Spotify's Attempt to Win Over Artists Isn't Going So Well

It's easy to hate on Spotify for exploiting artists, even for the millions of people who use the service to stream cheap/free music, and especially for the musicians themselves, who we now know receive a miniscule $0.007 each time a song is streamed. This week the streaming company launched Spotify Artists, a new website meant to address the haters and mounting bad press and, most importantly, try to make nice with artists, some of whom have started pulling their songs and publicly blasting the company.

The new website gives us the most transparent look at Spotify’s payment model yet. But is it enough to placate musicians? Apparently not. Just two days after Spotify Artists launched, a mystery person fired back with SpotifyforArtists, a spoof site that mocks Spotify's transparency site and offers veiled suggestions of what the company should be doing to help musicians, in the form of a faux-announcement of how Spotify is changing its ways.

Faux-announcement No. 1: It will start paying artists a living wage, and directly, without going through middlemen record labels. “We've really changed our ways," the site says. "Now SpotifyforArtists makes sure the creators you love see the love. Directly. We're paying them more.”

In reality, Spotify explained that it pays out 70 percent of its net revenue in royalties to rights-holders—labels, publishers, and distributors—who take their cut and then pass on the rest of the profits to artists. Royalties are doled out based on popularity, which amounts to about $400,000 for the biggest album each month, $3,300 for one "niche indie album" that Spotify named as an example, $17,000 for a certain classic rock album, and as much as $3 million for a huge star.

Faux-announcement No. 2: It will sell music: "For a while now we've been encouraging everyone to listen to music without ever actually owning it," says the site. "Now you have the option to buy an album and the artist gets 95% of the proceeds. Just like that. And you can keep it, listen to it anytime, anywhere. Even pass it to your children."

Instead, the mindset shift Spotify is actually hoping to achieve is to get people used to paying to listen to music at all. The company said it was built from the ground up as a way to combat music piracy. "Spotify has been successful in convincing this younger generation to abandon piracy and begin using and paying for a legal service,” it wrote.

Faux-announcement No. 3: It will provide lawyers to help artists get contracts that serve their best interests and prepare for the future of the music business.

Instead, Spotify launched an analytics dashboard to encourage musicians to track the social spread of their songs, the idea being to help music professionals take the best advantage of the streaming service.

At first blush the spoof site looks just like the real deal. But with a closer read it's clear the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek, and trying to make a point. Not to mention it features the albums of known anti-Spotify artists like the Black Keys, David Byrne, Aimee Mann, and Thom Yorke, who famously called the company "the last desperate fart of a dying corpse."

At the end of the day, however, the gimmick site is a lot of hot air and not-quite-humor, without any real substance. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered: How could streaming sites pay royalties directly to artists when they're cutting deals with labels? Why would people want to go back to owning music when it's available instantly and freely all over the place? Are we really still holding out for that?

I'd like to know who's behind the website. An angry independent artist? A disgruntled ex-Spotify employee? Or maybe just some hacker mocking Spotify's lackluster attempt to win over artists. Stay tuned.