Stop Thinking of Yourself as a Good Person: The Ethics and Economics of Music Streaming

I don't think you're reading that graph right. Looks more like around 92-93.

the height of curves in that chart is cumulative, so in 1985 CDs are the tiny light blue segment on top of an even split between cassettes and vinyl.

I'm thinking that as digital music gets sorted out and services gradually up their price and ad rates, it will get to about where the early 80's collapse was, and flatline there, 8.5 billion. No more Saturday Night Fever or format change anomalies.

most people i've met who make music for a living (or are involved in the production of music, live or recorded) pulled themselves up by their bootstraps

man, feel old saying this, but "what are the trends with the young people" in regards to purchasing digital music/subscribing to streaming services vs. just downloading it somewhere or going to youtube? my guess is that anyone who came of age after early 2000s is pretty used to easily getting what they want for free at this point. might be hard to ever get them back to the idea of paying for it on a regular basis.

for my kids it's all youtube. they're happily amazed when I provide them with mp3s they want but it's totally unnecessary for them

when I was my oldest's age I was already scamming/being scammed by BMG/Columbia House. those were different times...

I don't think you're reading that graph right. Looks more like around 92-93.

― schwantz, Thursday, August 6, 2015 4:30 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the height of curves in that chart is cumulative, so in 1985 CDs are the tiny light blue segment on top of an even split between cassettes and vinyl.

― juggulo for the complete klvtz (bendy), Thursday, August 6, 2015 4:33 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OK, yeah, that definitely makes more sense.

for my kids it's all youtube. they're happily amazed when I provide them with mp3s they want but it's totally unnecessary for them

― droit au butt (Euler), Thursday, August 6, 2015 4:48 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My dad has a pekingese and I don't think he even cares about music at all!

does he like pugs?

my mother in law is thinking about getting a pug. she just got an iphone too! don't know what her position on streaming music is.

your moms like my pug

That graph is fascinating -- I hadn't realized that there had been a brief period where CDs' dominance meant massively more spending than ever before on recorded music.

Also interesting that CDs are still well ahead of streaming, though probably not for much longer

i mean it is crazy - someone was just talking on twitter about how almost 15 million people paid between $12-$16 for hootie and the blowfish's first album.

Great interview with a Columbia House insider about that 90s CD $$$$ heydays

http://www.avclub.com/article/four-columbia-house-insiders-explain-shady-math-be-219964

stop telling me how to think, and how to feel. there is too much second-person directive since the beatles broke

with a love like that, you know you should be glad

yeah yeah yeah

you've hypnotized me with those crazy eyes of yours
you've cracked me open like a coconut
you've got me crawling round and round you on all fours

yes yes yes yes yes

you are inside a building, a well house for a large streaming

watch out
you might get what you're after

A Kiwi perspective, Russell Brown is pretty otm as usual

http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/friday-music-not-just-consumers-but-patrons/

I always use Bandcamp if I can. Monetarily for small artists, the margin between streaming and piracy seems so tiny as to be negligible. I was surprised that it took so long for Apple to encroach onto Spotify's turf (streaming). Is there any sign that Spotify will retaliate by offering paid downloads?

my guess is that anyone who came of age after early 2000s is pretty used to easily getting what they want for free at this point. might be hard to ever get them back to the idea of paying for it on a regular basis.

i'm likely to pay for spotify and apple music in the longer term because they both offer their own unique discovery features (curated playlists based on my tastes, radio-like streams &c.). i can't speak for ~the youth~ obv but imo it's that sort of play that will keep subscription services going. not everyone will pay but that's been the case since compact cassettes.

not everyone will pay but that's been the case since compact cassettes.

Those bloody compact cassettes! You make a good point - lots of this stuff has older equivalents. People find a way to get more music for less money. (No judgment on them, I include myself in that.)

Just like how 2nd-hand record buying has existed ever since Edison sold off all his old wax cylinders. There's not really a way to measure how much money from all 2nd-hand sales goes back into buying new music... hopefully more than 0.5c per track, but it's not a great benchmark.

It annoys me that Spotify, etc, are acting as if they think the way forward is streaming without owning music. It's disingenuous on their part. If they offered paid downloads alongside streaming, it would benefit all parties, as far as I can tell. And it would put downloading back on the agenda, at least.

I just can't foresee a time when everyone will be paying $10/month, even people who barely listen to music, or wouldn't listen online. It's a great deal for some, but meaningless to others.

What is the target number of subscribers to make the business model work? (i.e. replace music sales :-)

I just can't foresee a time when everyone will be paying $10/month, even people who barely listen to music, or wouldn't listen online. It's a great deal for some, but meaningless to others.

subscription services have always had a base though: newspapers, magazines, doubleday book club, that record club i can't remember the name of that was constantly a full-page ad in the nme, even gym memberships that 80% of people never use but keep paying for anyway. this model is not really all that different, and if they can really get a grip on discovery/curation as the differentiator, loads of people will think nothing of starting and keeping a pretty cheap monthly subscription.

services like curation will also address the fact that an industry that was built on 100 years of scarcity (e.g. controlling how many cds/records/amberol cylinders get made) and ~fucking ads~ (radio stations, video clip shows on tv) can no longer treat music as a manufactured commodity, and needs to shed generations of defensive behaviour if it's going to survive.

the other factor (which we forget easily) is that in loads of developing countries with a burgeoning middle class, buying music was never really a thing like it was for us, and downloading music off grey-market sites is pretty much normal.

streaming has huge potential to make new profits in those markets, especially when their governments suddenly close the gaps and promote streaming as a cheap and viable way to get music.

but again, the music alone won't be enough for people who have only ever got free music off the web. if those people believe they're getting good value from the extra stuff that streaming platforms offer, it's likely that more and more will pay a relatively low cost (e.g. apple music in india costs r120/us$1.90 a month) without really thinking about it.

At this point, Apple Music should probably team up with VNYL to regain the public's trust.

Or maybe the Chinese government (mentioned in your link, AA) could team up with Vnyl. Basically I just want someone to enable Vnyl to spread chaos throughout the world.

The price differences in different countries are interesting. As we've said itt, people *within* countries aren't all the same - it confuses me that the streaming companies haven't explored this. The pricing still seems very "one-size-fits-all". If Spotify, say, (beating the BC drum again) added a store for CDs/vinyl/dl/merch, I'm sure they already have some users who would be willing to pay extra for that, if it were easy to obtain.

I feel a bit left behind with the curation stuff, I'm still more of a radio person atm. Whatever happened to that Zane guy... :)

Spotify does have links to buy merch n stuff but only some bands do it despite it being available to all.

ok, let's talk about me in the '90s when i was still buying cds, and what kind of cds i was buying. i was a white college kid. i bought a lot of pink floyd cds, used if i could get them. my listening habits were far more insular and restricted than they became in the age of piracy (and streaming, i think, is basically just a form of legalized piracy). the uncompensated model of music has allowed a great many people, myself included, to broaden our horizons and open ourselves to other perspectives the music industry juggernaut necessarily marginalized. billy joel has stopped seeming so fucking important. in the 1990s, i might have read somewhere about algiers, but the chances of my actually hearing it would be somewhere around zero. algiers aren't being paid when i listen to them, but they're being heard. it's not good enough, but it's something.

what's happened, what perhaps inevitably happens with capitalism, is that my appetite for consumption- no, let's use a different word, for _experience_- has far outpaced my ability to provide just and fair compensation for what i've experienced. let's say i have the budget to buy twenty cds a year, which was about what i purchased back in my college years (because my financial situation hasn't actually improved any in the past twenty years- i'm sure you understand). that covers old music and new. how do i decide which twenty are most worthy of that income? do exclude smokey because he's dead? that doesn't seem totally fair to the people who worked very hard to reissue his stuff and bring it to a larger audience. do i exclude kendrick because he seems like he's doing fine, maybe doesn't need my money as much as some other people do? or does that simply make it more likely he'll lose his position as someone who can actually have some influence on all the garbage that's going on now? do i exclude fucked up because they're anti-capitalist anyway?

this is a fundamental issue with capitalism: at a certain point it becomes impossible to make meaningfully ethical decisions. i find myself saying this a lot this year, but sometimes, doing the right thing is simply not an option.

this board was started by (mostly white etc) people who were broadening their horizons in the 90s, by paying for a shitload of cds (AND stealing them ha)

fuck's sake i thought Smokey Robinson was dead for a minute there

no, but he does a great version of "piss slave"

this is a fundamental issue with capitalism: at a certain point it becomes impossible to make meaningfully ethical decisions. i find myself saying this a lot this year, but sometimes, doing the right thing is simply not an option.

― rushomancy, Sunday, 9 August 2015 01:36 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ot fucking m. i'm singling out rupert murdoch here but for good reason: in australia, giving money to murdoch is propagated as a key part of "doing the right thing" (most prominently, his anti-competitive game of thrones distribution deal), but he throws easily 95% of his energy into undermining australian democracy and handing the country to bigots. "doing the right thing" in this case is clearly to not give money to rupert murdoch, but the current govt, which he propelled into power against sensible odds, is tearing up our rights in order to repay murdoch for those favours. australians are increasingly onto this, and they're getting that "doing the right thing" and propping up odious companies are not the same thing.

more generally re streaming, sites like bandcamp were a brief respite from giant corporate intermediaries controlling everything in the music industry, but spotify, tidal and apple music are making sure giant corporates regain control.

http://www.engadget.com/2015/08/10/spotify-subscriber-only-content/

good

That's a sensible idea. Spotify's got to have some kind of premium content other than "we'll stop annoying you".

I guess this was influenced by Apple Music showing its hand and making itself subscriber-only. Sounds like Apple's free trial has done pretty well.

Since more music is likely to come under exclusive deals (e.g. Prince putting his discography only on Tinder Tidal), I guess we can expect more music to be removed from Youtube? It's the elephant in the room when it comes to full albums, etc, being uploaded.

I hope the situation gets better for the musicians, and we can look back on this as a "wild west" period for streaming. As rushomancy said, streaming is pretty much legalized piracy at the moment (with labels pirating their own music almost for free!).

Labels get the advertising cash from people uploading full albums to YouTube. The issue is whether this free, ad-"supported" tier should exist at all. Labels have given YT a free pass for a long time but that may be coming to an end this fall.

Related (old thread): the Spotify war between Kendrick Lamar and Michael Buble.

Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly (2015)

The original figures on earnings were mistaken. I don't know whether To Pimp a Butterfly actually broke the record in the end. Buble had set some kind of record with his Christmas album, which I know we all bought.

this is kinda of a cool idea, leaving indie artists on repeat on your computer w/the sound turned down to help generate royalties

https://medium.com/@sharkyl/silent-september-faq-1227c5ca90ee

heh, i think the portion of the electricity bill that covering the time that the laptop was left open, playing music silently, would be at least an order of magnitude higher than what the indie artist would receive in terms of the extra streaming royalties during the same period of time.

what a weird world

i'm doing it at work but maybe I JUST SUPPORT INDIE ARTISTS MORE THAN CERTAIN MEMBERS OF THE UTAH JAZZ :)

pretty sure john stockton has a deep ties to the SLC DIY scene

*REVERSE SLAM DUNK*

i had a very silly idea a moment ago. imagine, "in a world"...

a streaming service combining aspects of spotify and kickstarter where each user freely allocates their monthly subscription fee among the artists they listen to. for simplicity's sake, assume it's $10 a month and that all of that goes to the artists. plenty of people would just allocate all $10 to whatever pop star they listen to the most. but a lot of people would split it up differently. i mean i'd probably shoot dead moon $5 because they rule and deserve my $ and split the other $5 among local bands that have stuff available to stream. then there would be "rewards" for contributing to different artists, like if you total up $30 for a single artist you get a free LP, or whatever. or kickstarter-style tiered rewards depending on the cumulative contribution.

too bad this scheme would result in zero money for the labels, so it wouldn't fly. but it's too bad because i think a setup like that could fairly compensate musicians of all levels - the coldplays of the world would still make a ton, but locally/regionally known groups would probably get a fair amount of support as well.

ok, now someone else do all the stuff with talking to the labels and making the app and stuff, and then come back to me when it's time to make the logo

that's a good idea mailman

tyler photoshop stockton's face onto this pls:

http://www.gstatic.com/tv/thumb/dvdboxart/22955/p22955_d_v7_aa.jpg

this is a fundamental issue with capitalism: at a certain point it becomes impossible to make meaningfully ethical decisions. i find myself saying this a lot this year, but sometimes, doing the right thing is simply not an option

I think this is an interesting post -- but not sure I get you here. Capitalism doesn't force me to download stuff for free -- my budget (money AND time) does. Your situation in the 90s mirrors mine, though I think I was buying more than 20 CDs/tapes a year (I'd say 3/4 used). How I was able to manage even that amount was that I'd sell a lot back too -- I was losing all kinds of money, but I didn't care, because I loved music so much. Still do. still, despite the fact I listen to A LOT more music than was possible for me in the 90s, I don't think I actually like a greater percentage of it. Or, I like it a little bit, and forget about it.

I feel guiltier for downloading music than I used to. In 2001, I had no qualms using Napster. I thought it was a godsend, letting my desktop stay up all night downloading a 128-kbps version of a Cluster record. It's not like I was ever going to come across that CD in my local CD stores anyway. I could special-order it for $40, and I did do that on many occasions. But not as many as I would have wanted to, and was also burned many times doing it on records I didn't end up liking.

However, just like in college, I *could* have chosen simply to keep buying CDs, and selling back the ones I didn't REALLY REALLY need. I could do that today. But I don't. It's not capitalism's fault. It's my choice, and at the end, no one gets to have everything they want.

It sucks, because as I listen to this Eazy-E solo EP, I know that I probably would never have heard it were it not for streaming sites (and I'm talking Youtube here) or illegal downloading. I might have been offhandedly curious, but would have chosen to spend my money on more of a "sure thing". I benefit from hearing this, and I will certainly tell other people how much I'm digging NWA-related records right now -- but it's tricky justifying it to myself. I can't. I took this music, and no one other than me benefitted.

Would sign up for Karl's service. As it is streaming only pays if you are Taylor Swift (ie millions and millions of streams) which doesn't happen wo MASSIVE publicity.

As it is streaming only pays if you are Taylor Swift (ie millions and millions of streams) which doesn't happen wo MASSIVE publicity.

See also: pretty much every other format ever. The system overwhelmingly favors and rewards superstars. Like, peak indie, or even "indie," what were bands selling? 20K? I recall reading that "Zen Arcade" initially sold 20K, and that was considered an indie hit, so I can't imagine it's much more than that. (Barring the occasional more recent Merge explosion like Mag Fields or Arcade Fire). I mean, it took the Sex Pistols decades to go platinum in the US, and they only had one record, and one of the most talked about records of all time, at that! And that's when you can get the label to even concede the numbers.

I dunno local bands used to routinely repress after going through a run of 1000....Fugazi could sell over 200k independently, stuff like Pretty Hate Machine by NIN sold millions