Spotify - anyone heard of it?

spotify's gonna suck for musicians right up until they manage to go public/get bought at which point their service will collapse as they up subscription rates/change their model to increase revenue and their audience moves on to the next free service

this has happened so many times with internet companies it boggles my mind that people think they will be around forever or something.

nah man it's the future

I would pay more than $9.99 a month for what I currently get on the premium level plan, but I wonder how many would.

Anyway a more fundamental issue is most people who grew up in the mp3 era view music as inherently cheap, and that attitude will only get worse as time goes on.

or that somehow they have any interest in paying people sometime in the future. these people are greedy piratical assholes, keeping the boat afloat long enough until they can all collect their IPO money and abandon ship

xp

it doesn't happen for every Internet company xp

I didn't say "every". But companies with Spotify's model have no incentive to pay musicians, and they never will.

seems like a sustainable model is in spotify's best interest

and that sustainable model includes not paying artist nearly enough

^^^^

yes but guys i get a lot of cool shit for cheap and also the future can't fight the future

I'll leave you grizzled veterans of the music industry to high five each other

future preach

while I like Allen's point that simply shunning tech is a mistake, the dude obviously sees more money in his future from tech speaking gigs than shriekback royalties

in general tho sustainable models are not really the internet economy's thing - they care about things being sustainable long enough to make a serious amount of money, beyond which no one gives a fuck since no one expects anything to last anyway and oh hey the next version of [insert product here] will be out in a year anyway and that will be a total gamechanger etc. The planned obsolescence built into the economy is fucking insane. I am around so many internet people, "when do I get my stock buyout" is like priority number 1 with them. they all want to retire and just think baout stuff by the time their 40, very few have an actual interest in making anything that lasts longer than the latest hype cycle. Spotify's no different, I'm sure whoever's running the company has zero plans to be doing the same thing/working on the same program 10 years from now.

xp

idk until you somehow convince people (young people especially) that music is worth paying money for, these problems will not go away even if spotify does, the record buying population will just get older and older and smaller and smaller

I mean this comic is hella old and music's gotten easier to obtain since then

http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/3842/1255380609604.gif

not disagreeing with that anon, horse has left the barn etc.

a lot of bands do 'bundles' where they sweeten the deal with limited edition merch like t-shirts and/or other things. but you have to also consider motivations. it's easy for someone like me (and fellow metalheads) to continue to buy metal albums because we know it's a niche genre and we know these guys are scraping by. so we throw down mass money.

but get the average indie or pop fan and many of them think "ahh musicians are all overpaid anyway fuck em"

so...what's your point? That musicians should just give their shit away to tech companies?

i mean, yeah, i use spotify and fucking love it. the future is now and enjoy my 19 hour playlist of hot jams. but that doesn't mean i'm not sympathetic to artists who seek a more profitable, and frankly ethical road.

no, I was merely saying anon was right that the incentive to purchase music is drastically reduced, and there being no Spotify wouldn't change that (they'd just go back to Torrent sites). not that I'm saying its on artists to improve that (they're always on the short end of the stick) - the labels need to find innovative ways of getting fans to paying for recorded music again. They could also quit ratfucking musicians and giving them dimes for every album sold, but we know that won't happen anytime soon.

Young people have the feeling that everything is getting more expensive except music and film, which is not completely incorrect as far as I can tell, and I'm not going to fault them all on that. Spotify is a sweet deal. However, some tech companies are making billions out of films and music on the back of artists and it couldn't hurt them to create a non-profit fund for musicians or filmmakers or something.

Or we all agree that only the very rich can make music and films, because that is the endgame here.

on the contrary more people than ever can make music and get it out but no one can make a living on it, and the two are not entirely coincidental

^^

yeah anybody can make anything these days, its incredibly cheap to do so. getting paid for it is another story entirely.

not that I'm saying its on artists to improve that (they're always on the short end of the stick) - the labels need to find innovative ways of getting fans to paying for recorded music again.

yeah, i 100% agree with this (and have been offering my fantasy of how that happens, basically vinyl-only releases or app-bundling). i'm just tired of people with nothing more to say than "i like getting a lot of shit for cheap and so do kids and it's the future and don't tell me how my big mac is made, i know the world is fucked" trying to undermine critical stances on spotify without actually acknowledging them.

Lots of good recent posts here. I was just in a facebook argument about this and it makes me IA how often you still have to reestablish shit that should be basic accepted truth by now, and how much people still trot out 10-year-old canards. Like one dude kept saying "I don't really believe that people are buying less music because of the internet," so I had to dig up the figures that show global recording sales at like 43% of their peak dollar amount around ten years ago, and he was like "Well the economy is a lot worse since then too." Yeah dude but it's not 43% of its prior size. Consumers aren't spending 43% as much money as they did in 2002. And then it gets into the "well musicians make money other ways" train, and then you have to point out that if there's a pie that once made up some significant percentage of musicians' income, and that pie is now 43% of its prior size, that's going to take a pretty big bite out of musicians' incomes, and its' not exactly clear how other things are just going to "make up for" that, unless people are taking that same money they're not spending on recordings and spending it on concerts and t-shirts, which I seriously doubt.

It boils down to, people love free shit. You can make every speech imaginable to people as to why they buy music, and you'll have sympathizers, but most folks have already rationalized away why they don't have to pay. "I spend lots on merch at shows, that's where the REAL money is". "It's the record labels' fault for screwing over the artists, why should I have to subsidize that!". "it doesn't cost THAT MUCH to make a CD!"

The legit sales of mp3 albums on Amazon/ITunes etc has helped as its reduced the cost of albums, esp for those who are sick of hoarding jewel cases, but even then, only marginally. really, the RIAA did a lot to harm musicians' causes because by suing fans for inexorbitant amounts of money, they made the music industry eternal villains, and gave most rogue downloaders a freebie excuse to never quit downloading for life, cuz FUCK THE LABELS, MAN!

The narrative hasn't shifted much from what it was prior to when the digital music industry became largely legitimized - "the cost of albums is going up", "most musicians don't make much money off of album sales anyway", "I'm more likely to buy albums if I download", "artists can't trick me by putting out a great single and shitty filler around it". The main thing I've seen that has changed is the direction of the animosity. Around the time the RIAA was suing everybody, people still sympathized with musicians, but now folks are outright saying "FUCK YOU, MUSICIAN" to people in bands who actually want to be paid for what they record.

I buy all my albums (unless it's a rare out of print album that I don't want to pay $100 for) - and I know many of us here do. but a good portion of my friends use Spotify as their soul source of listening, too.

on the contrary more people than ever can make music and get it out but no one can make a living on it, and the two are not entirely coincidental

there is a difference between hobby and occupation. real artistic endeavors are a full time job and i wish they would be respected as such, it starts with getting access to funding.

on the contrary more people than ever can make music and get it out but no one can make a living on it, and the two are not entirely coincidental

― anonanon, Thursday, October 17, 2013 2:15 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I do think this is a big thing though -- the endless supply of people just "putting their music out there" is also part of the devaluation of music (in the sense of being something you pay for), and I think the internet probably impacts people's level of investment in particular bands, since there's always so much new shit to entertain you.

Hurting 2 I think it's because in the early days of file-sharing, while sales figures were down, the reduction wasn't as drastic, and the common argument being trotted out was that the inventory (or number of releases) had shrunk, as well as the average price had gone up two dollars over the decade.

After the data we've collected in the last decade, it's pretty much sticking your head in the sand to deny sales have drastically declined in the digital age.

xxxxpost

I think it's worth pointing out that in the history of music the recent state of affairs where you can make a professional career as a musical artist is unusual. Certainly jobs related to music have existed for a long time (composers, cantors, teachers, busking) but this current music industry is an aberration, and if it's dying, that might be a return to a sort of status quo. From a cultural pov the major question is whether this shift augurs a deficiency - will fewer people make worse music if the renumeration is less? Maybe, but it doesn't seem like the seeping of profitability from the music industry has correlated to a decrease in music production. If anything it seems to have correlated to a huge explosion.

yeah, if you take the music industry to primarily be "america pays you to help them dance, entertain them, and get a lil shooby-dooby hook stuck in their head" then the '90s, where people paid north of $13 dollars for a primitive radio gods album because they wanted that doo-doo-doo hook, was a huge aberration, the pinnacle of the baby boom's popularization of the LP etc. But I think this "what is the future of music" debate is wholly other than the "should people take their entire albums off spotify if they can" one.

One the major shifts, imo, was from music as a communal, localized phenomenon to something broader that was brought about through some of these modern technologies - radio, television, the internet, etc. Musicians in my local community make an income by teaching at the local schools, or training kids for their bar mitzvahs, or singing at a religious institutions, or holding music groups, or performing at local restaurants, etc. When radio + the contemporary diffusion of communal sounds to a wider market first started, that allowed certain musicians to make money from just selling albums to people living throughout the country, or world. As that technology has advanced though, this innovation has obv cannibalized itself - the very thing that lets you make a living by selling your music to fans across the world is the same thing that no longer allows you to sell your music (the wide availability of music through various channels - legal + otherwise). The answer seems to be a return to this communal professionalism. Or at least a reconciliation that this temporary burst of profitability is no longer viable.

Well, "should people take their entire albums off spotify if they can" needs to be parsed. Should they for the benefit of humanity's musical cultural heritage, or should they from their own economic perspective. For the latter, obv someone like Thom Yorke who is a famous dude who ppl will pay to make music will have a different answer than someone you've never heard of.

The answer seems to be a return to this communal professionalism.

Crowdfunding goes hand in hand with that idea.

the odd future guys certainly benefited from just throwing up their stuff on tumblr for free, but if I was Tyler I'd sure as fuck reduce my spotify presence to about 3 songs per album now.

I see what you're saying croup and yeah artists with the recognition and fanbase to do it (basically the ones already doing it) should definitely not make the full albums available on spotify if they want to sell anything

Mordy's thoughts on the larger historical trends in evidence here mirror my own

it is abundantly clear that the media market of the 20th century was a huge aberration in general

it is abundantly clear that the media market of the 20th century was a huge aberration in general

I have narrowed the peak of the music industry to the moment I paid $18 at FYE for the PJ's soundtrack to get the one raphael saadiq song I liked, it's been all downhill for them ever since

lol

well tbf before recordings there was sheet music, so I'd extend the "temporary burst" of profitability back a little further. But yeah it's basically the age of mechanical reproduction we're talking about, and the age of digital reproduction has now subsumed it.

i don't think the era of sheet music is comparable in scale to the recent burst of profitability

it would be hard to find an appropriate way to compare the industries, and you're probably right, but tin pan alley hits could sell millions of copies of sheet music. It was possible to make a living from music publishing alone for at least a brief period of history.

the reason I called it a "fire sale" is that the only reason to make the physical purchase of music needless, to wholly trade real dollars for digital pennies, is if you've given up on selling physical music.

But "trade real dollars for digital pennies" strikes me as hyperbole. The ratio is not 100:1 or 50:1 as "trade real dollars for digital pennies" suggests. If the basic *price per album*, at the current Spotify payment rate, is about $2.25, then what is the real comparative ratio of profit between a CD sale and 450 song streams?

it turned out that people were the worst record company of all