I don’t know how long this war against Spotify can go on, celeb musicians keep talking against the streaming service, basically repeating the same arguments, but have you read anything coming from Spotify to counteract all these bad criticisms? Will Spotify continue to grow despite this bad press? It currently has around 6 million subscribers (people who pay) out of its 24 million total listeners (that was the official numbers in March 2013), which still is not enough, but they are pretending to grow every year.
The last in-date musician to vehemently talk about Spotify is David Byrne, in an essay for the Guardian published on Friday. First of all, I adore this man and there’s nothing that he has ever said that doesn’t sound intelligent, so I had to read…
Spotify is not the only streaming service around, beside the Pandora-type radio, Byrne cites Deezer, Google Play, and the upcoming Daisy from Apple and Interscope, concluding that only one will probably survive, public selection obliges. Then he gets to the core of the problem, as many others have (Thom Yorke, Nigel Godrich) before:
‘The amounts these services pay per stream is miniscule – their idea being that if enough people use the service those tiny grains of sand will pile up. Domination and ubiquity are therefore to be encouraged. We should readjust our values because in the web-based world we are told that monopoly is good for us. The major record labels usually siphon off most of this income, and then they dribble about 15-20% of what’s left down to their artists. Indie labels are often a lot fairer – sometimes sharing the income 50/50. Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi)has published abysmal data on payouts from Pandora and Spotify for his song “Tugboat” and Lowery even wrote a piece entitled “My Song Got Played on Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89, Less Than What I Make from a Single T-shirt Sale!” For a band of four people that makes a 15% royalty from Spotify streams,it would take 236,549,020 streams for each person to earn a minimum wage of $15,080 (£9,435) a year. For perspective, Daft Punk’s song of the summer, “Get Lucky”, reached 104,760,000 Spotify streams by the end of August: the two Daft Punk guys stand to make somewhere around $13,000 each. Not bad, but remember this is just one song from a lengthy recording that took a lot of time and money to develop. That won’t pay their bills if it’s their principal source of income. And what happens to the bands who don’t have massive international summer hits?’
We have been there before right? And he continues by the sad realization that ‘if artists have to rely almost exclusively on the income from these services, they’ll be out of work within a year’, adding that only already established artists with ‘other sources of income, such as live concerts’ will be able to survive as they don’t rely ‘on the pittance that comes my way from music streaming’.
What about the ‘discovery’ argument, the fact that some artists see Spotify ‘as a way of getting noticed, of getting your music out there’? Byrne disagrees, claiming ‘I can understand how having a place where people can listen to your work when they are told or read about it is helpful, but surely a lot of places already do that? I manage to check stuff out without using these services. I’ll go directly to an artist’s website, or Bandcamp, or even Amazon – and then, if I like what I hear, there is often the option to buy.’
I agree, I love Bandcamp, since, if you decide to buy what you are streaming, all the money goes directly to the artist. Plus Byrne destroys the ‘claim of discovery’ made by Spotify: ‘the actual moment of discovery in most cases happens at the moment when someone else tells you about an artist or you read about them – not when you’re on the streaming service listening to what you have read about (though Spotify does indeed have a “discovery” page that, like Pandora’s algorithm, suggests artists you might like). There is also, I’m told, a way to see what your “friends” have on their playlists, though I’d be curious to know whether a significant number of people find new music in this way. I’d be even more curious if the folks who “discover” music on these services then go on to purchase it. Why would you click and go elsewhere and pay when the free version is sitting right in front of you? Am I crazy?’
Sure not! Personally, I have never discovered music while on Spotify, I look for the name of a band when I already know about it, it makes sense, right? And I have never used their discovery page, as I hate to be told what to listen to, how dare Spotify recommend me what to listen to!
Then Byrne compares streaming services to ‘a legalised version of file-sharing sites such as Napster and Pirate Bay – with the difference being that with streaming services the big labels now get hefty advances?’ and I have thought about this many times, what’s the difference between stealing an album on Pirate Bay and streaming it on Spotify, if the artist doesn’t receive shit from Spotify. At least you don’t make big labels richer when you steal it!
For Byrne, the future doesn’t look good at all:
‘The larger question is that if free or cheap streaming becomes the way we consume all (recorded) music and indeed a huge percentage of other creative content – TV, movies, games, art, porn – then perhaps we might stop for a moment and consider the effect these services and this technology will have, before “selling off” all our cultural assets the way the big record companies did. If, for instance, the future of the movie business comes to rely on the income from Netflix’s $8-a-month-streaming-service as a way to fund all films and TV production, then things will change very quickly. As with music, that model doesn’t seem sustainable if it becomes the dominant form of consumption. Musicians might, for now, challenge the major labels and get a fairer deal than 15% of a pittance, but it seems to me that the whole model is unsustainable as a means of supporting creative work of any kind. Not just music. The inevitable result would seem to be that the internet will suck the creative content out of the whole world until nothing is left. Writers, for example, can’t rely on making money from live performances – what are they supposed to do? Write ad copy?
His fear concerns emerging artists, who ‘will eventually have to find employment elsewhere or change what they do to make more money’ and ‘without new artists coming up, our future as a musical culture looks grim. A culture of blockbusters is sad, and ultimately it’s bad for business.’ I cannot agree more, there eventually are mainstream artists whom I like, but they are rather rare. I want to have the possibility to hear everything from anybody and this system condemns new discovery instead of promoting it. How could new artists emerge from this greedy machine? Byrne doesn’t propose any solution, I don’t have one either, and it is so saddening to realize that music creativity is doomed.