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

What are the pressures that are forcing even the most stalwart, independent artists to wave the white flag?

I expect it's sales drooping to the degree that they just figure "might as well get the nickels we can before there's just absolutely no money at all." Two jazz labels that held out for a long time, Posi-Tone and HighNote/Savant, recently showed up on streaming services, and I'm happy because I like the music they put out, but I also know it means they're just desperately searching for any possible source of revenue, HighNote/Savant in particular since they do almost no PR or marketing.

My guess - the people who are fans of their work have mostly switched to streaming for convenience, and to reach them the artist is faced with either being present on those services, or forgotten about.

I only use the free, ad-happy version of Spotify, and I do buy music, but I'm more likely to pay for something if I can hear it first via streaming (or at a gig). When e.g. ECM stuff was not available on any streaming service, I was a lot more hesitant to buy.

A few of my favorite releases from last year (Last Day of Summer, by Summer Walker; and the two Amerie EPs) aren’t even available on CD — if they were, I would have bought them right away. I guess I should buy the “digital albums” on Amazon so they get that money, even though I have no use for the MP3s.

It's got to take a lot of willpower to stay off streaming distro, to trust that people are going to seek out the music rather than giving up and assuming it doesn't exist if it's not on Spotify etc.

One of the gutsiest moves I remember seeing recently was the last Jason Moran album. It was Bandcamp-only, priced at $20 (!), and you could only preview-stream one track. Judging from all the little profile squares, it worked out extremely well for him (but obviously you can only pull this off with an existing audience who can afford it and is willing to do so). But given that, I'm sure a lot of those same people would have just listened on Spotify if they had the option.

critiquing individual consumer choice but not the larger economic system here is wild. this isn't a fans vs bands problem...

Agree. But I understand that people passionate enough to have accounts here are trying to be among the "good ones" as this whole mess hopefully gets something like sorted out

One of the gutsiest moves I remember seeing recently was the last Jason Moran album. It was Bandcamp-only, priced at $20 (!), and you could only preview-stream one track. Judging from all the little profile squares, it worked out extremely well for him (but obviously you can only pull this off with an existing audience who can afford it and is willing to do so). But given that, I'm sure a lot of those same people would have just listened on Spotify if they had the option.

I interviewed Moran about his approach to Bandcamp a couple of years ago. Here's the money quote (literally):

Most artists and labels charge between $7 and $10 for an album, but you charge $20. How did you arrive at that price point, and how is it working out for you?

You know, I think about music as, ‘What do you value it at?’ And that’s basically it. I’ve often been asked this very question, and my immediate response is, look at the back of a slave that’s been whipped, and ask yourself, ‘How do you value your work?’ That’s the end for me. I could charge $50 for this, and if a person wants it, they want it. If they don’t, they don’t. It’s totally fine. But I set it there more as a place to hold it. The way music has been sold, this thing where I should be able to stream the entire thing before I buy it, is unfair, and I think it’s unfair that musicians should fall into the mode where they would do that automatically. I don’t believe in that. So the way we’re running it, my wife and I, for her record as well, is there are one or two songs we want people to hear, but maybe not. And they can change. I can change it—it’s not set in stone. But right now, I’m sitting it there, and seeing how long I feel like I can keep it there.

The thing is, Moran — primarily because he was signed to Blue Note for close to 20 years — is in a position where he's institutional. Literally; he's the artistic director of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. His wife, Alicia Hall Moran, is in a similarly elite position; she gets grants from high art institutions for new work. So they're not dependent on record sales for a living, and can say, "This is my art, and this is how much I think it's worth. Buy it, or don't."

It's got to take a lot of willpower to stay off streaming distro, to trust that people are going to seek out the music rather than giving up and assuming it doesn't exist if it's not on Spotify etc.

right. ppl itt taking it for granted that it occurs to most people to actually sit and think “hmm perhaps i ought to go to the record store and buy a physical copy of this.” i don’t think it even occurs to most people that there is even a problem here, let alone the nature / stakes / scope of problem

critiquing individual consumer choice but not the larger economic system here is wild. this isn't a fans vs bands problem...

yup

the kids who stream nonstop probably don't have the disposable income to spend on cds and are just using spotify the way i used to listen to the radio.

this is my experience. like, kids and ppl generally aren’t “stealing” the latest X record (and getting away with it, the smug jerks !), they’re just typing in a song they like and letting that autoplay roll

part of the problem with this conversation is that it's taking as given that streaming is a like-for-like replacement for record buying. it's not. setting aside whether you "own the music" or not, which is fucking irrelevant for anyone under 25, stemming is a like-for-like replacement for record buying AND radio listening. it's eating the lunch of the record industry and the radio industry at the same time. its payment scheme tilts towards the latter which.. kinda makes sense? (given that very few people care about "owning" music?)

Ah yes, that's a whole other thing. I was talking to a friend's middle school-aged kid the other day about the music that he likes, and he didn't know any artists, just the Youtube keywords/auto-play algorithms he's into. And this is a kid who gets dragged by his cool dad to see indie bands and electronic music all the time.

xp

Downloading was a replacement for recording-buying. Streaming is most interesting, I think, because it replaces shopping experiences with listening experiences, which ought to be transformational for human culture, for all participants. And it makes the radio dial effectively infinitely wide, which is a quantitative difference that can be qualitative. We're barely at the beginning of figuring out how to make all this potential really happen for the majority of listeners and artists. I work at Spotify, and this is what I think about. A lot of people work at Spotify, and some of them think about other things. I won't claim any blanket corporate moral immunity. But I'm pretty comfortable saying that streaming is not a priori bad. Empirically, it's now the main source of music-industry revenue, and the factor that has returned the music industry to overall growth after many years of decline. There will hopefully be better services to come, but the current ones are plausible beginnings. There will hopefully be better payment models to come, but the current ones aren't crazy or evil by their nature.

Overall growth of the music industry /= artists making more money

xp not by their nature, just… accidentally?

Found this today: https://resonate.is/
Could be interesting. Streaming website claiming to offer a different model/better pay. Looks like they have some good stuff on there.

It's true that overall growth of the music industry doesn't necessarily mean artists are making more money, but whether that's true or not is an internal issue between the parts of the "industry" that receive the money (labels and other licensors) and artists. Streaming services don't have any control over that.

Direct control, no; but streaming services could certainly refuse their platform to labels that don't meet certain ethical standards in their treatment of artists, just like stores on college campuses can refuse to stock and sell logo-branded apparel made with sweatshop labor.

xp what about the fact that streaming is vastly more value for money, at cost per play, to the end user, and vastly less profitable to the industry, regardless of how the labels divide up that money?

Glenn, I'm sure you and others working for Spotify don't have ill intentions. I work in health care software, and most employees here feel like what we're doing is a net good, but I know there are doctors who hate how it's being used (focus on data and metrics by administration/insurance/government etc) and how it's changed their jobs. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, only try and make it better for all involved.

That said, it seems disingenuous to say that it's someone else's problem if almost no one can come close to making a living off streaming and most musicians view it as a loss leader, particularly since the mission statement literally says "Our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity—by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art..."

The few indie musicians who (as far as I can tell) make a decent living off Spotify have found ways to adapt to the system by making vast quantities off music, like one who's putting out an album a week and just released his 100th record. Obviously that's not possible (or desirable) for most artists.

i just don't understand why some fat faced swedish goon gets to be a billionaire off the backs of all the people providing the "content" for his ugly software

but the current ones aren't crazy or evil by their nature.

I love it when you tell me I'm being paid fairly! also fuck you

^what are your reasons for putting your music on Spotify if it doesn’t pay you fairly? (honest question, as a follow up to the Will Oldham etc. discussion above)

if almost no one can come close to making a living off streaming

well there are a few software engineers who must be pretty comfy!

^what are your reasons for putting your music on Spotify if it doesn’t pay you fairly? (honest question, as a follow up to the Will Oldham etc. discussion above)

this is a bone of contention between me and some of the other bandmembers (one of whom is here on ILX) but ultimately it's just a question of being where the listeners are. We have our stuff up on multiple platforms, and I prefer Bandcamp myself. With Spotify it's like: what do we have to gain from *not* being on it? Not a lot. We have no leverage and all it would do would make it harder for certain people to find us/hear us. This doesn't mean I endorse their pay structure as fair, because it quite obviously isn't.

shakey otm, i nearly replied with something similar

I mean imo ideal scenario is Spotify dies a horrible death and is replaced by a streaming model without all these useless major labels and distributors in the middle gaming algorithms and playlists and whatnot but no one figured out how to do that prior to Spotify eating up the market and now there's not much likelihood of something like that gaining the necessary traction.

let's not forget that Spotify hasn't really made their business model work yet either, they're STILL not turning a profit. The people who are profiting are the same pirate assholes that were profiting pre-Napster: huge media conglomerate major labels.

a big reason why spotify was able to gain such a foothold is because the major labels and distributors were major investors in the company from the start.

exactly, the jig was up from the get-go.

essentially the major labels backed Spotify as a means of transferring all of the costs of manufacturing/distro off their books and onto Spotify's. That way their profits go up, Spotify gives them their desired captive audience, and they reap the dividends while Spotify absorbs the costs.

it's all a bunch of deeply exploitative horseshit from an industry with a rich tradition of deeply exploitative horseshit, new boss same as the old boss etc

boom

Btw Resonate looks potentially interesting. I was pleased to find that my music (from one label) is already on there.

xp

it's the opposite of what they did in 1999-2001, when they were caught off-guard by napster & itunes. no way they were gonna let something like that happen again. of course, the songwriters who earn money with accumulation of pennies suffer when those pennies turn into fractions of pennies.

It's true that overall growth of the music industry doesn't necessarily mean artists are making more money, but whether that's true or not is an internal issue between the parts of the "industry" that receive the money (labels and other licensors) and artists. Streaming services don't have any control over that.

this is so disingenuous. Spotify's backing from the major labels makes their streaming service complicit in the major labels' dictation of the terms on the market. I can see you splitting hairs by leaning on the fact that Spotify doesn't directly negotiate individual payment structures, but the fact that distribution is so closely tied to the behemoths of the industry means that the behemoths are given outsize influence on how things work. They dictate the market price of music to the artists and we can either take it or leave it.

xp

I mean imo ideal scenario is Spotify dies a horrible death and is replaced by a streaming model without all these useless major labels and distributors in the middle gaming algorithms and playlists and whatnot but no one figured out how to do that prior to Spotify eating up the market and now there's not much likelihood of something like that gaining the necessary traction.

only if all the major label artists and their back catalogs came with them, which is not going to happen

i just don't understand why some fat faced swedish goon gets to be a billionaire off the backs of all the people providing the "content" for his ugly software

― adam, Thursday, August 1, 2019 10:48 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm and well put

this thread Acts that are not on Spotify would have to get a lot longer

xp

What if every indie artist went Bandcamp-only, though. Listeners could find music in a few places, it’s one app away.

the pie is so small that it doesn't make business sense to relegate yourself to only one platform. your listeners want to find you on the platform they use, and if you're not there, it's more likely that they'll just listen to something else than make an effort to find your stuff elsewhere.

have you noticed there have been a lot fewer tidal or apple exclusive releases lately?

Sorry to keep coming back to this — but if enough artists decamped en masse to Bandcamp, wouldn’t it have a chance of gaining the necessary traction?

If part of the logic here is that listeners can't resist the allure of listening to an act on Spotify if its an option vs Bandcamp, if this happened what do you honestly think the odds are of you suddenly spending way more $ on those artists music, vs you just listening to other stuff on spotify?

I mean, if "you" means "me," then the odds are strong -- I used to happily truck around the city going to different record stores, I've bought $$$ imports for a few bonus songs, etc. (I'm sure everyone on ILM is similar). I understand the point that the average joe may be just as happy listening to Generic Indie Band B, if Generic Indie Band A isn't on Spotify.

we have a family apple music subscription, but I noticed that my teen kids mostly use YouTube. They say they can just start with a song they want to hear, and then let the autoplay go; plus, all things being equal, they like having something to look at while listening. they say they don't care about sound quality, and don't care about saving playlists or whatever.

stop thinking of your kids as good people

LOL. I guess the dominant mode of consuming music may be changing as a result of streaming — it's less artist-focused now — and so the idea of "following artists to where you find them" may not apply the way it used to. Of course there are still huge artists who could probably disrupt things if they chose, but I don't want to "put it all on them."

even those artists (massive stars like beyonce, legacy acts like ac/dc, tool, king crimson) are caving in and putting their stuff on spotify.

I wonder if some of these holdouts have secured better deals for themselves with Spotify

I would assume so. For huge acts it's a bargaining tactic, a la Taylor Swift

Artists would still put their music on Spotify (and Youtube) if it didn’t pay out a single cent in royalties, it’s where their audience is now. It just isn’t where your income is going to come from.