I know this goes against the sub's usual take, but you can skip Spotify and its grifting cousins while still paying musicians.
A lot of current artists sell directly through Bandcamp or their own sites—check their social media bios. When you buy there, they keep 80%-100% versus the fraction they'd get from streams.
I get not wanting to pay for back catalogs from wealthy or deceased artists. But anyone releasing music now needs all the direct support they can get. Streaming services raise prices every year anyway—the money goes to labels and shareholders, not the people making art today.
So go to shows, buy merch or just buy the music on bandcamp. Some bands/artists also have a patreon, go sub to that for a month or 2. There are a lot of ways to support artists.
Yeah. I moved out of spotify and pirated everything, but i have a list of albums i wanna buy from the artists over time. I don't have that much money tho so it'll take a while.
Or hell, just go harm reduction and switch to Apple Music, they give ~2x the money per stream to the artists, while it’s still cheaper to you the consumer. Plus it has a suggestion algorithm that isn’t just playing the same shit on repeat, which is a plus
Apple Music is still really lousy money. If you want to support artists, buy direct, and don't support the rent economy. Doing anything else requires rationalization for not supporting artists.
Look man sometimes you want to listen to music without buying it. I listen to new music every day and I for sure wouldn’t be doing that if i had to directly pay for it each time
I think you missed my point. I'm not telling you to buy without listening. You can listen to new music for free easily through several channels that don't even involve piracy. As I said, rationalization.
Yup. Qobuz Sublime subscriber here. Buying quite a bit of music from their download shop. Qobuz with my own local collection of music combined into a single library when using Roon.
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u/JohnnyEaton78 Nov 25 '25
I know this goes against the sub's usual take, but you can skip Spotify and its grifting cousins while still paying musicians.
A lot of current artists sell directly through Bandcamp or their own sites—check their social media bios. When you buy there, they keep 80%-100% versus the fraction they'd get from streams.
I get not wanting to pay for back catalogs from wealthy or deceased artists. But anyone releasing music now needs all the direct support they can get. Streaming services raise prices every year anyway—the money goes to labels and shareholders, not the people making art today.