Estimated reading time: 4 minute(s)

This week, there’s been a growing hue and cry about Spotify, precipitated by Neil Young taking a stand against the platform’s promotion and publication of Joe Rogan’s harmful rhetoric about CoViD, but further bolstered by people seeming to wake up to Spotify’s less than generous revenue sharing model. To be totally fair, they’re not the only ones screwing the artists, but they’re among the most egregious.

I’ve known for a while that, while the math isn’t exactly this easy, your average artist’s played stream equates to somewhere around $0.003 of revenue for them. Worse, they aggregate their rev share counts across all artists, so that a portion of the revenue from every single subscriber goes to Justin Bieber, even if you’ve never listened to him.

Well, no longer! I am pulling each and every Spotify link that I’ve carefully strewn all over this site, as well as the Arsies. I’m replacing them with TIDAL links. The platform seems to do better for the artist (more like $0.015 per stream), plus are experimenting with ways that fans’ revenue goes more directly to the artists they actually listen to. Better yet, the platform doesn’t seem to be trying to actively kill anyone yet.

And here’s the icing on the cake: launching today, I’m putting a TIDAL embed widget on every First Listen page, so you can preview the album right there in your browser window as you read our pithy impressions.