 We've all long wondered what it will take before Spotify finally increases musicians pay. And since we just crossed the 10th anniversary of Spotify being available to consumers in the US, there's never been a raise for musicians while they pay out millions to Joe Rogan that talk about taking horse drugs on air and Amy Schumer to dish out cringe advice, it's hard to not wonder why that money shouldn't go to the musicians who built their platform and got them a user base. We all know it hasn't seemed fair for a long time, but the question is, when will that change? I think Spotify has finally crossed the line that really is going to set musicians off and will finally be time for their exploitation of musicians to make some concessions. So in this video, I'm going to show you the line I think they crossed recently that will damn them and cause a backlash that will make them finally have to start paying musicians a higher rate per stream. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fan base from zero to 10,000 fans, and this is Muse Formation. Okay, so quick internet history lesson for context. Remember when Facebook was literally the only game in town for musicians and trading a Facebook like for a song stream was the most savvy music marketing move of its day? Okay, if you don't remember that, let's think back less than a decade ago to when anyone who's smart in the music business would try to estimate how big a fan base an artist had, it would be judged by how many Facebook likes the artist had. Oftentimes, that would be a greater indicator even over record sales. But that came to an end once every musician realized what Facebook had done is they had used the allure of musicians, giving access to their innermost thoughts and unprecedented direct contact with fans to build up Facebook's platform numbers. And once Facebook felt like that was solidified, they became what we all know today, a place where if you want to talk to the very fans, you got to like you there, you need to pay Facebook to reach them. Because of this, musicians have largely abandoned Facebook. Aside from updating their fans on their biggest moves and really talking about the big budget events that can maybe make them some money back, they're probably not going to pay to talk to their fans. And those foolish enough to think Facebook ads build up their fan base. And yes, there are some people who are foolish enough to think Facebook ads still build up their fan base. And if you still think that, boy, do I highly recommend you watch my video on why Facebook ads don't build your fan base which is linked on the screen now or in the description below. Anyway, what happened here is Facebook got greedy. They thought they had a firm grip on their users being addicted to their platform and turned out they were only right about the people with the most brain rot in our society. You know, the 30 to 80 year olds who spend all day on their circulating memes about whichever political party they don't like or even worse curing COVID with the blood of children or whatever the latest agency is. Anyway, so we all know anyone hip and smart with an ounce of youth in their body is no longer keeping up with musicians on Facebook instead uses any of the many other more pleasing social media alternatives. This was caused by Facebook deciding that they would now charge people to talk to their audience. This angered many musicians and sadly Facebook saw this as the only way they could be profitable. So they kept going down this path and instead saw massive amounts of people abandon their platform or at least draw down their usage to minimal check-ins on people they haven't checked in with except for seeing when they get married, divorced or they start causing some massive ecological disaster by setting a fire with their gender reveal parties. They squander their addictive platform and relevance for big cash grabs. They could have probably engineered much more strategically if they had just put some more thought into it. So I'm sure you're wondering why Grandpa Cannon is leading you down this weaving path of an internet story of ancient internet times. But let me connect it to modern day Spotify. For most of 2021, Spotify has been promoting a new tool for promoting a musician's new release called Marquis. And as you can see here, it really is great. You may have even seen it in your app already. Here's how Spotify themselves describe it. Marquis is a full screen sponsored recommendation of your new release to Spotify free and premium listeners who've shown interest in your music and have the potential to listen more. When a listener clicks on a Marquis, they are guided to your new release in your release alone. This means they can focus solely on your music and discover more of you. Basically when an artist's new release comes out, it prompts you when you open the app to listen to it. Marquis target people who have listened to the artist before and really can you think of a more effective marketing tool? I mean, this is the type of thing I've dreamed of all my life. I mean, hell, they get you when you're in the mood to listen to music and say, hey, you seem to enjoy this artist. Since you've listened to him a bunch before, they have a new dose of that music you seem to like. What could be better? So you might wonder, what's my problem with all this? I mean, if they were doing this for free and targeting the biggest fans of each artist, you'd think and drive an app engagement and make people stick to their platform more and explore it and get more deep bonds with music and grow more bonds to the app and you'd think they would be happy with that. But no, this is Spotify, an exploitive force beholden to a corporate board so it must always lust after bigger profits each quarter even if it will probably end in a rake face. Now, according to a digital music news article, which I will link below, Spotify is unfortunately charging up to 50 cents per click in order to drive these streams and it's entirely possible that this isn't even the highest rate. And if you don't know about per click rates, that's pretty high. Now, let's do some math here. Spotify pays artists anywhere between .003 to .005 per stream with .005 typically being on the higher end. In that payout range, it would take artists anywhere from 100 to 167 clicks to break even on just one sponsored link. So the way I see this is only in my top, let's say, five to 10 songs listened to each year get that many listens from me. And for this, this makes it a pretty money losing endeavor if you embark on this since most fans are never gonna click on a song that many times and listen to it. And much like when Facebook started doing similar, it's really hard to see how artists make back these payments when click-through rates are this high. This also lends a hint to why everyone has wondered for so long why Spotify doesn't have more easy, concise release radar type playlists of just artists you engage with heavily and their newest releases you haven't listened to yet. Seems like the easiest feature to make in the world. And yet, it's always been absent. It's almost like this planned obsolescence style product efficiency will enable them to exploit musicians even more. I mean, they're basically now trying to charge a fee for a feature that anyone who has used the app more than a dozen times wonders why they haven't already implemented it. It's their basic job to alert you about this stuff and they are derelict in it in order to charge musicians for it, but also not surprising when it comes to this company. Now, if you think I'm being hard on Spotify, trust me when I say if you've followed my writing over the decade and a half I've been writing about them, many people say I've been too charitable to them. But one thing I can say, my predictions for what happens with their actions have been pretty dead on over the years. Time will tell, but I think as this tool gets more adopted and the major label money that can afford it allows even further tilting to the playing field advantage towards big pocket labels, it will enrage musicians more and more that they are having to pay to talk to fans, they bring the Spotify themselves, and the platform is going to get a ton of backlash. Every day Spotify walks a tightrope to keep getting away with their exploitive practices towards musicians, but now deciding to directly profit from musicians to have access to their own fans seems like a step too far to me. Especially as they are about to see competition from blockchain competitors like Audius who will take a while to become any sort of threat to Spotify, but as we've seen plenty of times in the past when those platforms grow, it's when the bigger company has a weakness. Having any alternative for their users to utilize, this could be the pressure point that makes Spotify finally have to give concessions to musicians. So my money is on that this is what you're going to see is that Spotify eventually is going to see so much backlash they're going to have to start making a little bit more of concessions towards pay, since the labels and the musician advocate companies will see weakness, and that's when corporations always go for blood. Anyway, thanks for watching. If you think I'm wrong or missed something, let me know in the comments. If you enjoy this video, we discussed the music business and growing musicians fan base from zero to 10,000 fans here. And if you're interested in that, click on one of the playlists above. Thanks for watching.