What do I do? What was the point of this channel before beef and stuff? I'm having a total loss of identity. I don't even know what's going on anymore. Oh, that's right. I used to hate on Spotify.

I know some of you guys in the comments are like, I don't like Drake, or I don't like Kendrick. But please don't lose sight of the fact that the number one enemy of music today is music streaming giant Spotify, who have recently found another way to be disgusting and unlikable, pulling over million dollars potentially out of the songwriting community with these recent price hikes and royalty alterations they've announced as of late.

If you are a Spotify premium subscriber and it's your first time hearing it here, the premium price is going up. So if the prospect of that annoys you, might be time to switch. But if that's not enough, let me tell you why this price hike is happening and how it's going to screw over songwriters even more.

Ever since Spotify managed to corner the music market, the platform has been seeking out ways to to branch out beyond music and become some all-encompassing media hub for its users. For a while, they were throwing millions and millions of dollars at the podcast market with little to nothing in the way of positive results, outside of Joe Rogan now being a full-time on there talking about conspiracy theories like an idiot.

With the podcast thing being a bust, it seems like the company's new focus is going to be on audiobooks, and the way they're expanding for them on the platform is devious.

When you actually think of the way that music used to be purchased and valued and how songwriters and rights holders and recording artists used to actually make money from their music, how it's transitioned into this, it's kind of insane. Rather than just simply getting paid off of the purchase of an album through whichever means you buy it, we're now seeing artists and songwriters getting paid through some big, vague royalty pool that Spotify sets aside beforehand.

Rather than setting aside some other separate fat pool of cash that these writers of books are most definitely worthy of, Spotify is now instead just raising its price just a little bit and then throwing an untold number of book writers and publishers into that royalty pool from premium subscriptions whose value from payouts from what I'm gathering are no longer going to be as impactful due to the fact that they're being bundled and collapsed.

And again, per Billboard, their high ball estimate of the amount of losses songwriters are going to take as a result of this is about $150 million. This is all just mind-blowing to me, not only because Spotify continues to get more and more brazen every year and how it's screwing artists over, but also on top of this, it's not like it's only the little guy that's going to get screwed by this at the end of the day. Big artists, it's huge artists, it's major label artists, it's some of the biggest names in songwriting in the industry.

It's not like these people are without representation. How are labels just sitting by and allowing this to happen and not really doing much of anything? This is a pretty major change from Spotify in terms of how they treat and dish out their royalties from premium subscriptions. I can't imagine the labels knew nothing about this oncoming change before it was announced to the public. And if they did, why are they not fighting on behalf of the people that make their business model work?

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, this is just another step in this ongoing process that we're seeing on the internet of tech essentially taking all art, all creativity, all media, and flattening it and collapsing it. I mean, this was the resounding commentary that came out of the rightfully angry reactions to that new stupid Apple iPad ad.

While I do believe in funding the arts and finding different creative ways of doing so, I'm not sure if throwing every voice, creator, composer, writer, everybody into some massive one-size-fits-all click-per-stream royalty pool is the way to do it. That's most likely going to just lead to a lot of people getting ripped off and over time making less money.

Spotify, they never cease to surprise. Those are my thoughts on that. Let me know yours down in the comments. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano, Spotify, royalties, forever.