In Strict Tempo, vol. 101: New Year, Same Old Story...
Hello all, welcome to this weeks In Strict Tempo. As usual at the start of January, music consultancy firm Luminate put out their annual industry report, and as usual it generates a tonne of debate and attention-grabbing headlines. This week, it was the turn of the United Musicians & Allied Workers Union, who dropped a post on Bluesky saying that Spotify have de-monetized 88% of music on the platform.
Now, while that’s a headline-grabbing message, it’s simply not true. For one, the Luminate data only looks at 2025 releases, as in things that have been released that year. Nothing that already exists on the platform that has over 1000 streams has been ‘de-monetized’. Spotify announced their new royalty threshold in 2024, so anyone releasing music in 2025 should have been well aware of the new rules.
Do I agree with the policy? Not really, but I can see why they’ve done it. The royalty generated from 1000 streams isn’t going to make much of a difference to anyone, although we have to appreciate that Spotify is just one income source of many for musicians. We also need to take into account how Spotify pay rightsholders. They have a set pool of money that gets divided up based on track popularity. You’re getting paid from the same pool as Taylor Swift, and the more releases that are eligible for that pool the less there is to go round for everyone, from Swift downwards. This policy (rightly or wrongly) means that of 253 million tracks on Spotify, only the top 26.5 million have been paid out on. That means for mid-tier artists, who are getting 1000-100,000 streams they should be looking at a bigger payout than they would have previously.
Of those 253m tracks on Spotify over 120 million of them have under 10 streams. This is stuff that even the artist & their friends can’t be bothered to listen to (although I’d wager a lot of it is AI slop). You have to ask yourself, really what’s the value of this stuff being on Spotify? A further 60 million (so 180m out of 253m, almost 70%) has under 100 streams, again a fairly tiny amount, although one that probably starts to affect niche and DIY musicians. Add on the next 40-odd million that has done between 101 and 1000 streams, and it certainly begins to look like there’s simply too much music that isn’t getting listened to out there. This is all 2025 releases, by the way, not what’s already been uploaded previously.
What’s the answer to all this? I saw someone suggest Spotify raising the royalty threshold to 250k streams, which would certainly increase payments significantly for anyone streaming above that number, but it would also exclude a huge amount of musicians from ever earning money from the platform. Unsurprisingly the suggestion did not go down well with the usual suspects. I don’t have an answer, but it’s clear that something needs to be done about the sheer amount of AI crap on streaming services. Bandcamp this week announced they would be banning AI created music from their platform (although how they’ll identify and police this remains to be seen). My suggestion would be for the major DSPs to tighten up the list of approved distributors they work with, and stop the DIY distro platforms from having access. Of course this isn’t without it’s own issues (many rappers, as well as pop stars like Ed Sheeran have used these platforms to host their early tracks, some probably still do), but it was never the case that you could get your releases in a record shop without a distributor, so maybe more curation is what’s needed, even if it’s a sledgehammer style use of the term.
I spent a nice couple of hours speaking with Matt Anniss, author of the excellent Join The Future this week about his PhD looking at the rave culture in East Anglia. I was too young to really experience the big outdoor raves in the area, but around the turn of the millennium was a regular party-goer at a number of unlicenced and semi-legit parties in local village halls and backrooms of pubs & restaurants which I thought it would be interesting to share as a kind of ‘alternative’ to the traditional rave narrative. It was a very interesting and enlightening chat learning about Matt’s links with the area, the differences between Norfolk & Suffolk, and the area’s impact of dance music in general.
Work (and life) has been manic this past week, so I haven’t really had much chance to listen to new music. I haven’t listened to a huge amount of anything this week tbh, just some old Weatherall mixes, and this new one from my colleague Rupert Ellis, playing B2B in Valencia which fits that kinda vibe. I’ll make up for it next week for sure, but enjoy the mix below in the meantime.