Which music streaming service is right for you? It may depend on your personal ethics – National

A new survey Earlier this month, it was reported that 84% of recorded music revenue in the US comes from streaming. I think it’s a little bit lower in Canada, but we continue to embrace the technology more and more each month. Streaming is not just the future, it’s the present.

When it comes to choosing a music streaming service, there are more options than just the Big Four: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, and YouTube Music. There’s a second tier of platforms that includes Deezer, Qobuz, Tidal, SoundCloud, and Napster (the legal one, and officially known as Rhapsody). Digging deeper, there’s 8Tracks, Tunein, AccuRadio, iHeartRadio, Boomplay, Jango, and maybe a dozen more.

There’s another tier that specializes in specific ethnicities and genres. For example, JioSaavn and Gaana focus on Indian material, Patari caters to the Pakistani market, Moov is all about Southeast Asian music, and Anghami is geared toward the Arab world. IDAGIO is designed for classical music fans, while ROXi is for karaoke lovers. They all draw from the same massive catalog of more than 120 million digital tracks.

In the West, most music fans stick to the Big Four. Spotify has the most customers, with more than 600 million average monthly users (AMU), 246 million of whom pay for a subscription that unlocks the app’s full features and user interface. (That’s slightly less than China’s QQ Music, a joint venture between Spotify and China’s Tencent, but that streamer is mostly aimed at the global Chinese market.) Apple Music, Amazon Music, and the rapidly growing YouTube Music each have around 100 million AMUs.

Which of these options is right for you? It depends. What sets these platforms apart? Let’s take a look.

The first question you should ask yourself is, “Do I want to pay to listen to music?” If the answer is no, you’re limited to “freemium” offerings like Spotify, iHeartRadio, and a limited library on Amazon. It doesn’t cost anything to listen, but you have to sit through ads multiple times an hour, and the app and desktop functionality are clunky. Some artists have also been known to keep their music off the free tier. Want all the features? Then you have to pay.

Some streamers are available globally, while others are restricted from going beyond certain geographic areas due to the terms of their music licenses. If sound quality is important to you, Amazon, Tidal, Qobuz and Deezer are among those that offer high-resolution streams, meaning music is streamed at CD quality or higher. Apple has Spatial Audio, which sounds pretty good to my ears. Spotify lags behind in this area, but Spotify continues to promise to introduce HiFi at any moment.

What else sets streamers apart? The look of the app/desktop version. Some offer better lyrics and metadata than others. Search experiences can be very different. And of course, there are proprietary recommendation algorithms, each backed by their own mysterious secret sauce. Let’s start there.

Spotify has been bugging me lately because it seems to inject songs into my feed that I don’t want and don’t want to hear. As a rocker, why is it being served to me? Please Please Please By Sabrina Carpenter? I’ve never intentionally played a Kendrick Lamar song, so why does Spotify occasionally push me towards it? Some conspiracy theorists believe Spotify’s algorithm could be changed from “recommendation” to “promotion.” And if it’s really a promotion, that means someone paid for it. Who? Is this the new bribe?

Another factor may be your personal code of ethics when it comes to artists being compensated for their music. It’s… complicated.

Every publisher must negotiate licenses with rights holders every few years; this process involves record labels, publishers, copyright boards, distributors, aggregators, and collection societies. Rights holders, who must look out for the musician’s interests, want to get as much as possible out of the publishers. Meanwhile, publishers want to keep costs to a minimum. Once the rights holders have received their share, the rest is passed on to the artist. These royalty payments also vary depending on the artist’s contract with the label and publisher.

So how much are these payments? All kinds of figures come up in Google searches.

Spotify’s average payout per stream is widely thought to be between $0.003 and $0.005. Apple Music is said to pay between $0.007 and $0.01 per stream. paying artists up to 10 percent more Those who upload music in Apple’s Spatial Audio format. Everyone else falls between those two ranges, except for Tidal ($0.012 to $0.015 per stream) at the top and YouTube Music (a nanoscopic $0.00069 per stream) at the bottom.

But it gets more complicated. We need to look at the methods used to split subscription and advertising revenue at the end of each month.

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Spotify uses something called “streamshare.” About two-thirds of every dollar Spotify collects is paid out in royalties. If you’re paying an average of $10 a month, three of those dollars go to Spotify and the other seven are paid out in royalties. All of that money goes into a pool. Spotify then looks at how many times music owned or controlled by various rights holders gets streamed during the month. The company then divides the amount of money in the pool by the number of streams the rights holders see in each market. If, say, Universal Music owns the rights to 42 percent of all songs streamed in a given month in a given territory, it gets 42 percent of the royalties.

In other words, if you think your subscription money is going to the indie artist you’ve been listening to on repeat for the last 30 days, think again. Most of it is probably going to a major label. And if your favorite artist gets less than 1,000 streams a month, they’re not getting any. That’s Spotify’s policy. That’s why some platforms, including Tidal and SoundCloud, are working toward a user-centric model where your money goes to the artist when you listen to their song.

Then there’s Spotify’s “bundling” problem. Because of how Spotify is licensed, revenue and costs increase simultaneously. The more money Spotify makes, the more money it has to pay out. If the company focused solely on providing music, it would lose money every year until the heat death of the universe. So Spotify has been looking for ways to control costs and slow down payouts while keeping users engaged on the platform. That’s why Spotify has pivoted to providing podcasts that engage viewers at no cost. That’s the logic behind “bundling,” wrapping other options around a streaming music subscription. This has recently included audiobooks.

In the US, Spotify’s audiobook bundle deal allows it to pay musicians a discounted rate because it pays royalties to authors. Yes, authors deserve to be paid, but including audiobooks in the math (see the streamsharing explanation above) means: The percentage of revenues collected that will go to musicians will decreaseperhaps as much as $150 million next year. Meanwhile, book publishers are also worried that this will affect how they pay their authors. And by the way, Spotify doesn’t pay anything for an audiobook unless someone listens to at least 10 percent of it.

So what’s the best choice for a streaming platform? As the title suggests, it all comes down to your personal ethics. If you want maximum compensation for artists, Tidal and Apple Music seem like the way to go. For audiobooks, a service like Audible or a similar platform seems like the best bet.

But you’ll need a subscription, and considering that each platform gives you instant access to almost the entire human race’s music catalog for the price of a single CD (and Audible has thousands and thousands of titles for less than the price of a single hardcover book), that seems like a bargain to me.

Better yet, maybe just go to a record store or bookstore. Physical copies of art will always be better for the artist than something digital.

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