Last week was strange. With Savita Halappanavar’s story gripping the country from Wednesday, it seemed kind of unthinkable to carry on writing about whatever facet of the music industry was on my mind that morning. So I just left it for a few days while my head was occupied with other things. In those few days though, Spotify had a bit of a moment. Not only did it launch in Ireland – seeing a whole lot of new people being to use and explore the service, Damon Krukowski, former drummer in Galaxie 500, dropped some reality on people with a great article on Pitchfork. All in all, a lot of people were talking about Spotify and what it means for listeners and musicians.
Maybe it says something about the company I keep but it seemed that there was something of a healthy suspicion among new Irish users of Spotify last week. As they got to grips with the near-endless library, many noted how the service almost erases the need to buy music. Putting 18 million tracks at one’s fingertips, for free, is not really an incentive to go out and purchase lots of music. Some compared the service to Bandcamp and found the latter to be better for musicians, though I don’t feel the two are particularly comparable. One is a giant searchable music streaming and discovery service, the other a (generally self-run) platform for individual bands or labels to host and sell their music. While both are means of listening to music, they are totally different forms. You don’t get paid for having your music streamed on Bandcamp and you don’t download music from Spotify. You also don’t get personalised pages on Spotify or your own URL. They are designed with different types of use in mind. Given the connectivity of Spotify, MySpace might be a better comparison but even then it’s a stretch and Bandcamp is no replacement for MySpace anyway.
Two of the most interesting local thoughts about Spotify came from Stephen Quinn, Dublin’s busiest mastering engineer, and the Hardcore For Nerds blog. Quinn’s thoughts about the future of cultural consumption are important because if we think the situation is bad now, what’s it going to be like in 20 years time when no kid will remember having to pay for the music/film/tv/games they consume? When most of their elders will have been downloading/streaming everything for free for at least half their lives, who is going to say, ‘wait, someone put a lot of time and effort into that thing you’re enjoying, maybe there should be some reward for that’?
The HC4N post makes one super important statement – Spotify is “a paradigm-shifting way of listening to music”. It marks the total control of the listener over a large swathe of recorded music history. It makes the listener more powerful than ever in terms of what is available to them, and that is Spotify’s key selling point. On Spotify, the disinterested listener is just as valuable as the engaged fan because one stream is much the same as the other as far as the technology is concerned. The final summation is also disturbingly simple and true – “So the minor artists benefit little, the major artists benefit slightly, and the company that controls it all benefits the most”.
The biggest story in Spotify’s week was Damon Krukowski’s tale of pennies over at Pitchfork. Krukowski gives a detailed account of his recent royalty payments from Spotify and Pandora, the two major streaming services, and they make for disappointing reading. Comparing the physical sales of the first Galaxie 500 single, ‘Tugboat’, with the recent streaming figures, he finds that the band made (considerably) more money from each individual record sold than from the 14,000 streams ‘Tugboat’ received last year. Again, the summation is damning – “Here’s yet another way to look at it: Pressing 1,000 singles in 1988 gave us the earning potential of more than 13 million streams in 2012”.
The crux of Krukowski’s article is the way in which recorded music has become devalued by the system which capitalises on it; “music itself seems to be irrelevant to these businesses– it is just another form of information, the same as any other that might entice us to click a link or a buy button on a stock exchange”. Music is bait, access is value and the musician is nothing at all.
While I do hesitate to compare independently selling 7″s in 1988 with streaming services in 2012, it is true that the means by which people access music now has very little to do with the music itself. People are dealing with technology companies rather than music companies because the technology companies have the means of access. Whether that is Spotify or UPC, someone is getting paid and it’s probably not the musician, hence “the ways in which musicians are screwed have changed qualitatively, from individualized swindles to systemic ones”.
Krukowski is right not to look at Spotify as a replacement for selling records, if only because Spotify doesn’t sell physical product. It’s about access not ownership. It would seem that most people are willing to make that switch so there’s very little anyone can do about it. The counter-“argument” that musicians should get out on the road and make money that way is facile and ignorant in the extreme. There are huge time and money costs involved in touring, which makes it really difficult for any band who might have other jobs, who might live in a place that isn’t the US or mainland Europe, who might have more than three or four members… There are finite amounts of towns, finite venues and finite fans to go around. Bands are getting paid less on the road, if at all, because there are so many of them. Not all music is made to be played live. Music is not always about entertainment. I could go on, but Maura Johnston kind of kicked this all to touch on her Tumblr.
P.S. Check out Philip Sherburne’s application of all this to contemporary dance music to see the damaging effect it can have on the performer/creator relationship.
