Spotify has reduced royalty earnings for ASMR and white noise creators.
Do you make ASMR, White noise, Nature Sounds or Sound Effects?
Spotify is reducing the amount you will be paid.
The Issue:
With Streaming, genres like White Noise, ASMR, whale sounds, and static, have become hugely popular as background listening. Listeners will stream these for hours in the background while doing other things like cleaning, cooking, studying and sleeping. (Which is great for these people).
But the problem is that this is also exploited by creators who intentionally make their tracks short, not for artistic purposes, but to maximise royalties through repeated streams of short tracks.
Usually, a typical music song is a few minutes long, but with genres like White Noise, Nature sounds, Static, and Non-Spoken ASMR, creators are making these tracks to be just 30 seconds long and arranging them one after the other in a playlist, without listeners realising, in an attempt to gain a large number of repeated streams to gain oversized royalty payments.
Besides the track length, these types of noise recordings are valued the same as music. The big growth in royalties has allowed noise uploaders to earn much more than what they contribute to listeners.
I think what Spotify is saying here, is that “Noise” uploaders give listeners multiple short tracks and are being paid the same as music songs while contributing a lot less to the listener experience.
Music VS Noise, How are they addressing this?
Along with other policy changes, Spotify has categorised ASMR & Nature Sounds tracks under “Functional Noise”.
Functional Noise genres will include White Noise, Nature Sounds, Machine Noise, Sound Effects, Non-spoken ASMR, and Silence recordings.
These ‘Functional Noise’ genres will also have to be a minimum of 2 minutes to be eligible to generate royalties.
Additionally, Spotify is working with licensors to value these Functional Noise streams at a fraction of what Music streams will make.
Why has Spotify made these policy Changes?
Setting a minimum track length of 2 minutes for Function Noise recordings should deter creators from making 30-second noise tracks and stacking them in playlists, so this genre should make 4 times less than it did previously as it will take 2 minutes to qualify for a royalty as opposed to 30 seconds.
Spotify states that this should free up extra money to go back to honest hard-working artists.
And for the artists who do make functional noise genres, this should create a fairer playing field as there is now no incentive to make tracks 30 seconds long just to farm the Spotify system.
Spotify has stated that the opportunity has been so large that Noise uploaders are flooding streaming services with similar-sounding noise recordings, aiming to attract enough search traffic to generate royalties.
Summary:
As Spotify makes major changes to how it pays artists, the landscape is changing for creators of genres like ASMR and white noise. These new rules are designed to make royalty payments fairer and discourage low-quality content.
This could mean a better listening experience for users and a fairer situation for creators.
It's a significant move showing how the music technology industries are adapting in a time where the value of digital art is always being evaluated, - for good and for bad.
Let’s see if other streaming platforms are going to follow these changes too.
What do you think about Spotify's new changes? Share your thoughts in the comments below.