Spotify Paying Out EVEN LESS?!, Andre 3k Album, and Christmas Decorations

I've been thinking a lot lately about how it would be hilarious if uh Central C switched the bar. How could I be gay? My bitch is homophobic. Welcome back to another episode of the One More Time Show. Yes, sir. Gems Takes. And a little bit of bullshit. Just a smidge. Just slid in at the end. Just like not too much, not too little. It's the minority of the audio. Oh god. But it's there. All right. What's on the agenda first up, Henry? Well, a lot of you have probably heard, but we have got to talk about the new rules for Spotify. Spotify. The big bad. What happened? Swedish corporation that dominates music. Swedish capitalists? Like, I didn't even know. Look, Daniel Ek is coming for you artists. And uh, well, he's always been, you know, coming for y'all, but he's changing up the rules on how the platform works. Starting Q1, 2024. Oh, God.

Yeah, which is uh right around the corner. It's so soon. It's pretty close, pretty soon. I thought these things would have taken at least like a year to roll out, but let's hear it. What's going on? As it turns out, uh tech companies can just pretty much type in some lines of code and make it make it happen, man. Pay artists less now. Yeah. They have a button that just does that. All right, so what what are the because I know there's a lot of speculation around like what was gonna happen, what what was exactly gonna be the policy change, right? So you have the latest and greatest, I believe, right? So, like what's what's going on? There's one main one that's gonna affect, I think, most artists, but definitely will affect every smaller artist. So we'll that's the big one. We'll save that one for last. Just real quick on the first two ambient noise kind of tracks that aren't as musical, um, which I like. I like listen to, you know, I like having noise on when I sleep. Um, but I guess some of them were trying to game the system, so they're gonna be paying out ambient noise creators less now. No, I know say it ain't fucking so.

It's so. All of my ambient producers are like they're other in uproars. They figured out that you have to get like 30 seconds of listen time to uh to get paid, and they know that most people are sleeping to it, so they're making like 31 second tracks. Oh my god. And just people are looping it and they're racking in the three-tenths of a penny at a time. Are you pro like game the system like that? Or like do you really care? Like, do you have any opinion on that? I say go for it, you know. But I also say, you know, Spotify, like, if you're changing it, I get it. Yeah, whatever. If it's the rules, yeah, it's fine. That that one I I kind of get. It's whatever. But but then I also do wonder like what the distinction is. Yeah, right. Like, how do they know white noise? I feel like, okay, yeah, I get it. What if I add a little hi-hat in the background? Exactly. What if I play a little guitar real quiet behind it, to what degree does it then become an instrumental, right? It's a great question.

Because clearly that's on the platform and they support that. They've they've editorial playlists with you know instrumental hip hop and instrumental this, instrumental that, right? So I am kind of curious around how that will play out. You know what I mean? Like the like where the line is drawn. Yeah, seems very vague, for sure. Yeah, so sure. All right, so moving on, number two. We'll take notes on that. Uh number two is, and I understand like the reasoning behind this one, they're trying to penalize artists who get fake streams. Okay. The stream farms in Brazil or whatever, all the fake streams, they're getting better, I guess, recognizing when your fake streams are fake. So they are gonna penalize people, they're gonna start fining people. Fines. Fines. I think I saw a dollar amount actually, I can't remember what it was. Um, I remember thinking it wasn't actually too bad, but I guess I guess if it racks up over time. Yeah. I don't know though. I I still wonder, like, with both of these, there's got to be some sort of appeal process now that's gonna be in place, right? That's the funniest part is if someone gets fined $500 for get having a bunch of fake streams, and I don't and I don't fuck with that artist, and I could pay like $50 to give them a bunch of fake streams, and then they get fined. Fuck.

Where's the line? How do they know who's who's who? Yeah, I mean, there's that, but then there's also like, you know, even the ambient, you know, even rule number one, right? As far as like, is there a way to appeal it and be like, no, this should be counted? Like, I put my heart and fucking soul into this music that I'm that my fans really, you know, like all right, three stacks, calm down. Okay. Just kidding. Yeah, I like the new album. Yeah, okay. I'm sure you do. Yeah, but okay, the anyway, those are whatever speculative. The big one is that there is being introduced a minimum number of yearly streams that each track must meet before it qualifies for monetization. I'm not at the board, so I'm doing my own sound effects. So, um, there there was speculation on what that number was. Spotify came out and finally said that the number is 1,000. 1,000. So that's with the less than sign.

You can't have the less than if you have the less than 1,000, make no money. And that's none, and that's every year. No money, zero dollars, zero. No three tenths of a penny, nothing. Wow, and that's yearly. So, like, to put that in perspective, if you drop a 10-song album and all 10 tracks do 999 streams in the first year, you make zero dollars and zero cents. Wow, and if they all do 999 streams each the next year, they get zero dollars and zero cents still. So there's a couple sides of this coin. There's obviously the smaller artists who are pissed off, they're already having trouble making money on DSPs, and this is just gonna make it you know even harder for them, which I totally understand. And then there's the other side of the coin that is, you know, are should we be encouraging artists to take their music more seriously and only be uploading when they think they can get more streams and you know, taking the burden, I guess, off of Spotify of having to deal with a hundred thousand new songs uploaded every day. Because you see platforms like YouTube have you know they have minimum requirements to monetize, and no one's really yelled at them.

So I mean, yeah, we we barely met, we barely just got started there. Yeah, uh we never bitched, yeah. Yeah, we a little. Well, uh, but so I guess I'm just scratching my head here, right? And like I we have artist friends, producer friends, like we have plenty of people that make music who are you know part of our community, clearly. So I I want them to get paid for their art, I want them to win, I want them to make money, right? But at the same time, I mean, you give the example of 999. Let's say all thousand or sorry, let's say all 10 tracks did do a thousand streams. How much money are we actually talking? Yeah, not shit, not shit. Dollars. You can't buy a meal off of it. Maybe a McDouble. Even those are expensive now with inflation. The dollar menu does not exist anymore. It's the 350 menu now. So I I I bring that up to say that I think that if our artists and producer and like songwriter, creative friends, uh, if they're thinking about streaming services as their you know, ticket to financial freedom. It's just you're playing a losing game.

They're playing a losing game, right? Like it's only in the numbers, yeah, right. Right? Like you have to be doing some serious volume of streams to actually be making any sort of like sustainable income off of off of streaming. So I I bring that up to say that I think the perspective needs to change. I think the the mindset, the the you know, mind frame needs to shift, right? Like I think that we need to stop looking at streaming platforms as our only revenue streams. And I mean, we've talked about this almost at nauseam, but so I don't want to take it there, but at the same time, I think that it's it's worthwhile bringing up like there are other ways to monetize your art. Absolutely. I mean, shout out to Curtiss King, who just recently took all his music off Spotify. Whoa. Gave him the big fuck you. No. He's two weeks, two weeks clean. He got his two-week chip. Yo, he's off of Spotify. He's off the stuff. He's off the spot. He got rid of it, cold turkey. Oh. Took his shit down.

And you know, he's a big advocate of the DIY route, which I think that way more art. I mean, I it seems like artists don't even understand that this is a thing that can happen. Like, you can sell your music. Bro, there's companies like Even, literally, who are, you know, it's essentially like a more like next generation band camp, right? Where it's allowing artists to monetize their art direct to consumer. Absolutely. Right. You can literally sell your music, and I think their whole shtick is like you can sell it to consumers ahead of it coming out on streaming. So they're not necessarily trying to replace streaming. They're not like, don't put your shit out on streaming. This is an additional revenue stream for you to monetize directly to your fan base, right? It's super serving your biggest fans, giving them an extra little something to be able to support and yeah, and show love. And like, same thing with you know, Andre, shout out to Andre dropping like the vinyls of new blue Sun. You could have there's still physical music, believe it or not. Some cars still have CD players.

Vinyls definitely still here. There's a lot of ways that you can do it on your own, but it is a lot more work, and it's not as convenient for the listener as it is press and play on an app on your phone. So, yes, I understand if it's intimidating, but for a lot of you guys, you know, that can't seem to get a million fans, it's probably gonna be a lot easier to get a thousand that just fuck with you deep, you know, instead of a million, like people that know you and stream you occasionally. Yeah, I mean, I I just think that there's gonna be I I forecast, I I forecast that there's gonna be a movement to to really figure it out. Yeah, like to figure out what is my plan. If streaming services, I mean, shit, we posted a tweet post about this, right? Yes, where we basically said if streaming services stopped paying artists completely, right? What how would you make money off of your music? Yeah, and the comments section was going crazy, right? What money exactly? Because I think a lot of artists, you know, smaller artists um that that have fan bases, it's not like they don't have fan bases, right? Like these are folks with you know actual engaged fan bases, but they're just small.

Yep. Um, they they haven't been relying on streaming at all because they realize that's not where they can make their actual money. That's not how they're gonna pay their families, pay their bills off of their art. They need to go direct to their fans. Like they've built core fan bases that live on social media or live in whatever platforms that they're on, and they need to be serving them in different ways because those fans want to support them. Like, I don't know if artists actually understand that. Like, we've even started to do some things where like our community is supporting us, and like, shout out to you guys. Anyone that's tuned into a live stream, anyone that's you know, booked a consultation with us, anyone that has asked, like, hey, how much do you charge for interviews and you want to try and get you know on our platform for exposure and supporting us? Like, that shit means a lot. And and there's people out there, even if it's smaller numbers, they're gonna pay a hundred X what a thousand streams even is gonna pay. Yes.

So uh I think we just need to. It's really about like if y'all if y'all take anything away from this episode, it's really like let's flip the let's flip the mindset. Like, let's let's change the way we're thinking about this. And yeah, like it's annoying, we can all bitch about Spotify, like fuck you. Why are you doing this? Whatever. But like, let's be honest. It that wasn't those numbers weren't gonna pay you anyways, really. No, I mean, these new rules are just the latest in a trend since Spotify came out of you know, not being able to like monetize directly the way that most people are in the mainstream, but there are other options as scary as they may seem. So maybe start looking into them. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all right, so I want to move on into the new Andre 3000 project. Let's go. New under the sun, new blue sun. Oh fuck. You haven't heard it yet, clearly. No, yeah. I haven't. That was gonna be my premise. I was gonna ask you about it. Okay, I mean, I just feel like it's one of those things where I haven't got we're shooting this on the day it came out. Right.

Okay, so like give me a break. I've got a fucking three-week old newborn at my house. Okay, so but I it's perfect background music. Like you can do other things while you listen to it, you don't have to listen to the words. There are no words. You have you don't have children. They could do the words. You don't have children, my friend. Why can't it play in the house? I I wanted to give it a real list. I wanted to get like real spiritual with this shit, bro. Because all the shit I was hearing about it, like I feel like I needed to do some ayahuasca and take a list. I mean, should I? As someone who's who's dove into it, like not like that. How was it? I I like it. I like it. You like it? I like it. What were you so far? I like it. What were your expectations going in? Uh it's exactly kind of what I thought it was we're gonna be. It's you know, a beautiful assortment of different instruments, kind of free form. Um he improvised a lot of it. If you watched, I don't know if you saw the GQ interview he did, kind of talking about it. Yep. So. Which like, oh my god, if I got to do that, I know. You want to be that guy. Oh, look at that fucking bozo.

You're not even doing it right. Exactly, bro. I was pissed. No. He was good. He was definitely good. He was fine. But I was also like, oh my god. Like I wanted to be you. Oh my dude, I've never been so jealous of some dweeby interviewer before. So yeah, there's no there's no like, you know, tempos, the keys kind of change. It's very free-flowy, and weird, like percussive sounds kind of come in here and there. And and yeah, it's fun. Um, it's you know, did all of us want him to come out and fucking rap? Yes, obviously. Like, we all wanted him to rap. God damn it. Of course we did. We did. Of course we did. Fuck. And everyone still thought like maybe there's a little bit of hope. He says he's gonna just be rapping on this shit. When I read the track the title of track one, I was like, this is definitely gonna be this. He's not rapping, folks, at all. Not a single bar. The only bars are the titles of the songs. Those are they're kind of bars. They're kind of hard. The one about um Pussy pussy being off the tongue way better than the formal word vagina. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pretty pretty hard. That's a bar. Pretty amazing. Um, but yeah, no, I've just been like kind of upset at the people that have been going hard on him and like getting being pissed off at him like entitled. Like he owes you a goddamn thing. Not shit, bro. That's what pisses me off. Like, the people that feel like, yeah, you know, you gotta be out here inspiring and doing the baby din, and you deserve we deserve the dinner. Like, no, you guys don't deserve shit. Like, he he's earned, I think, as much as anyone else, if not more, the right to, especially artistically, go on whatever journey he wants to, right? Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. Oh boy. If you heard that album, that fucking flute inspired woodwind instruments, free form instrumental album. All right. And you didn't know it was by Andre 3000. Give me your take right now. I would probably think it was one of those like CDs you you get at the airport or something. I just Peruvian flute bands.

This goes back to the shit I've talked to you about before about how biased we are as listeners. Sure. If we like, dude, everyone's hyping this shit up. Even the people that I've seen post like really great things about it. Yeah. It's like, bro, it's because Andre 3000 did it. Like, I'm sure it's great, it's good music, like it's well done, it's tasteful, whatever. But like, dude, you're not bumping that shit if you didn't know it was Andre 3000. You would have turned it off immediately, bro. You know what I am doing. What are you doing? And you know what everyone else is doing. What are they doing? Sampling the fuck out of this album, bro. This is gonna be the most sampled album of all time in give it seven years. Bro, his publisher, his publisher is like, bro. They just got an army of lawyers. Are you kidding me, bro? They just got a fucking army of lawyers. Because there's no drums. And like, anyone that's you know looking for clean samples, we're always looking for the part with no drums. So we can and this whole thing, it's an hour and 27 minutes. So no drums, fired.

Beautiful melodies from weird instruments. It's like, dude, I mean, we're gonna hear this over and over again in so many forms in the years to come. So I'm looking forward to that. I just think my no, I the my favorite part about this whole rollout, I can't even call it rollout without laughing. He didn't even want to market it. It was like, I guess I I deserve, like I the music deserves to be told about, I guess. He like sort of wanted to talk about it. Yeah. Like, I guess I owe it to the music. Bro, I'm actually surprised he didn't, you know, release it under like another name. Well, he said in the interview that he has released music under other names without telling anyone. Oh, fuck him. So how do we how would we ever even know? Oh my god, I only I only saw the clips of that interview. Yes, yeah, See, I watched all 30 minutes. I once again, child. Newborn child. Multitasking, man. I was on calls with you all fucking day. When was I supposed to listen to this album? I listened to it the same day. So yeah, when I started having to actually pay attention to my woke child. He's woke.

He's woke It's she, first of all, you know this. You have one of each. I didn't know which one. Oh god. Anyway, so my favorite part of this whole release, like this whole thing that's happening right now. Stumble out. Bro, the internet. Yeah. The internet is so it's undefeated. Yeah, they're that's great. It's so fun. For sure. I love the memes. Yeah. I love even I like I like seeing the I like seeing what the haters are saying too. I like seeing the negative shit. I'm not gonna lie. It makes me the haters like they really hate on him, though. It does like show me who people are. Oh, dude, humans. I'm like secretly judging people. Humans are okay. Are bad. Yeah. It's like if you hate DJ Khaled, it's like, okay, you're that type of guy. Yeah, just be just you, you just want to hate it. Yeah. You have hate in your heart. You just have nothing else to do but hate. Okay, this was a funny one though, that wasn't necessarily hate, but because in the GQ interview, he was like, What am I gonna rap about now? Like, I gotta go get a colonoscopy. Yeah. Shout out money making meek. He was like, Yes, rap about colonoscopies. Like, absolutely.

We would listen to that shit , Andre. Absolutely. I love that. I love that. And then just like the people posting, like, you know, how I'ma be with my homies listening to the new Andre. And it's like the flute sounds and them just like bobbing their heads, like, yeah, you know. It's true. Yeah. Like we're giving this music a shot because he's earned it. Yeah, absolutely. He earned so many people's respect as a creative and as an artist that to Neek's point, we would listen to him rap about colonoscopies. Hell yeah. We would listen to him put out an instrumental album full of flutes and other woodwind instruments. Bass clarinet, baby. Yeah, I mean, like, he's earned it. Uh, and that's special, man. Yeah, absolutely. Like, that's that's gotta be like the North Star. I think someone actually posted something to that effect of like, I mean, that's like the mecca of being a creative when like you feel comfortable and confident enough to have like earned the right, and I hate saying it that way, but it is true. Earned the right to put out this just you know, completely left field from what you've you've built your career on, and for people to still want to listen to it and want to to give it a shot and care enough to be talking about it.

And imagine all the people, the types of people that are listening to it that never would have listened to something like that that are expanding their creative palettes. I think that's pretty cool. No, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, so I I was driving through my neighborhood, man. Just to kind of wrap this up with a little tiny smidge, it's a little bit. That was a clean bullshit transition. Thank you. I've been working on these. A smidgen, a smidgen of bullshit. Okay. Uh I was driving through my neighborhood, and you know, as of today, what is it, November? Just to tell y'all, it's November 17th. Shit. All right, not that it's not even Thanksgiving yet, right? Bro, Christmas. Christmas fucking lights. At what point is it acceptable to put up Christmas lights and Christmas decorations? What date is acceptable? I'll go November 25th. One month. One month. Okay, so you're a you're a calendar, a 30 days calendar guy prior to Christmas. I might say, actually, I think you know it's even better, even cleaner. Thanksgiving. On it?

On well, no, it's because you gotta watch football on Thanksgiving. And eat. And eat food. And sleep. And talk to your family. And sleep. And sleep after sleep. Yeah, go to sleep at 7 p.m. With the itis. The tryptophan, whatever it is. the itis. The itis. The itis will get you. I don't want that. You're getting it. I've gotten it. You were gonna get it again. Yeah. Uh, yeah, I think and same with the fucking music too, guys. Cool it with the Christmas music, please. Mariah can wait until the day after Thanksgiving. She's got plenty of money. You don't have she'll make millions more this season, but like we can get we can hold off another week. Yeah, I just like, oh my god. And I love, don't get me wrong. I love Christmas decorations. Love it. I like Christmas music too. Okay, you lost me there. No, you made a Christmas song. And the whole premise for the marketing. Don't forget, the whole premise for the marketing rollout was how much I hate Christmas music. Okay, sure, sure. You're right. You're right. But for me, you know, born and raised with a Jewish mom, but I had a Protestant dad, right? Do you get you celebrate both?

Uh of course my mom makes me like the fucking menorah like a good Jew, but like I don't do anything else. Yeah, she gets hella presents when you're growing up. She gives no presents on Hanukkah. Anymore when you're a kid. I know, I know. I don't get any presents on either. But no, I just I just want to get your take. Did you used to get both? Of course. I just wanted to get your take. I just want I just want to get your take. Uh you know, no, I think right now it's too early. It's too early, bro. For me. Like, like give it a rest. For me, the decorations, I like the decorations also. Yeah. Those don't piss me off. The music pisses me off. Dude, you have like an award-winning lights uh house. Yeah, that we shot in a music video at. Yeah. Ridiculous. Yeah, shout out Vic. He's already setting up. He's probably, I think he's already set up. No, you know what? He does Thanksgiving. Here we go. Vic does Thanksgiving is the first night that he lights the whole shit up. He's already setting it up, but that's see. That's why I go by Vic rules subconsciously. Okay. Vic is Lord. He gets it. No, he's the decoration Christmas light god. Absolutely.

We should listen to him. Oh, you got anything? Um, okay, so yeah, real quick. Uh Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben. What, Henry? Oh no. I don't like the sound of this. I want to know the thresholds. I don't want to tell you. For when like Earth is crumbling, right? Climate change is becoming crazy. Like, oh God. The Earth is already is collapsing. What? And we're starting to move to Mars. We're colonizing Mars, right? That's where we're going. How many people need to move to Mars before you feel comfortable following and then establishing your new life on Mars? Like how early or late would you go to Mars to live? Is anything happening on Earth that's acting like that's that's like hurting people, or are they are they proactively going? Let's say that like the climate is killing, you know, starting to kill people. Some people slowly. So some people are getting the fuck out. And they're projecting like five to ten years, it's over. Sure, but it could could be sooner. Could affect you. Could be sooner. Yes, but definitely not right now. Just what how many, like, how many people?

It's more so about like how many people need to go live on Mars before you feel comfortable. No, no money constraints. This isn't a money thing. I can go whenever. Government subsidized. Okay. Oh, fuck. Um, I mean, I'm oh fuck. Oh fuck. Yeah. Thought this was a good one. I'm I'm gonna be honest, man. Uh, it's it's gotta be a like a tribal decision for me. It's gonna have to be do we all wanna go? Does the crew want to go? Sure, but what it what do you recommend to your family? Oh my, I have to be the head of household. Father, yes. Oh fuck. No shit. Oh even though your wife runs. Okay, there's how many there's how many people on the on on planet earth? Eight billion. There's eight billion? Yeah. Okay. I mean, there's there's gotta be a billion up there first. There's gotta be a B, bro. I'm not just jumping. No, there's gotta be a billion. Yeah. Yeah, like a what is that? A 12%? Like a little 12 piece. I don't mind that.

Yeah, like I I'm not going, I'm not going first, but I'm not going fucking last. That's what I'm saying. Absolutely not. Well, this has been another episode of the One More Time show. As always, please subscribe or follow. What what is the thing? It's a follow. One of those? We don't, We don't know yet, really that much. This is audio only. There's a ton of podcast platforms too. So whatever this platform has, click the button. Click it. I think there's reviews too. If you could leave us five stars, that'd be much appreciated. It would. We love you guys. Yeah, we're gonna come back next time and we'll see how the Andre 3000 episode uh albums aged by then. First week sales episode coming soon. 10 units