Aspiring artists who wish to earn money through Spotify streams will have to work harder to get more plays. While Spotify along with YouTube is a great place to start and grow, artists will need more than a thousand plays before their content is monetized.
Spotify's New Payment Policy
Known artists in the music streaming platform won't have to worry about the new policy, but those who are trying to make it through Spotify will have a harder time earning money from following their passion for creating music.
With the new payment policy, contributors to the platform will need at least 1,000 streams per year before they can become eligible for monetization. The company reasoned that this was part of its effort to eliminate fraud on the platform.
Since the money will no longer reach those who don't reach the provided metrics, it will instead be given to those who do. That's not even the worst news with the new policy. Artists who get enough streams will eventually get paid, while other content creators are permanently ineligible.
Accounts that post "noise" content, for instance, will no longer get paid for their audio if it does not exceed two minutes, as reported by Engadget. These so-called "noise" audio are the ones people usually play in the background like rain noises or chirping birds.
As if that's not bad enough, the earnings will also be lowered for noise recordings, which means that the payout will be smaller than what music gets. Spotify is yet to announce just how big of an impact this reduction will be.
This doesn't bode well for Spotify, especially since the streaming service is already known for underpaying its contributors. However, the 1,000 stream threshold does filter out those who post content just to earn, throwing sound quality and substance out the window.
Furthermore, Spotify claims that by increasing the required streams, the company will be saving $1 billion, which can be redistributed to the artists who deserve it. It was also mentioned that 99.5% of contributors on the platform meet the new metrics.
Spotify's Crackdown on Fake Streams
The streaming platform has long been aware of fraudsters trying to pass certain songs as music just for the sake of getting monetized on the app. Back in May, Spotify removed tens of thousands of AI-generated songs from the platform.
Most of the songs were created by Boomy, and the startup was reportedly using artificial streaming to boost the number of plays. In case you don't know, artificial streaming is when online bots posing as humans inflate stream numbers, as per Financial Times.
This is not the first time that AI-generated content caused problems for the service. Several accounts have also published music made with AI using real artists' voices. This resulted in requests from record labels to take down such content.
For example, the AI-generated song "Heart on My Sleeve" gained so much popularity across streaming and social media platforms, and it was created using AI with the voices of popular artists like Drake and The Weekend.
