I had a Spotify Premium account for a little over a year but had to cancel it a few months ago to save money while I was between paychecks. Fortunately, I had an Apple Music trial through Verizon so I could continue to listen to my country music ad free. My Apple Music trial was coming to a close and I was close to having a paycheck to afford Spotify Premium again, but I wanted to check with all my musician friends to find out which platform pays them more. This is a question I researched once for e-books when I was trying to decide between Kindle and Apple’s book app.


Then something happened. Spotify, along with a few other streaming platforms, want to appeal a decision made last year to increase payout rates to songwriters by 44% over the next five years. Stop. Read that again. No, they are not suing songwriters. Let’s just get that fact straight first. But we’re still mad. Let’s just be mad at the correct facts.

Songwriters are amazing. Extremely talented. Brilliant at the way they can put the words together that we don’t know how to say. They perfectly tug at our heart strings but they also know how to help us party. And that’s only with songs that see the light of day. Songwriters have so many words and melodies streaming through their heads pouring out over to notebooks that may not even get shared or cut. This means there are thousands of hours of work built up that songwriters are never paid for. Not to mention songwriters are underpaid to begin with.


Therefore, it is extremely disappointing that Spotify and other platforms are fighting against the rate increase. A rate increase that is happening over 5 years. That’s less than 9% a year, not even a percent a month. So it’s not like there will be a shock to their profits on day one. They could have even added a small increase to their monthly streaming fee that music lovers would have been fine to pay to continue supporting their favorite artists. Because listen, I would love to be able to afford buying every single ablum that a country music artist releases but that’s just not realistic. However, paying to stream all my favorite artists on some fun playlists I’ve made spreads the wealth a little more.

The moral of the story: I would highly recommend stopping all music streaming from Spotify, Google, Pandora and Amazon immediately. Then switch over to Apple Music. They even have an Android compatible app! Remember, music is non-existent without songwriters.

**P.S. The answer is Kindle, if you were wondering which platform pays authors more.