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

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.

I'm probably just setting up a straw man here but what would be a reasonable price to pay for the streaming model - so that artists were fairly paid for their work? It seems like even 10 times the current price (i.e. £1000 a year) wouldn't really suffice and who's going to pay that anyway, even if we're agreed that at some level it's the correct amount? Which makes me think morrisp's argument has some validity, ie there needs to be a tipping point of artists removing their art to a different platform (say Bandcamp) and circumventing the role of labels- a move which, over time, would return the control to the artist, if (and it's a big if?) listeners were prepared to follow them.

Naive, much?

can I just say that seeing someone else's display name w my last name in it continues to be jarring/confusing

If the cop fits.

artists removing their art

anyway, major labels - NOT THE ARTISTS - own huge swathes of the back catalogs that act as a black hole for a streaming service like Spotify, pulling everything else in by virtue of being the place where the most stuff is. If a bunch of current artists that happen to own their own catalogs move, this is still nothing compared to the 99% of recorded music from prior eras that is owned by someone else.

sorry will change if you like, was a joke based on this guy: https://www.instagram.com/jacobcollier

lol not referring to you

or did you think Mo Collier was my real name

http://www.multiverse.org/index.php?title=Shakey_Mo_Collier

xxxp SiriusXM is $150 for base package (you can negotiate it down a bit) — the price was raised this year due to increase in the "Music Royalty Fee" — so assuming artists are adequately compensated by satellite radio, maybe that's a good point of comparison... keeping in mind it's radio, not play-on-demand (which would likely have to cost more).

xp

the ilx name you used for years is your real name now, it's science. thought collier might be part of your actual name lol

(that's $150/yr, btw)

i think it's important to point out that artists don't get compensated by radio plays in the united states, just songwriters

Thx, I don't know how all those royalties work. Also, I guess SiriusXM has overhead that Spotify doesn't... y'know, satellites...

(literal "overhead," lol)

ie there needs to be a tipping point of artists removing their art to a different platform (say Bandcamp) and circumventing the role of labels- a move which, over time, would return the control to the artist

Just to make an obvious point — this is what the "promise of the Internet" was supposed to lead to, back when everyone was working thru the Napster problems — and it seems like the technological reality of the "democratic online marketplace" has been trumped by the "Spotify is where everything is" center-of-gravity factor, which is sure a bummer.