5% of the stream share will continue to monetize after these changes. So only .5% of you all need to worry about these changes. Here's some other quick math, right? Because .5% could sound small. It also could sound big. Whoever you are, however you move, Spotify is predicted on a quick Google search, right? It's not official because Spotify doesn't release these numbers officially to have 11 million artists on the platform. Give or take. 5% of that .5% of that is 500,000 and 50,000 artists. That's a lot of artists. That's a half a million artists, right? That booted act. You don't get any payout, payout period. Zero. We're not talking about you get less payout. You get zero payout. That's something to think about, right? Just putting this all in the context so you all can think for yourselves. I know everybody just says this has to be bad, this has to be good, or y'all shouldn't be worried about it. We like to put out the information because we want y'all's opinions on this as well, not just to throw our own opinion out there and say, you know, we're the crusaders and everything is bad that artists that this Spotify makes, right? No, we're not those guys. However, this is interesting. Again, half a million artists not getting paid. That sounds like horrible on a service level. But with that being said, why is Spotify specifically targeting a relatively tiny portion of tracks on its services that are very low popularity? Because that sounds bad too, right? Oh, you're not that popular, so I'm not going to pay you at all when we're talking about music. I mean, I know. I know. Because you're like, well, you got to be, the game is the game, right? That's what it always comes down to. It's like, I'm barely getting paid. Now you're just saying I'm not going to get paid. But from their summation, right? We've heard this stat before, 100,000 tracks being released every single day. That's a lot. And artists, y'all are competing with all these artists too, right? And this is where the streaming model becomes very important. And I don't think a lot of artists sit in this enough because we'll hear a number like .003 is what you get paid on Spotify or .00110 on Apple or just making up these numbers. But you'll hear these random numbers, but especially on Spotify, the payout works in a pool system. It's not that fixed number. It depends on what country your music is streaming in, right? The demographics, like, is it the free Spotify app versus the premium, right? And also, again, the proportion. There might be some other factors, but those are like the big three I can think of, right? So what does that mean? The portion, the pool system is a part of, you got to worry about more than anything because you have the least control of that one. So what does that mean? Jacory has a million streams a month. He's killing it. Little Cheeto, right? That's it. Little Cheeto over here. He got a million streams and he didn't pay $4,000. Let's say that's what his demographics and the cities that he gets streamed in adds up to, right? He's getting paid $4,000 for his million streams a month that he's making. That's some good money. It's great money. Right? Yeah. Congrats to me. Congrats to you. Little hand clap, but that's not reality because he's not the only artist on the platform, right? So if he's 100% of the streams in the pool, great. But, you know, I come around, you know, I drop a little, you know, marketer boosted track, got a little compilation. I'm coming in greasy. I'm not even coming with my own music. I'm just getting a compilation, you know what I mean? Pushing the label button and we're doing 10 million streams a month. Not only am I going to get that $4,000 times, I mean, that $4,000 a month that Jacory is getting times 10 because that's what y'all would be thinking. It's like, oh, Jacory gets $4,000. Sean has 10 million streams. So he's getting $40,000. No, that's not how it works. That sounds nice. You just get what you pay for. The reality is Jacory no longer has 100% of the streams in the pool. He now only has one 11th of the streams in the pool, right? And that means he's getting paid less, period. So it's not getting paid $4,000. If that was a number he was getting paid out anymore, he's getting paid less than that. Let alone the fact that here comes five other artists getting a million streams. Now he's only one 16th and then you throw in all these artists that get a 500,000 streams, 10 streams, millions getting 10 streams, right? Once you add this up, your share of the pool gets smaller and smaller and smaller. You almost want to look at it like equity in a company. You have a smaller portion of equity or profit share in the overall pool. So those 0.5% that are not getting paid is actually going to allow some artists to have a bigger portion of the pool, right? Yeah. No, 100%. That's, that's how I looked at it from the jump, you know, which is I get the, the outlaw about it, you know, the, that, that section they cut off is the loudest, you know, right part of the, the artist space in general. But I completely understand, man. It's like, Hey, there's a couple of things I look at actually, I think one to what to your point, Hey, we want to be able to pay people more money in order to pay you all more money. Some motherfuckers got to get axed, right? Now I also have this darker theory. It's not proven. I just kind of been speculating on it, but I think, you know, they're trying to demotivate some people who want to be artists, you know, really? I think so. Because we look at, right. So the 100,000 songs that get uploaded, they get no play, you know, to me, you know, what that's equivalent to. What storage space being taken up and having to pay that? Okay. I was, yeah, but that's not where I was going, but that's, yeah, that's going. I look at, they're like spam posts on the social media platform, right? So it's like, here are all these songs that are affecting not only the payout that we can give to what we perceive to be the more serious or higher quality artists, but then you may also be ruining the listener experience of the platform like it's possible. You know what I'm saying? I mean, the listener experience, I don't know, because it's hard enough to discover music on Apple, Spotify as it is. Man, you never typed in a song you've been looking for in like 30 other motherfuckers. I have seen that. I have seen that. But if you have your algorithm set up enough, it should be only the people who have a certain amount of streams in the first place. You're not going to get Mr. Zero streams popping up. That would be annoying. That would be annoying. So I'd say this, right? In addition to that, what I don't like about the pool system in general is you're pushing artists into a zero song game. Like they are competing with each other. My win is your loss, which is why this loss for 500,000 artists is actually the win for the others in that way. Now, again, though, with that being said, we don't know exactly what the cutoff is. So we use some math that they put on here talking about 200 plays a year, but they haven't specified that you just have to get 200 plays a year. So there are some numbers that it could be fairer at than others. A thousand streams, you're getting paid out about $6 a year. How much money are you really taking from somebody? Now a thousand streams per song, this is what I don't like. That per track shit is weird to me. But seeing that, that takes me back to the quality control issue, right? Because what have we seen happen in the last three, four years of music, right? We've seen the boom of the massive song drop, right? The artists that would put out a 15 song, 20 song shit, Chris Brown rumored to drop like a 40, 50 song project. You know what I'm saying? I think this year, next year, we've seen that increase, right? And for a long time, I think a lot of artists have seen it like, I'm going to drop this 15 song project knowing there may be only like four of these or actually going to be the main driver or the banger. The banger is exactly right. So a part of me feels like the per track thing is to discourage that, you know, hey, like less now we're going to make you, we're going to force you to think about shorter, more concise projects because like you drop 15 songs and only seven of them, you know what I'm saying? Make it to wherever you basically wasted your time on the other eight from a financial perspective, not from a credit perspective, but from a financial perspective, right? It's like having a contest when you make people pay for their submissions because you don't want them to submit a million times. Yeah, exactly. All right. I get that part of it, right? The quality control issue. My thing is though, if I imagine myself being an upcoming artist and I get a thousand streams on this song, 50,000 streams on this song, because we know Spotify doesn't spill over as cleanly as some other platforms where these numbers go up and then the rest of the catalog moves up immediately. So I can really find myself in that situation, right? I have a thousand streams here, 500,000 streams here, and 500 streams on this other song. And it's not getting monetized even though I've shown myself to be a professional artist and an artist who's out here getting it, right? Because I do like the idea of, I don't want to say if I like, but I understand the idea of, all right, none of this catalog throughout all this isn't getting, let's just say, 200 streams in a year or a thousand streams in a whole year. Cool. This artist isn't hitting a thousand streams a year, but you got a song. Now, I understand if you think more from a business organization like we're at work or something, oh, you got to hit these incentives, but hit that number to get yours. But this is a little different because the artists own it. This is their property, essentially, and they're renting it out. And where do you find yourself in a situation where someone says, I'm going to borrow your stuff from you. And based on how well it does for me, I'm going to pay you. Social media. This is their TikTok creative marketplace. This is their Instagram Reels Creator Fund. This is their YouTube Creator Revenue Mall. This is basically them. And that's the problem I have with it. All right, but also that's the problem I don't have with it from a normalization standpoint. Because what was the math to do about $100? About 18,000 to 20,000 streams. 18,000 to 20,000 streams, just to make $100. Now, when we look on YouTube, they're not giving you no money for less than $100. Yeah, Instagram's the same way too. Most of them are like that. The cutoff to the capitalist bargain pay is $100. Why? Because just the processing fees and masks, it's not that much money. But you're taking a lot of money for all these transactions. It starts to not make sense and it just becomes a hassle. You have to have a cutoff somewhere. Everybody has to have a cutoff somewhere. So less than $100, we're not going to pay you out. And y'all are already dealing with this in other places with the rest of your content, which you also own, that Spotify's argument, music is still content. It's content, period, right? So that is an argument, right? That, hey, you're already made this agreement. How come you willing to give him that deal, but you're not willing to give me that deal? They set the precedent, y'all. They complain over there. So I do hear that. I do hear that and I understand that. But that's where I go back to the per track basis. Because YouTube doesn't do that. I don't think of Instagram or TikTok. I don't think they do that as well. It's how much have you made, right? You've made over $100, not just this track, right? Oh, this each video has to make over, make $100 before I pay you that $100 for that video. That's what the track portion says to me. Yeah. I think Instagram is kind of like that. Like you, you do get a particular payout per video, not necessarily like your overall. So I, cause I'm not. Well, they are also stopped their, their model too. Yeah, they did. You're right. But Instagram is the only platform I can think of that's the closest to this where like we had a set up amount of money that we're trying to pay out of the year. So everybody's, you know, saying a slice of the pie does directly affect somebody else's like, like slice of the pie. They're the closest I could think of this, like, to this model. Cause I don't think, um, I don't think TikTok has a fun, like just a set amount. I don't think like Snapchat has a set amount. I don't think, I mean, we know YouTube, YouTube like ball out, you can ball out. It's not, yeah, it's not even a pool. It's just ad dollars coming in, which is beautiful. That's a whole, that's, that's a different system. See, if we, if we work on that system, then I might feel a little bit better. It's limited pool. It's, it's, it's finite, man. These ain't buying products on their stream mouths, man. That, that is true. That is true. You're not hearing the ad on streaming. So, and then going to buy something immediately. But their projection, this is that positive part. Again, for those who do meet this criteria next year with this limitation, there's going to be an extra $40 million that could be distributed to those 99% of artists. 99.5 to be exact. And man, if I'm in that 99.5, that sounds good to me. More money for you. More money for you. Which is similar, right? To this whole idea that Deezer is doing, right? The thousand stream minimum to be considered a professional slash hobbyist artist. And I think that's what Spotify is missing in any of their language, because I think there is a reality that there are hobbyist artists, right? And some people are thinking, well, any money out of an artist's mouth is bad money, right? That's blood diamonds. I think there's a, I know we talk to artists, right? That are really trying to get to it. So it's going to apply to 99% of the artists that we're talking to, right? However, the hobbyists, the people who probably aren't even aware of this message, there's a lot of hobbyists that they just want their music on Spotify, because it feels like real and professional for them. And they kind of play with the streams a little bit, but they don't care about the money. Like I know people for real that are doctors, engineers. I know one guy who has an online business shout out to, I don't know if you want me to say a name, so I'm not going to say a name, but he does millions in his business online selling stuff. And he does his artist thing. And it's more of a like, oh yeah, I want to get to 10,000 streams. I want to get to, like he's doing it kind of like a game and he cares about the music. So he wants to keep creating, but Spotify is not going to pay him anything that gets him happy, right? Like he doesn't look at his career as that. He's more so I want to get to a point where I actually have some real fans. He cares about the real stuff, because the money isn't really a big deal to him, right? And he's in that fortunate position and he has that freedom. So there's a lot of those people out there who again, one, the money doesn't matter in that same way for them. That's $6, $18, $100. But even those again, who are like still taking it seriously in the money is not, doesn't matter. There's even more artists that, yeah, I just wanted to put it on Spotify and I'm cool. Like it might only get 20, and I'm not spending any marketing dollars, all right? This is going to go to the artists, more money for the artists who spend marketing dollars, who are posting like seriously and significantly. So I think that goes understated and because so many artists are trying, right? The ones who hear this message, they are trying and grinding out. They're thinking about them and they aren't aware of how many artists aren't trying to get to them in the same way they are. I would play devil's advocate and say, there's a couple of them listening right now. Oh, we got some hobbyists for sure. Yeah, they tune in there. Oh, okay. Okay, devil. Okay. Yeah. But like Sean said, for the vast majority of you, yeah, that's probably won't have the craziest impact on you other than you might see your streaming royalties go up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So again, I think when we look at that, it's probably going to be more of those type of people in that half a million that we would think, right? Yeah, definitely. All right. Yeah. And look, when we're talking about a career, six dollars, all right, if you're looking for a career, that's not going to prevent you from having a successful music career. Exactly, bro. It's not, right? Now, again, they didn't put a limitation. So maybe that number is $50, $100, whatever. But what's weird is, if it is, let's say, $100 and I bust that $100 down into 10 months and 12 months, it's almost like paying a subscription fee because you're not, you know what I mean? Because you're not getting that money. Granted, they're not keeping the money. But it's a weird behavior. I want to get into the other aspects of these because we can go on that conversation for days. I want to get into a couple of the points in terms of the changes that they're making. Let's talk about the fact that most artists fail to understand that it doesn't take forever to monetize your audience. We had an artist literally begin to take off and make $20,000 from his brand new audience in the same month. But how is that possible? It's because we're in a new era, baby. Yes, you want to continue to build a relationship over time, but the first time you make money from your audience can happen today if you understand the New Age music marketing funnel for artists. So if you want to hear about this approach and how you can apply it to yourself, I made a completely free video to watch at www.knowlabelsnecessary.com slash monetize. You got to make sure you put the www or if you're on YouTube, you can find the link in the description and check out how we help monetize artists for completely free. I promise it'll completely change how you see things. Spotify will financially penalize distributors of music and labels included when fraudulent activity is detected on music that they've uploaded to Spotify. This is big. This is way bigger than I think people are giving the energy for that is granted. This is a big win for artists, a big win. And I don't think I think the initial thought is like, well, we already know that labels are going to game the system and they're still going to try to figure out how to how to stream without getting detected and things like that. Well, before they've continued to do it because the risk was low. They weren't really getting penalized, right? But now distributors, I've already seen distributors kick off artists who have streams that are fake because they don't want to mess up their relationship. But now you're talking about relationship and money. I don't know. We got to figure out how to actually better find fake streams on our own platform because Spotify has great fraud detection, right? Themselves, they consider it to be state of the art, but it's going to force the distributors and labels to do that. Now, I think the differentiation, because they say distributors and labels included before we get into like how this works and some of the factors. Labels are only going to be included in this if they're a label that also offers distribution. That's what I believe. Why? Because the label, if we're a record label, but we don't actually do the distribution ourselves for whatever reason, how are you penalized? I know most labels do distribution. Because you want to control that yourself and get all those numbers. But I only say that nuance because I know there's some makeshift labels out there that I want to be aware of that. I can see that because then if I'm a label that doesn't do distribution and you try to penalize me, I'm like, nah, go to talk to a wall, go talk to the same stem, go talk to whoever. Whoever I run my stuff through. And that becomes an argument. It's like, well, shoot, they let us run it. And we thought it was good. We just put the money up for it. I just wanted to say that because I know there's some labels who listen and people run their things in all kinds of different ways and setups. All right. Now, but with that being said, this goes back to the big win because we have the pool. We talked about the pool earlier. Does the Corey have 100% of the streams? Does he have one tenth of the streams on the platform, one 20 of the streams on the platform? When you get rid of all these fake streams, now your share grows up. All right. You went from 100 to 111. What if all of my 10 million streams were fake? So now you're getting paid less for no reason. So you're not only competing with real artists, you're competing with fake artists like the fake bots. These people, they shifted and spoke about the criminal organizations that are doing those fake streams and those pumps. We talked about that in the episode. We'll put that in the description below if y'all really want to get the details at. But the way they're going to approach it is they're going to be looking at basically the AI tools at increased streams. They're also going to be looking at the streaming farms. And the third party playlist. Those two. So with all that being said, again, this is a big positive because even if you got impacted on one side, once you hit the threshold to get started getting paid, you're going to be paid more money. Yeah. And I just thought about this as you was talking about it. It stops you. If you are in that 0.5%, it stops you from using illegitimate means to make it back over to the 99.5%. Which is huge because there are so many indie artists that we know that are using bots. And it's like, why? We've had extensive conversations on this channel about bots and when, why they make sense or why people are driven and have legitimate incentives for themselves to use bots. It does exist. But this changes those incentives in that landscape as well. Every new rule and every new update in the landscape will change how the incentives act and how the people engage. And again, even when we said bots make sense for some people at certain times based on other incentives, not just to build your fan base stuff. They were never indie artists who were trying to build from ground up working for themselves. And I've seen so many artists think they could play that game and it just doesn't make sense. Right? It's like happening. Like it's like knowing that I can hop in the drug game and I'm probably going to die or go to jail and you don't have to hop in the drug game. But I'm going to do it. Just try to run this lick real quick and then hope I get out alive. All right. That's what artists are doing with these fake dreams. Yeah. And I think it's good for the audience to know too that in Spotify's brain, the third party, you know what I'm saying, user generated playlists, to them it's basically the same shit as bots. They're like, we don't own that shit. We're not driving traffic to it. So that's shit fake as far as we concern. And so I don't know. I feel like this is Spotify has been on like a good two year initiative to kill out playlists. And they have been on a great streak so far with everything from just, you know, the purge that happens like once a year. The purges have been good. You know, the Discovery ad edition, the marquee ad edition, these different marketing incentives that are that they've been, I guess what I'm trying to say is like it feels like they were trying to like nicely stop artists from using playlists and this is them going like, all right, fuck it. We over this shit. See, I say this is the only time I've taken it seriously because before when they were doing these purges, I feel like they were only impacting indie artists, even though they were knowingly like some big artists that do it. This right here is really going to hit everybody. Y'all understand and I love that music business worldwide made a clear incentive to Y distributors. They don't mind some of this money coming in on these platforms. So basically they mapped out if you're an artist and you get paid out, let's just say six dollars because you only got six dollars. A lot of you don't care about that six dollars. Even if you don't have that much money, it's a little bit of work sometimes to set everything up. All right. Well, the distributor cares because your six dollars plus five hundred thousand other people six dollars gets to send in my bank until I pay it out until you take it from me. I'm making interest. I'm making money off of your money just like a bank. And now you're putting distributors in positions where everything needs to be of the highest quality. Everybody like money doesn't get to sit as idle because the people who make it are going to be in a position where they're more likely also taking it away. It's going to be a lot more. Right. So there's all these smaller things that are impacted throughout this decision and I think people easily go to this big versus small initiative and narrative and people don't understand the nuance of Spotify truly being in the middle of a legit rock and hard place. All right. And of course labels get involved and they take control. They have this leverage because they have catalogs. But for me, you know, my whole thing like we always talk about this like yes, we have our opinions. We have our thoughts and we have things that we advise for artists at the same time. We want the artists to think for themselves and like I don't like going towards the industry is bad or everybody's trying to do you wrong because it forces people into this victim mentality to think they can never win when in fact you can win in today's climate is more winnable than ever for especially an individual moving. We know and we have plenty of artists. We've helped in that way and more importantly, when you do that, not only are you encouraging the certain mentality that is actually disheartening. All right. And untrue because it's like pandering. You're also keeping people from thinking. All right. And I think this is the benefit of having a conversation getting to the nuances because you hear all the details and now you can form your own opinion. You hear our opinions too. We got them. And then we also involve them as we get more information. But it's important to like think all these things through and then just see where you lie. Like in this equation, we don't know the specific streams in terms of the cutoff for the 5% versus the 99.5% yet. Right. No, the 0.5% versus the 99.5% yet. We don't know that. But wait till that happens and then see where you lie. And you might be, oh, I'm surprised. Yeah, I'm good. You're saying, I'm just going to see more money coming. All right. So like there is that. Now with that being said, fraud detection, all these things that are really going to be improving and the pressure they're going to be putting on the distributors and labels to make sure that they aren't sitting on money that's not theirs essentially or allowing artists that aren't real to continue to continue to take advantage and exploit Spotify and take away from other artists. Cause like this is, this is what all that does. And like, I love distributors from the very fact that they know how to act. They know the part that they play is bigger than they let off, but they stay quiet and just let it be a Spotify versus the indie artist conversation, the record labels versus the indie artist conversation. But they very quiet and they sitting on this interest making money off of your, your uncleaned dollars. Right. We just, oh yeah, we just going to take this $19.99 from you a month for $9.99 a month or $19.99 a year. We're just going to take this flat fee. All right. Because we don't care if you get a one stream, two streams, a million streams, we're going to make money from you regardless. And then we just going to make more money from you if more comes and many, in some cases, and then you got the percentage models, but like these distributors are very good at keeping themselves out of that conversation where we have leaned on a lot of times. One distributors are new age record label models. And then at the most simple tier of just putting the music out, not taking part or getting any percentages or any of that stuff. There's still just this quiet, this quiet middle man taking that front end dollar having no investment in stake. They do their job. They put you over there, but they're benefiting in more ways than you get to detect on that front end. Yeah. That's why that this show kid purge, one of that was last year, year before it was so crazy. Cause the first time someone from a distribution company that he was like forced to kind of like talk out loud and talk about how they kind of saw their role in the industry. And then to your point, the more they, you know, it kind of got brought up, you're like, man, like you really are just the record label. Like you're not getting scapegoated the same way the label is, even though, even though majority of the issues that most current artists have are because of things that result, come from the distribution company. It's very few artists having label troubles. A lot of artists are having distribution distribution troubles or problems that could come from that side. So it is, never thought about that, man. They've been like the quiet, they've been escaping being the scapegoat. And now Spotify, but Spotify saw through that. Spotify was like, no, you have just as much to do with this issue as the labels do, but you are just as much in control of putting these, uh, I want to say lower quality, but like, let's say these, these artists that may not meet certain criteria on the platform, you're just as involved in incentivizing them to run to box and run to playlist them because they, they want to maybe get more support from you or starting to finally generate some income. When all you had to do was, if you had shut them out, you know what I'm saying? Never allowed them to enter, which we could argue that's a good or bad thing. You know what I'm saying? But if you had did that, we wouldn't have to do this. You know what I'm saying? If you didn't want to take action, so we don't take action. Now it's a little bit of a lash out to your point. Yeah. Cause they probably been sitting there getting all resentful, man. Like, look at all these, these bad, mean tweets that we were reading right now about us. They don't know what distro kids doing. They don't know what tune chords you're sitting all happy. I feel like they get there like, I don't know. I imagine there's a world where like the distributors probably either send in a report to maybe DSPs or get a report back on how many artists they put onto the platform. I'm like, like, I'll just be looking at this show to kids. You're like, God damn, bro, another another 20,000 motherfuckers this month. Yeah. Raise your prices. He's raised your prices. His quality is horrible. Yeah. Because it's not just the participation is enabling, right? You might not be the cause of the strings, but you have allowed it to happen. And I think that's what this penalty is all about. That's another point too, because you, you brought it up right. Like there are artists who like to just do these small steps to feel like they're more serious than they necessarily are right. Oh, it's cool that my son on Spotify can send it to my, my mom and be like, look, I'm on Spotify. I don't know how to what the fuck you got to do. You know, Spotify, you know what I'm saying? Or like, hey, I can, I can, you know, from the marketing side, we've seen the hammer go on this playlist and I'm gonna feel official because my strings are shooting up like crazy, bro. All these things that I do feel like enables the lower tier indie artists. It's enabling them to not figure out how to move correctly so they can move to be a higher tier indie artists or higher tier artists in general. And so that's why like, I ain't really mad at this man. I feel like, you know, it's putting a fire under some asses. It's going to motivate some people to either truly figure this out, like figure this out, not necessarily the right way, because we know there's no real right way, but at least explore, you know, all of the options that have the potential to have a real impact on your artist career and your artistry. And some of it is forcing you to now think differently about the quality and amount of music that you put out. Like a lot of things that have been subject of complaints for the last like three, four years since the streaming era really became like what has become. And now those things are being addressed. You know, it took us a long time to get here, but we're here. See, I want to read the specific words as well just so they had that context so I didn't yet. And additionally in Q1 2024, Spotify is planning to charge the distributor of that track a monetary penalty. This is a track by track thing yet again, right? Spotify hopes this will act as a deterrent for distribution companies and labels for them continuing to distribute tracks from known bad actors. This is a per track enforcement penalty whenever flagrant artificial streaming is detected per track, per track. Everything they're doing is per track. So they want to take away heavily per track or they want to benefit heavily per track. All right. And I think in a way though that does encourage quality of music as well kind of to what you kind of alluded to earlier because like I want to make sure each track is hidden. I'm not just throwing stuff out there just so I can have a catalog and you know, now that they've streamed three, they're going to trust the fourth one to be okay. And now they're into it. That's that's an interesting thought on it. But overall, they say their hope is that the deterrent will over time mean fewer people are risking streaming fraud on Spotify and more money entering the pot for real artists and right holders to benefit from real artists and right holders. So I think that that's a positive. All right. So as much as we might say the 0.5% that might be missing from this equation is a bad thing on Spotify as part possibly right depending on how you look at it. I think it's clearly undisputably a good thing in terms of how they're approaching streaming fraud. Now the last thing they are introducing a minimum length of time that non music noise tracks must reach in order to generate royalties. Now we've already did a whole podcast talking about white noise and just it's just listen to it right. White noise podcast. People listen to this music to to sleep, chill, different reasons. Yeah, many of them though, listen to sleep especially right. Go check out our podcast on that. We'll put it in the description if you want us to talk about that extensively. But the point is this is music that's primarily listened to without any level of engagement, which is a lot of it arguably because when I'm in work, I'm listening to music like it's background music. However, I think the added portion that you're unconscious if you're sleeping to the music. Yeah. That's a big challenge for Spotify to justify to advertisers that they're trying to charge. Like how are we going to put ads on music when people are asleep and then charge you for it? Like if I'm Pepsi or Coca Cola, it's like, yo, people not even wait. Our CTR is horrible. Is there a way that you can not play us during this time or what? Everybody got weird schedule these days. People sleeping during the day. It's not even a basic, you know, same hour of sleep. So nah, we need to make sure we're not getting played heavily. Now what they are doing instead is instead of saying, hey, you have a 10 minute song and people are now taking that 10 minute white noise song and making five songs out of it. So they get paid five times out of that 10 minutes because they separated into different tracks. It's like, nah, bro, you're going to get paid one time. For lack of better words, that's what they're doing. So again, that non-artist is getting paid less money. They are getting paid because they are bringing streams to the platform. And I guess there is something to the skill or talent of choosing it. I don't know, right? But apparently, probably legal-wise or for whatever reason they've determined, we can't just kick these people straight up off the platform. However, we can minimize the impact they're taking from real artists. Yeah, I see that. That's how I know that white noise thing. It really pissed them off. I didn't know what they were going to do with that. They say real quiet when that shit was hot. But yeah, nah, this is like, man, that shit really pissed them off. Matter of fact, if you don't know what white noise is, you know, EJ edited some white noise in this video real quick. And then, you know, take a quick pause. Let people here see what that looks like. Give it like five seconds. Probably nine-five. That's too long. Give it like three seconds. Like two, three minutes. Yeah, three seconds of white noise. And now we're back. So now that y'all have had a chance to hear it, you can understand why Spotify doesn't want to one, pay out a lot of money to these people. Two, lose out on advertiser dollars. And then three, have to hear from your mouth, the vocal artists, you know what I'm saying, like vocalism. You got words on your shit. But why are you making less money? Because this, to your point, 45-second white noise one got 50 million streams last like a month and a half. That's a hard argument to come back on, man. Exactly. Again, when we go back to the model of this is a limited pool, this is not based off of your isolated merit of bringing streams on the platform. So you're competing with all the other artists on the platform. How can you compete with white noise? You can't, bro. Like I don't, if I'm listening to, I don't know, if I'm listening to, let's say Jay-Z, I'm listening to him in a mood, my primarily when I want to hear some lyrics or whatever, right? And I might be a little bit more thoughtful if I'm thinking about those songs, those are the specific songs that he has for that. He got some more party songs, right? J. Cole, I'm like, he ain't trying to hear some thoughts. I'm listening to Future, right? Gucci May, that's in a whole another mood, right? But people who listen to white noise, they're listening when they go to sleep. They go to sleep every night. How can you compete with that? Exactly, bro. Like, what are you going to do? You only going to how many parties a week? You know what I mean? You're older, you only going to how many parties a month? A year at some point, it might only be your only time to celebrate. No, this man is sleeping every single night and they're getting paid off of it, let alone multiple times off of one track. You can't compete off of this. So I got to give them kudos to at least like putting a handicap on these white noise people because they running circles around artists. That's your super OP. That is crazy. But again, like those are just some of our thoughts. Overall, I think this is a better approach. I think overall, overall, I find a strong argument for this being better than what's existed. Yeah, 100%. Right. Again, I know we got this 0.5% to account for it and we don't have that criteria yet. I think what they're doing is teasing that out. We're going to put out the message that is going to happen. We don't want to put a number because we want to see how y'all feel about this first, right? And then we want to have these messages split up. We don't want to throw it all at once. Man, we're trying to beat y'all over the head in one second. Yeah. So based on what that number becomes, we will then have a discussion. Maybe it's a month from now. I mean, we're not far from Q1. We're not, man. So it has to come relatively soon. They got less than 60 days to make that decision. Maybe 60, like three. But you know, you get the point, right? They have to make that decision and they have to make the announcement before that activates. So I imagine it's going to come out sometime in November, early December at the latest. Yeah, man. Hopefully we don't get unlucky and they come out the day we drop this. That is a fact. That is fact. And that's even more reason to be done with this episode. I'm Brandon and Sean. And I'm Cory. And we out. Peace.