Will these changes help or hurt “working artists?”

BREAKING NEWS concerning Spotify payments:

Spotify is rumored to be discussing three big changes to its royalty model, expected to take effect in 2024. Spotify states that the changes are intended to eliminate streaming fraud and ensure money gets to working artists.

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There are 3 main changes to Spotify’s royalty model:

1. They are introducing a threshold of minimum annual streams before a track will start generating royalties. No specifics on that threshold, but industry insiders estimate it to be around 200 – 1,000 streams per year.
2. Financially penalizing music distributors and labels when fraudulent activity is detected on tracks that they’ve uploaded to Spotify.
3. Introducing a minimum length of play-time that each non-music or ‘noise’ track must reach in order to generate royalties.

A little context. Spotify is bombarded with insane amounts of audio spam and as they called it “noise” tracks that clog up the system and devalue the music released by legitimate artists and labels.

To me this is the initial house cleaning needed before meaningful discussion and change can happen that ultimately improve streaming royalty payouts. But what do you think?

Does this help reduce the noise that siphons off royalties from working artists, or does it just set the stage to slowly edge out indie artists and get more money to the major labels?

Let me know your thoughts!

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