Last year I wrote that Spotify's royalty system is "as perfect an embodiment of the winner-takes-all neoliberal economy as has yet been devised." Perfection, it turns out, can always be improved, as Damon Krukowski reports: "Starting in 2024 (less than two months from now), [Spotify] will no longer pay any royalty on tracks that fall below a minimum 1,000 streams a year. These tracks will still earn royalties, in theory – but those royalties will not be paid to their rights holders. Instead, they will go into a pot to be divided among accounts that garner more plays. This is akin to a regressive tax – reducing payments to those who already receive less, in order to boost payments for those who already receive more, increasing the divide between haves and have-nots. It is, on the face of it, the ugliest of ugly capitalist cash grabs." Kevin Erickson of the Future of Music Coalition notes: “Among the people not hitting this threshold for big parts of their catalog: Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur prize winners and nominees. People at the pinnacle of artistic and critical acclaim in their respective niches are being told they have to get more fans to earn >$0.00.”
