I respect work, risk, and attitude.
But I don’t respect an industry that only listens once you’ve already proven yourself with likes, followers, and viral stats.
Today, labels don’t sign artistic potential. They sign data signals. If a track doesn’t show up in the numbers first, no meeting, no interest. Music is treated like advertising content, not art.
Then there’s the streaming payout nightmare, so bad that even Herbert Grönemeyer publicly called it “an idiot system.”
Spotify pools revenue and hands it out proportionally by total streams. The biggest acts take most of the money. The vast majority of artists barely see anything. You need millions of plays just to earn real money.
Grönemeyer went further and labeled the whole payout model the biggest idiot system in capitalism.
Even when a fan pays subscription fees, the artist might see a few cents – if at all – and the rest dissolves into a giant pool where only the top performers get big slices.
Here’s what I don’t respect:
- an industry that judges art by algorithmic signals first
- labels that only care once the numbers are “good enough”
- payout models that reward the few and starve the many
- the pressure to chase clicks instead of focus on music
- streaming paychecks that are tiny, humiliating, sometimes worthless
Music was never meant to be ruled by charts and dashboards. When the signals matter more than the music itself, that’s not a marketplace, that’s a rigged economy.
If this doesn’t change, we’re not creators anymore. We’re data points.