Angry Metal Guy Speaks: 10,000 Posts

By Angry Metal Guy

There’s almost no good way to mark these anniversaries without getting a little self-referential, maybe a little maudlin… or without tooting your own horn until you’re red in the face and everyone’s embarrassed. Still, it has come to my attention that this is the 10,000th post of AngryMetalGuy.com. Actually, as of this writing, the number of posts in the entire system is supremely metal 10,666. Also, we have something like 600 drafts that never saw the light of day and 49 pending posts that have never been published.1 To say that we’ve been productive carries with it a drunk Bilbo Bagginsesque tone of bemusement.

“My, we have been productive.”

During the 16ish years of unbound fecundity that it took for us to reach this dubious landmark, many a writer or would-be writer (over 60, at this point) has spilled internet ink within these unhallowed halls. We have extolled the virtues and excoriated the shortcomings of wonderful records and forgettable platters. We’ve opined, and raged, and littered the page with so many puns and dad jokes that you’d think this website was the patriarch of a family of 10. The total result of this hard work has resulted in been 8,032,385 words that have been written.2 Divide that by 10,000, and that’s an average of about 803 words per post—53 more than our max review length.3 The Year of Our Angry Overlord, 2019, was our most productive year ever. It saw us jam through 983 posts—a mind-numbing number if you think about it for long enough. Our longest average posts to date were last year, in 2024, where our average post had 955 words. I can’t even imagine how that’s possible, but there you go.4

And what are the core bits of writing that really drive readership? Well, here’s where the horn tootin’ comes in. Of our Top 20(ish) posts, 10 are Angry Metal Guy’s Top Ten(ish) Record(s) o’ the Year lists (with 2015 taking the cake for the most read post of all time). Three more of those are other lists: songs 50-41 of my Top 50 Heavy Metal Songs list; 10-1 of that same list; and my Top 15(ish) of the 2000s. The most viewed non-list was Steel Druhm‘s April Fool’s post from last year about Ripper Owens leaving KK’s Priest for BB’s Maiden. And then there’s the reviews. El Cuervo‘s review of Opeth The Last Will and Testament,5 my review of In Flames’ Foregone, Druhm‘s review of Megadeth’s The Sick, the Dying…and the Dead!, both Veil of Imagination and Epigone (landing very close to each other in terms of views and written by El Cuervo and myself), Batushka’s Litourgiya (TYMHM from 2015, penned by our dear [not actually] deceased Roquentin), and my review of Opeth’s Pale Communion round out the Top 20 posts.6

And even after all this time, we are still changing the world and keeping up with the times by spreading disinformation about incorrigible self-Googler Ripper Owens. That Ripper Owens post that was posted on April 1st, 2024, has moved from parody into objective fact, as it has been picked up by Google’s AI as the answer to the question: “Is Ripper Owens still in KK’s Priest?” The answer? “No, Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens is not currently with KK’s Priest. He left the band in early 2024 to pursue a new project with former Iron Maiden vocalist Blaze Bayley.” A round of applause for both Druhm and the superiority and inevitability of AI!7

What do I take away from this list? Well, aside from pride at what I—nay, we—have wrought, it pays to review big bands’ records if you want a lot of views. I know that’s tough to imagine, but there we are. Better, however, than the super obvious thing is that I’m particularly proud of how we helped to spread the word about Wilderun and Batushka. But this list also brings with it some melancholy and nostalgia. Seeing Druhm and me as the only active writers on this list is a bit of a bummer. But as time moves on, we’ll make new memories with new exploited writers who will pen review after review without compensation, only to watch us feast ourselves even fatter on the spoils of our seniority.

And the raft of contributors who have come and gone deserve recognition. In the end, I want to thank everyone who has contributed to making Angry Metal Guy what it has become over the years—from the Potatoes Jim of the world to the Steels Druhm.8 Without you, this would never have happened. I appreciate the blood, sweat, and/or tears that you have put into carrying my boulder up that hill every day. And so even though your names aren’t at the top of this list, know that I tolerate each one of you with the same cold-hearted disinterest that I always have. Your service has been noted.

As for you readers? Without you, it would’ve taken a lot of refreshing my browser and switching between VPNs to get enough daily readers, so as to result in a desire to keep pushing on until we hit 10,000 posts. So, thank you for your loyalty over the years. We love (most) of your comments. We enjoy (most) of your opinions. And we are (entirely) happy that you spend your hard-earned money on the bands we love, and thank you for your trust. You reading, listening, and supporting the scene means we’re all making the world a better place one overwritten review or blog post at a time.

#2025 #AngryMetalGuySpeaks #Batushka #BlogPost #BlogPosts #Disillusion #InFlames #Landmarks #Megadeth #Opeth #Wilderun

Angry Metal Guy Speaks: On Spotify

By Angry Metal Guy

Recently, in the Phantom Spell review, a number of people commented that the great new record from Kyle McNeill is not on Spotify. This is, indeed, the case. Phantom Spell is part of a nascent movement of musicians who are divesting from the platform because of Daniel Ek’s involvement in the development of AI war tech. A decision like this is never an easy one to make. Spotify, due to having a free option, is extremely hard to leave behind. It has an enormous listener base, and for bands who are trying to reach as many people as possible, it can seem like an impossible thing to do.

Yet, there are good reasons to leave Spotify behind. A startling bounty of reasons to give Ek and his streaming service the boot, one could say. We here at Angry Metal Guy are pro-musician. I think we all agree that musicians should be fairly compensated. We love music, we want music to flourish, and I think I speak for all of us when I say that it is sad that the industry as we understood it has perished. I’m going to argue here that supporting Spotify is probably not the best way to accomplish music’s future flourishing. And if we want to do that, then I think we need to make some different decisions. So first, I’ll tell you why. And then I’ll suggest some alternatives.1,2

Spotify pays artists less than almost anyone. Spotify pays an average of $0.00318 per stream. That means it takes over 314 streams to make a single dollar on Spotify. Start to break that down, and even artists who have a million streams will only earn $3,180. By contrast, Tidal pays $0.01284 per stream ($12,840 per million), while Apple Music pays between $0.008 and $0.01 (8-10,000 per million). Want to earn the minimum wage from Spotify? That’s 350,000 streams per month to do it. And remember, these are gross figures. Musicians net considerably less than this because there are a lot of grasping hands that come between the payout from the streaming company and the artist. Spotify’s model prioritizes volume over value, which takes me to the second point.

And Spotify keeps trying to pay even less by suppressing royalty rates, developing new ways to underpay artists, and withholding pay from obscure artists. The first of these, suppressing royalty rates, has to do with a lawsuit that first appeared at the end of the last decade. The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board (USCRB) has a fixed royalty rate.3 In 2018, the USCRB raised the “mechanical royalty rate” for songwriters to 15.1% of revenue, gradually set to increase to 15.35% by 2027. Spotify, along with Amazon, Pandora, and Google, appealed this increase, fighting to keep songwriter royalties lower.

Then, in 2024, Spotify quietly reclassified its Premium subscription as a “bundled service,” which includes audiobooks. That allowed the company to apply a lower royalty formula, and that cut the songwriter’s pay by 30-40% overnight. They were, of course, sued by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC)—which, be honest, did you know that there was a Mechanical Licensing Collective?—which alleged that Spotify underpaid creators by over $150 million. Spotify won the case, but the US court system siding with moneyed interests isn’t exactly an unexpected outcome. And the ethics of this are pretty fucked up, in my opinion.

Also in 2024, Spotify officially implemented a policy stating that any track with fewer than 1,000 annual streams will not generate royalties for rights holders, even if it has been streamed. Spotify defended this move by claiming most of these payments never reached artists due to distributor payout thresholds and thus redirected those funds to more widely streamed tracks. According to critics, this demonetized between 60% and 87% of all the tracks on Spotify, with an estimated $45-50 million in lost royalties during 2024. So, even if the infrastructure has a bit of a dystopian vibe where the ostensible payout just lands with some other entity, anything earned could still eventually be paid out if something takes off.

You probably heard about this guy who made a fake band called The Velvet Sundown recently and garnered over a million listeners in a short period. While that’s dystopian, what’s worse is that Spotify has increasingly embraced the use of anonymous and AI-generated music. This isn’t a fringe experiment; it appears to be a deliberate business strategy. Investigations have revealed the existence of Spotify’s internal “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) program, which fills popular playlists with tracks by pseudonymous or entirely fabricated artists. These “ghost artists” are often produced by stock music firms and earn Spotify higher margins because they circumvent royalty structures. A Swedish investigation uncovered over 5,700 fake artist identities linked to just 20 creators, with some garnering billions of streams. And while The Velvet Sundown turned out to just be straight-up fakes, AI tracks falsely attributed to deceased artists like Blaze Foley—a country singer who died in 1989—were found on their official Spotify pages, which raises a ton of questions about how these are curated.

All of the foregoing examples point to the cheapness of “content” in a streaming world, and it seems like Spotify is leaning into that for music, like Netflix did for films. They are creating generic brands to fill out playlists, thus keeping royalties in house through company-owned, algorithmically optimized content. And they think—probably rightly to some extent—that listeners won’t notice or care.

Spotify’s headquarters are in Stockholm, but in 2023-2024, when Swedish unions asked Spotify to sign a collective bargaining agreement—which is literally how labor law works here—Spotify refused. When Swedish courts denied Spotify’s request to make engineers work overnight shifts (which is against Swedish labor law), Ek and co responded by moving hundreds of jobs abroad, instead of negotiating. So, not only does Spotify treat musicians and listeners poorly, but it’s also setting a precedent of labor hostility here at home.

Most recently, Spotify has come under intense scrutiny for the ethical implications of Daniel Ek’s involvement in military technology. Daniel Ek, through his investment firm Prima Materia, led a €600 million funding round in the German military tech company that specializes in shit like AI-powered drones, underwater systems, and—I find this one to be devastatingly frightening—battlefield decision-making software. Ek is now Helsing’s chairman. In response, bands that I have never fucking heard of like Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu have announced they are removing their music from Spotify, viewing participating in Spotify’s capital accumulation as akin to being complicit in Spotify’s monetization of both data-mining and war technology. There have, predictably, been calls for an artist-led boycott.

People have different preferences, but the two primary alternatives to Spotify—if you intend to stay in the streaming game—are Apple Music and Tidal. They both pay better than Spotify, and Apple Music has the added benefit of allowing its subscribers to upload and stream personal files that are not in Apple’s catalog. This latter thing, in my opinion, is among the very best features, and it is the one that has kept me with Apple Music even though I don’t use it for real streaming very much.4 Tidal, on the other hand, pays the most per stream of any major platform and has experimented with direct-to-artist payments and different payout models that I honestly don’t understand very well. The point is, both of these options are heads and shoulders better than Spotify (or fucking YouTube Music or Pandora).

But you’re here at Angry Metal Guy Dot Com, which means you’re a fucking music nerd. And that means you almost certainly are aware of Bandcamp and Ampwall, where you can support many of your favorite artists directly. Spotify—and even Tidal and Apple Music—pay fractions of pennies. Bandcamp pays 80%+ of the sale price. You buy something for 10 bucks, the artist gets 8.5 Ampwall, which is newer and was formed after the sketchy Bandcamp buyout a couple of years back, when half the staff got fired. I have less experience with it, but my understanding is that it’s artist-owned, transparent, and committed to ethical monetization.

Even if you think AI weapons systems are the way of the future and hey, why shouldn’t Daniel Ek be trying to break up the collective bargaining system in Sweden, there’s a pretty solid case to be made that if you are using Spotify these days, you’re making a choice that isn’t to the benefit of the artists that you love. The solution that I have chosen, in part because of Angry Metal Guy, and my ability to be able to listen to promo on the move before it’s been released, is Apple Music. It’s a great service that does everything I need it to. It’s full of cool features they don’t advertise, and I strongly recommend it. It’s system-neutral—yes, it will work on your Android phone—and Apple has not taken part in things like the lawsuit about the USCRB that most of the other big names in streaming took part in. Tidal is even more generous, however, even if it doesn’t quite have the features that I’m looking for. And many of my friends who are moving on from Spotify have moved to Tidal.

No matter what you choose, this fucking timeline is the stupidest timeline. And one way to express your dissatisfaction with this stupid af timeline is by telling Daniel Ek to suck it. He’s certainly been telling us that for years.

#2025 #AI #Ampwall #AngryMetalGuySpeaks #AppleMusic #Spotify #Streaming #TheVelvetSundown #Tidal