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

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

but you could kinda live off of an indie hit, or so i hear.

xpost Yeah, but those are outliers and also pretty big acts in their own right. (And of course, how much Pretty Hate Machine money did Trent see? He and TVT were sue-buddies for years.) I imagine most lil' acts probably top off pretty low on the sales scale, and always have. Even big indie sellers probably don't sell enough to live on minus a steady diet of touring and merch sales, which is still how bands largely support themselves.

i think ppl used to be able to get by on record sales though, like i read stuff about vic chestnutt that was heartbreaking in terms of getting dropped and then watching things disappear.

i never once heard the "musicians only make money off touring they don't make anything off records" until people could download shit for free

it's not so much wow someone used to sell 500,000 records and make a shit load, it was the people like, i dunno...god....Joe Henry or someone like that in the 90s, who could probably make a liveable middle class income from sales (or better)

like people who used to sell 60,000 albums on an indie who now sell like 800

*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

― 1994 ball boy (Karl Malone), Thursday, August 20, 2015 12:22 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so... patreon, basically?

I'm not against the model, but what you are describing is patreon

(and that's not even getting into the issue of paying songwriters and lyricists and instrumentalists and band members so on and so forth, which is a (lesser) reason why most of the people on patreon are DIY types)

i should have posted it in your terrible ideas, it was just kind of a silly daydream

your terrible ideas that already exist for the most part

isn't Drip FM kinda like this?

i guess it's not, but it could be. i don't think Patreon is really equivalent to what Karl is talking about, i.e. a streaming service where you pay one subscription free to have access to a huge base of music, but could transparently funnel a portion of that fee to specific artists.

i mean, i think there's potential there. lots of people will stream music repeatedly on Bandcamp and not take the extra laborious step to buy it. but if you were already paying for your one big streaming service and could conveniently and magnanimously dole out even a small chunk to indie artists you like a lot (and presumably that would go through the normal label channels, but that's still better than the current situation, especially w/indies), well, everybody would do that.

Artists would still be getting more than they are now in Karl's example so it is still a good idea

y'all realize it's not gonna be $10 forever, right?

I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere down the road, you're paying $10/month for access to a genre-limited subset of the Total Library, with the option to pay more in order to listen outside your home genre, or for add-ons like a monthly curated "emerging artists" playlist

That would be a terrible product tho, they shd just nationalize the music industry and pay musicians through taxes on non musicians

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

― Ma$e-en-scène (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, August 20, 2015 3:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but you could kinda live off of an indie hit, or so i hear.

― lil urbane (Jordan), Thursday, August 20, 2015 3:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xpost Yeah, but those are outliers and also pretty big acts in their own right. (And of course, how much Pretty Hate Machine money did Trent see? He and TVT were sue-buddies for years.) I imagine most lil' acts probably top off pretty low on the sales scale, and always have. Even big indie sellers probably don't sell enough to live on minus a steady diet of touring and merch sales, which is still how bands largely support themselves.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, August 20, 2015 3:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think ppl used to be able to get by on record sales though, like i read stuff about vic chestnutt that was heartbreaking in terms of getting dropped and then watching things disappear.

i never once heard the "musicians only make money off touring they don't make anything off records" until people could download shit for free

it's not so much wow someone used to sell 500,000 records and make a shit load, it was the people like, i dunno...god....Joe Henry or someone like that in the 90s, who could probably make a liveable middle class income from sales (or better)

like people who used to sell 60,000 albums on an indie who now sell like 800

― Ma$e-en-scène (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, August 20, 2015 3:45 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bolded part is a massive t-bomb.

Also my band (circa '03-'05) sold like 800 CDs mostly through shows and CDBaby, and the CD actually paid for its (studio) recording costs plus helped pay for a tour (from which we did NOT make money). People forget how profitable CDs used to be for bands that actually did have 50/50 type deals with labels or self-released when they say "bands didn't make money from CDs anyway".

around 04-05 my band sold over 100 CDS AT A CD RELEASE SHOW, now it's hard to do 100 period

but yeah we were able to stash show money for recording/space rent, and generally break even

I get that, and I've done it myself. CDs/record sales def. help(ed). But unless you were selling a ton they're still mostly subsidizing a hand to mouth existence, aka break even. Which is not a bad place to be, doing something that you love, but doesn't exactly allow for much idle time, especially after you divide your gross 4 ways, pay off recording, fix the van, pay rent, eat, etc.

When I was in a touring band, the worst would be when you'd play with a shit act on the bill, and they'd want to swap one of their CDs for yours, and you'd be thinking, that's our money I am giving you!

I guess basically what I'm saying is just because it was always bad doesn't mean it's not worse now

And I don't even think we've hit bottom yet! At least clubs still seem to be hanging around.

I suppose land values and leases will kill off all the NYC & SF small venues soon enough

the casual cruelty of the new elite:

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/636107643191365632

are there good articles out there about the contemporary live music industry or w/e? feel like there's something going on there but i only ever hear about "the death of the music industry".

i mean "death of the record industry"

Most live music is paid through beer.

xps i think that should be 'substitute' not complement

i am cautiously hopeful that this streaming shit will put $$$ back in musician's pockets because as more streaming services pop up they'll compete for material by offering labels more. no one seems to argue that netflix/hulu is bad for tv or movies? the only weird thing is that you don't pay per piece of music so there's weird zero marginal cost stuff. like previously you could buy one album and you can listen to it a million times, now you listen to as many albums as many times as you can

the big black box for me is how music gets distributed b/w labels and musicians and whether or how that's changed. i've tried to research this but seems opaque if anyone's got links please share

also i don't understand how freemium can work as a business model for anything but especially music

also i don't know what the morality has to do with it... if music is on spotify or applemusic, the person who owns the music agreed to put it there and is getting compensated for it. how is it immoral to listen to it?

devil's advocate would be it's not so clear cut -- the music industry is changing and artists are left with only shitty choices: stream and get a little bit of money or don't stream and get nothing. is it ok to buy sweatshop-made clothes if the workers there "agreed" to their conditions? the

the big black box for me is how music gets distributed b/w labels and musicians and whether or how that's changed.

you mean digital or physical?

I think "Freemium" is simply a loss leader, a strategy to get people to start using it. They will likely gradually reduce the content available to free users, and add more perks for the subscriptions, and gradually up the price of the monthly subscription. Remember when cable TV only cost $12 to $15 a month in the 90s (at least in the U.S.) and people complained bitterly? Well, they kept watching, and kept paying. Now most people pay well over $100 a month, and of course still complain. But admittedly the quality (HD), features (ability to record up to 4-5 shows simultaneously on latest DVRs) and amount of content is better than ever.

I finally laid down my thoughts on it here. Apologies if the writing is not quite up to snuff, I was distracted by a health scare (I'm okay):

No Whining in Rock ‘n’ Roll: Don’t Feel Guilty About Not Spending More Money on Music
http://fastnbulbous.com/no-whining-in-rock-n-roll-dont-feel-guilty-about-not-spending-more-money-on-music/