[00:00:00] James: Welcome to episode 211 of the Bandhive Podcast.

[00:00:04] James: It is time for another episode of the Bandhive Podcast. My name is James Cross and I help independent artists tour smart. This week on the show, we're going to be talking about Spotify's new rules for streaming royalties and why they don't really matter. And I'm going to give you a little example using my own band, Taken Alive, for that, which by the way, if you haven't checked out Taken Alive yet, You can find our music by going to links. takenaliveband. com. Again, that's links. takenaliveband. com. And you can listen to Apple Music, Spotify, whatever you prefer from that page. So as you've probably heard by now, it's been A huge discussion over the last month and a half or so, maybe the last month, Spotify is changing their rules for royalty payouts to artists starting in 2024.

[00:00:54] James: A lot of artists have a big problem with these rules, but honestly, that is [00:01:00] misguided at best, more likely misunderstood. Because all this outrage over Spotify not paying out royalties to artists for songs that did not receive at least 1, 000 streams per year doesn't matter.

[00:01:15] James: That's about four dollars. Per year that this artist is missing out on if they are hitting 999 plays but the people that I see complaining about this are also the same people who don't understand the basics of business and Don't promote their music. They're just throwing it out They're hoping that somebody will randomly discover their music and hand them a career Which is never going to happen because that's not how it works Realistically that 1000 plays like I said is about four dollars That's not going to make or break anyone's profitability as an artist at the end.

[00:01:48] James: Spotify, who has to administer millions of payouts for under a dollar, because this is a quarterly payout versus a yearly 1, 000 play threshold, that is going [00:02:00] to be a massive drain on Spotify's resources, their accounting team, or whatever team handles it. That's just adding unnecessary costs and wasting time for Spotify.

[00:02:10] James: I've seen a lot of reactions saying, Oh great, well now Daniel Ek is gonna earn more money. Well, no. He's not. Every article that I've read, including the official release, has stated that all of these micropayments that aren't gonna be paid out to artists are going to be redistributed to any artists who do meet the 1, 000 play threshold.

[00:02:29] James: What that means is Spotify is not making any more money on this and you know actually they can't because they have a set Percentage of their revenue that they have to pay out as royalties. They can't just say oh, we're not gonna pay out this portion We're gonna keep this for ourselves. That's not how it works It's legally mandated that this amount of their revenue goes to towards royalties, which means that this redistribution Is going to be a nice boost for artists. We're talking about a huge chunk of money So artists who do meet [00:03:00] the 1000 streams per year per song requirement are going to be seeing Royalties that are slightly higher. Everyone says spotify royalties are too low Well, why don't we give it to people who are actually putting in the effort rather than sending people 10 cents because they got streamed I don't know like eight. Let's see 10 cents 30 times why are we sending people 10 cents for 30 streams?

[00:03:24] James: That's honestly a waste of time We can go out there and if somebody is honestly putting in that effort, reward them by saying, Hey, you actually hit this minimum of 1000 streams. So now you're going to get paid for your 1000 streams and you're going to get a little extra for all the people who didn't put in any effort.

[00:03:41] James: What Spotify is trying to do is reward artists who put in the effort. Above all, I think it's cost cutting. That's my conjecture, but it seems pretty obvious to me they're trying to cut costs. And wasted time on these micro payments, but they're not earning more money for themselves They are sending that money to other artists now to go [00:04:00] through why it's so easy to hit a thousand streams on spotify I'm going to use my band taken live as an example and you can hear the exact song By searching for movies on repeat on your platform of choice titles movies on repeat We dropped the song on november 3rd and within nine days we had over 1000 plays on Spotify.

[00:04:21] James: That's not bad for a band that had about I think it was just under 50 monthly listeners before we dropped this song. Now we have over 800 monthly listeners. because we promoted this song and to be honest we did the bare minimum But here's what we did before the release the guys chose a fantastic producer. This is before I was actually in the band They went with Gary Chione at Sound Acres in New Jersey Then, after working with him for producing and tracking, we all collectively decided to send the songs out to James Paul Wiesner, who's worked with Paramore, Under Oath, and a bunch of other amazing [00:05:00] A list bands to mix our songs.

[00:05:02] James: That made such a huge difference, don't mean any offense to Gary Chuney, I think he's an amazing producer. He did the mixes for the EPs, the songs were good, the production was good. The mixes, I was not a huge fan of them. Having Gary produce and record these new songs that we're working on now, that we're releasing, and then having James Paul Wiesner mix them, night and day difference.

[00:05:22] James: They are fan tastic. It really matters to have good production. And I think this is an example, because we laid our release plan out months in advance to support the song, and we did a few things, including a subnet hub campaign and some other marketing aspects. But we didn't do a lot, so when release day got here, there's four of us in the band, each of us posted a song multiple times across various platforms and we messaged our friends letting them know.

[00:05:48] James: These were direct messages, one to one, saying, hey, we have a new song out, would you mind checking it out? We also made sure that we updated the link in submit hub. I see a lot of artists mess this up. You have to put in your [00:06:00] Spotify link the day of release so it can be automatically shared by any playlisters who've approved it.

[00:06:05] James: Now we had nine approvals on submit hub, which doesn't sound like a lot, but that's out of 11. Total submissions. So that puts us at what like an 82 or 89. Hold on an 82 percent Approval rate it was as high as 89 at one point, but then I sent more submissions and dropped slightly but 81 percent approval rate on submit hub.

[00:06:26] James: That's fantastic The site wide average is like 26 or something Which is still good if you have an amazing song and pitch it to the right people you can absolutely get A higher approval rate. And we actually talked with Jason from SubmitHub, he's the founder and CEO, just a few weeks ago on the podcast.

[00:06:42] James: 207. So if you want to check that out, go to bandhive. rocks slash 207, that's the number 207, and you can listen to our latest interview with Jason Grishkoff from SubmitHub. Now that said, those nine playlists, I'm sure they helped a little bit. We have a few where we got several hundred plays. That's fantastic.

[00:06:59] James: [00:07:00] The main thing was, we used those playlists to train Spotify who wants to hear our songs. Which by the way, I also have a free course on how to get SubmitHub approvals. you can find that at bandhive. rocks slash SubmitHub and you'll get a little coupon for going through that course as well to get a discount on SubmitHub credits.

[00:07:20] James: So again, you can find that at bandhive. rocks slash SubmitHub. and all these links will be in the show notes for the episode as well at bandhive. rocks Slash two one one. That's the number two hundred eleven aside from submit hub We also ran a small ad campaign a 50 budget over five days and we used hype edit for that which honestly The campaign didn't do much, that's probably not Hypedit's fault, but I don't recommend paying for Hypedit because their support has been quite clueless regarding certain aspects of their business.

[00:07:51] James: I've had a lot of issues and they even admitted to me that they don't know the things that I know, they're not going to try and [00:08:00] help in any way. So it's really a limited service because their support. Openly says we don't know and we're not going to find out how to make this work That's really unfortunate because I was excited about hype edit. I don't recommend it their support not great They're friendly, but they don't know what they're doing, which is kind of pointless for support. Anyway, because of the direct outreach we did, the playlisting via SubmitHub, and the effort that we put in on having a good song with great production, the Spotify algorithm ended up picking up the song and played it on release radar as of yesterday's reports, which was for the first 10 days, over 500 times.

[00:08:37] James: So after those 10 days, we had 1, 314 plays, 782 unique listeners, which comes out to 1. 68 streams per listener, 103 playlist adds, and 58 saves. For an independent artist who's just putting in the bare minimum as far as effort is concerned, which yeah, I said, if you're doing less than this, you're not even trying.[00:09:00] [00:09:00] James: What we put into this is the bare minimum if you want to make it in music. We could have done a lot more. to be honest, this band is more casual for us. We take it seriously. But we're not going to go in and invest a ton of money on this band. It's a passion project, we take it seriously, we run it as a business, we're not looking to make this our full time career.

[00:09:21] James: We just want to put this out there and put music out there that people enjoy. But for what that is, for what we are, an independent artist who's just getting started, these are fantastic results for a song after one week. you can't tell me that's bad. For somebody who's just getting started and not doing any real… Big push for a song that's amazing and we've already earned More than that 4 minimum Spotify is talking about now the thousand plays minimum four is rough? that's an estimate for the royalties. if Spotify is supposedly stealing That 4 from independent artists. Well, what are those independent artists doing that they're not hitting the 4 [00:10:00] minimum? that's what it really comes down to and honestly the key comes down to making good music that people want to hear and you know with taken alive We're not in a mainstream genre But that doesn't stop us from putting in the effort to make music that people who like our kind of music are going to enjoy And above all, let's recognize that the change that Spotify is instituting next year isn't going to hurt anyone who takes their music seriously.

[00:10:24] James: So instead of sitting there on Facebook and complaining and arguing about these changes that Spotify is making. Why don't you reach out to half a dozen people and ask them to listen to your song reach out to? 50 60 people and ask them to listen to your song do that direct outreach because here's what it comes down to you No one sees your social media posts Maybe a handful of people but if you directly reach out to people one on one that is going to be a lot more effective and You will get plays on your song if you have a good song great production and put in the effort Any one of those three things if [00:11:00] those are missing?

[00:11:00] James: You're not going to get the results you want. So you need to have all three of those things. A good song, great production, and you need to put in the effort. If you don't have those, you're not going to make it in the music business. So instead of complaining about Spotify, instead of whining about the changes, why not make those three things happen?

[00:11:18] James: So you do hit the 1, 000 plays per year threshold. And you can get that 4 from Spotify. It's going to be so much better in the long run because you know at that point that people actually care about your music and they want to listen.