CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@amyfou

@amyfou why is this making me cry aww my hors

Distrokid, the most common service, says

"If you don't renew your subscription to DistroKid, your music will be removed from services. DistroKid subscriptions are billed annually on the date you first signed up and paid for the subscription.

To prevent your releases from being removed for this reason, you can opt any upload into DistroKid's optional Leave a Legacy album extra." which is an extra service

reviews also say that people's music was taken down for various reasons and also that it can take months for the music to appear on the services in the first place

@bagahens that's good to know. i will add that

@brhfl @JoscelynTransient i had a friend who was trying to figure out how to put their music on qobuz but opt out of spotify. i might consider that if it's possible

@JoscelynTransient i have seen several folks talk about putting music up there. i have not done so but it's worth looking into. tidal is supposed to also have an okay payout

i'm not going to tell you to go all or nothing but i would really suggest subscribing to a streaming service with a better payout like qobuz. but even if you continue to subscribe to a streaming service, tossing an artist 5 bucks once in awhile will go so much further

i just mentioned this to a friend who didn’t know about it but in case you are unaware, to get music on a streaming service, artists must pay a distribution service. if they stop paying, the music gets taken down.

which means that many artists are out there paying and also not making any money because spotify now requires a thousand streams to make a fraction of a penny. spotify's playlists are increasingly filling with ai slop that is preventing people from hearing these artists.

supporting artists directly through services like bandcamp, faircamp, mirlo, etc, means that they get more money than they would make from thousands and thousands of streams.

on bandcamp friday, all their fees are waived and the money goes directly to the artist. so for example somebody paid me 6 dollars and all i lost was 37 cents in payment processor fee

edit to add: i am told that some services are a one-time fee for example cdbaby was a one time $14.99. that is still a LOT of spotify streams to recoup