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

http://www.invisibleoranges.com/2015/08/damage-done-how-much-money-i-didnt-spend-in-2014-because-of-spotify/

― Cosmic Slop, Tuesday, August 4, 2015 9:49 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The thing that makes blog posts like that super fatuous is NO ONE IS STOPPING YOU FROM PURCHASING A NON-STREAMING VERSION OF THE MUSIC YOU LIKE IF THAT'S ACTUALLY IMPORTANT TO YOU. Dude is trying to have his cake and eat it, too; you can't be all "streaming pay rates are criminal, I can't abide that type of thievery to artists OH HEY I SAVED $700 THIS YEAR YAY" without at least acknowledging that your statement of caring about what artists make is a lie you are telling yourself so that you can continue to believe that you uphold the values you think you should have.

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:02 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I dunno Dan, I mean life is full of those kinds of economic/moral contradictions. When a product is legally available for less money, very few people will deliberately pay more money for it regardless of their moral convictions (e.g. sweatshop clothing).

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:06 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nowhere did I say that one shouldn't make the choice to save money. What I said was "stop pretending like the moral question is more important to you than saving money" (with the I hope unnecessary-to-state caveat that we are talking about luxury items that it is assumed the consumer in question can afford; a person who can afford the cost of a device capable of streaming as well as the sustaining costs of a subscription to an online service and a streaming service can afford an offline device capable of playing CDs)

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:12 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

saving money isn't always a choice, often it is more like a necessity

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:20 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

of course anyone who can afford a computer/smartphone and streaming subscription can afford a CD player and CDs/mp3 player and mp3s; the difference is that one is a fixed cost and one is a potentially infinite cost. buying used can cut down that cost significantly depending on what you buy, but A) that itself is a compromise in terms of money making it to the artists and B) it is still a potentially infinite cost.

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:21 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We all (I assume) agree that minimum wage should be raised even if it means paying slightly higher prices but I doubt many of us would voluntarily pay a higher "support workers" price where a lower one was offered.

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:40 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not to mention how futile it would be to do so as an individual

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:42 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

again, in many cases you are mistaking "would voluntarily pay" with "are able under our budget to pay"

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:42 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well that's a whole other thing, but "afford" is a slippery concept. When there was no spotify, many of us "afforded" paying more for physical recordings (or else taped/burned them from friends, I guess).

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:44 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're either referring to a time when illegal downloading was rampant, or when the economy was not a shambles

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:45 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not that all of this doesn't have moral ramifications -- of course it does, no one is disputing it. but treating it as a completely free moral choice with no other variables -- the equivalent of one of those "flip the switch and kill one person / leave the switch and kill ten" questions -- gets into dicey territory fast.

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:50 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Do all of the people who claim they "can't afford" music also never travel, never eat in restaurants, never go out to bars, never see movies, never purchase books, never partake in any form of entertainment that costs money? I'm sure there are some who fit that category, but there are plenty of people with some discretionary spending who make the rational choice that they "can't afford" to purchase music -- as long as there is a cheaper or free alternative. If the alternative wasn't there, they'd pay for it, and some other part of discretionary spending would take the hit.

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:55 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that naivety is built into the article tho. in any retail system handwringing about distributors driving down the profits of manufacturers is addressing the wrong problem - you're decrying a feature of the economic system that's intrinsic to that economic system

― the lion tweets tonight (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:56 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

or in brief, lol ethical consumerism

― the lion tweets tonight (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:56 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Do all of the people who claim they "can't afford" music also never travel, never eat in restaurants, never go out to bars, never see movies, never purchase books, never partake in any form of entertainment that costs money? I'm sure there are some who fit that category, but there are plenty of people with some discretionary spending who make the rational choice that they "can't afford" to purchase music -- as long as there is a cheaper or free alternative. If the alternative wasn't there, they'd pay for it, and some other part of discretionary spending would take the hit.

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:55 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is perilously close to the "if they're really that poor then why do they have cell phones?" argument

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:57 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

of course anyone who can afford a computer/smartphone and streaming subscription can afford a CD player and CDs/mp3 player and mp3s; the difference is that one is a fixed cost and one is a potentially infinite cost.

Define "fixed cost" here; assuming you mean "a predictable amount every month", either method can be put into a bounded budget controlled by the consumer, making either a predictable amount every month. One does give you more music at your disposal than the other; I'm not disputing that. And xposts make me think that we're pretty much on the same page here, I'm just being kind of a dick about it.

We all (I assume) agree that minimum wage should be raised even if it means paying slightly higher prices but I doubt many of us would voluntarily pay a higher "support workers" price where a lower one was offered.

I don't disagree. What I'm saying is that making that choice when it's offered to you and you have the ability to pay the higher price shows what your actual priorities are, and if your self-image as a "good person" involves the other choice, walk the walk or stop lying to yourself.

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:57 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Do all of the people who claim they "can't afford" music also never travel, never eat in restaurants, never go out to bars, never see movies, never purchase books, never partake in any form of entertainment that costs money? I'm sure there are some who fit that category, but there are plenty of people with some discretionary spending who make the rational choice that they "can't afford" to purchase music -- as long as there is a cheaper or free alternative. If the alternative wasn't there, they'd pay for it, and some other part of discretionary spending would take the hit.

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:55 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is perilously close to the "if they're really that poor then why do they have cell phones?" argument

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:57 AM (18 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, it's really not at all

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:58 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Define "fixed cost" here; assuming you mean "a predictable amount every month", either method can be put into a bounded budget controlled by the consumer, making either a predictable amount every month. One does give you more music at your disposal than the other; I'm not disputing that. And xposts make me think that we're pretty much on the same page here, I'm just being kind of a dick about it.

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:57 AM (3 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that would indeed be the definition of a "fixed cost"

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:58 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

besides, people who use spotify rather than purchase music are not limited to the poor

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:59 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

true, I imagine they also include a lot of middle- and/or working-class people whose budgets more easily allow for $15 a month than $15 a CD

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:01 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't disagree. What I'm saying is that making that choice when it's offered to you and you have the ability to pay the higher price shows what your actual priorities are, and if your self-image as a "good person" involves the other choice, walk the walk or stop lying to yourself.

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:57 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, you drive a car to work? You turned on your air conditioning today? STOP PRETENDING YOU CARE AT ALL WHAT HAPPENS TO THE PLANET!

Except if I don't drive my car to work or turn on my air conditioning, it will do exactly zero to slow the advance of global warming. Only collective action works. Just like my putting an extra few hundred dollars a year, in aggregate, in the pockets of all of the artists I listen to will make almost no difference to their lives.

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:02 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean, if someone is living on minimum wage but has made the choice to be on Apple Music, I'm not churlish enough to be all "you fiend, taking music from the mouths of starving musicians" because that person is doing some budgetary magic of their own to even be in the game (possibly/probably from a losing position). I'm talking about people like me who claim they can't afford to pay for albums, even MP3 albums, but love their favorite artists and lament that the industry is imploding around them; they are lying to everyone, including themselves. If they wanted to, they could afford it; they are choosing not to pay. And what I am saying is "be honest about the ramifications of that choice".

xp: actually I take public transportation to work because I want to limit the driving I do as part of being a responsible citizen in a city that affords me transportation options, but apparently that's meaningless and I should go out and buy 10 Hummers that I just let idle on the side street next to our house

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:05 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

true, I imagine they also include a lot of middle- and/or working-class people whose budgets more easily allow for $15 a month than $15 a CD

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:01 AM (43 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not arguing with this at all! Anyone with a fixed amount of money to spend, which is most of us, is sensitive to what things cost, and is going to be better off financially when they spend less. Still, if there was no Spotify (and no downloading), some of those working/middle class people would decide it's worth spending $15/CD on music (and maybe this would mean slightly less on some other discretionary item), and in aggregate this might amount to more money going to artists. Not that I think going back to that model is on the table.

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:05 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would like to reiterate that my actual point here is "do what you want to do but don't lie to yourself and everyone else about what you are doing"

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:07 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xp: actually I take public transportation to work because I want to limit the driving I do as part of being a responsible citizen in a city that affords me transportation options, but apparently that's meaningless and I should go out and buy 10 Hummers that I just let idle on the side street next to our house

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:05 AM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I take public transit to work too. I also live in a 1300 sf apt though and I do use AC, not cranked, but I use it. I could live with my entire family in a 550 sf studio and avoid AC and dramatically cut my carbon footprint. I could never take an airplane again anywhere and live a perfectly fine life. I could switch to an all-vegan diet. Should I stop thinking of myself as a "good person" because I don't do these things? Do I have no right to argue that there should be collective/regulatory action on global warming because I live an American lifestyle and don't fully "walk the walk"?

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:08 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What does any of this have to do with apple music vs spotify.

― Jeff, Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:09 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There should be a separate ethics and economics of streaming music thread.

― Jeff, Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:10 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Should I stop thinking of myself as a "good person" because I don't do these things?

Either that or you should change your definition of what a "good person" is.

Also, Jeff is right.

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:11 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

since when did ilm threads stick to the opening point? lol

xp

― Cosmic Slop, Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:12 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I know, crazy idea!

― Jeff, Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:13 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's no such thing as a "good person," people make thousands if not millions of moral decisions per day, if anything thinking of oneself as a "good person" makes one more likely to be complacent about them

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:13 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol Ethics and Economics of Streaming sounds like it's be a ___ for non-majors course, only I'm not sure what dept

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:18 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Jeff killed the thread

― Cosmic Slop, Tuesday, August 4, 2015 11:57 AM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the line graphs showing total dollars spent on music over the past 30 years are a horror show for the music industry. what i'm not sure is whether it's the casual fans who are to blame (they didn't buy music anyway, right?), or the hardcore fans like the writer of the article above who have abandoned their expensive habits (are there enough of these people to make a difference?)

i mean, what's easy to forget as someone who Loves Music is that the vast majority of people never bought CDs except as special occasions anyway. like waaay less than 1 a month. so it seems reasonable to suggest that past a certain threshold, streaming subscribers + (diminished) purchasers would on aggregate be spending more on music than just purchasers did before.

― transparent play for gifs (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, August 4, 2015 12:08 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

saving money isn't always a choice, often it is more like a necessity

that is of course true. but if that's the case for this particular invisible oranges writer, then his using spotify isn't doing any financial harm to anyone, because he wouldn't have/couldn't have bought all those records anyway.

― fact checking cuz, Tuesday, August 4, 2015 12:25 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so is this a thread galley or

you have to pay to open the other thread

If you love pensioners, schools and hospitals so much why dont you give to charity, why should it come out of my pay packet

what is a thread galley?

i mean you posted almost an entire thread...are we suppposed to comment or just admire it

do as you wish, I birthed it, but it is out in the world on its own now.

every time you don't open this thread a cat dies

(for real tho that was nothing close to the entire thread)

lol katherine

If you love pensioners, schools and hospitals so much why dont you give to charity, why should it come out of my pay packet

All of these things* are considered to be public services and should be funded publicly, ie through taxes. No one has of yet put forward the idea that music in the US should be funded primarily through the government (although that would be interesting; I know that Sweden had a program like this which is directly responsible for The Knife's ability to have a career).

* well okay, not "pensioners" specifically, but the idea of a society taking care at a basic level of its citizens after they leave the work force

I should also admit that I was so irritated by that blog post that I never actually made it to the last paragraph where dude says he plans on changing his spending habits, so a good amount of my ire is at a strawman. Sorry everyone!

loool, I was gonna mention that

that's ok, it's nothing compared to my ill-informed rageposts yesterday on that NYer article I didn't read

no thoughts on this except that as katherine hints the answer to "should i stop thinking of myself as a good person" is absolutely, invariably "yes"

Some might say "sociaopathic." ;)

Dammit I meant "sociopathic."

not buying music is infinitely more ethical than buying music theres enough garbage in the world already

^ sounds like a burgeoning effective altruist

i stopped thinking of myself as a good person when i shoplifted something at the age of 16 and got away with it. should i start thinking of myself as a good person, and then stop again?

good people know that music is a necessary evil at best and do not place untoward emphasis upon it

Ppl who earn decent incomes should not tell anyone poorer than them what to spend their money on

Ppl who earn decent incomes should not tell anyone poorer than them what to spend their money on

This is how I feel about it. I used to make a middle class income, now I make a lower middle class income (due to relocating for health reasons and having to take what I could get in my new city, in the relatively poor state of New Mexico). I also have some expenses (due to the same unresolved health issues) I didn't have when I was making a higher income. I stream Spotify on a twelve year old computer which I can't afford to replace at the moment, unless I want to go further into credit card debt than I'm comfortable with at the moment. I do not have a cellphone, but I don't want one anyway.

I'd add something to this thread along the lines of "I don't use Spotify or any other streaming service and this is just one reason amongst many why", but the thread seems to have worked it's way around to that already. I still buy everything I want on CD; I'm slightly more selective about what I want than I was a few years ago, but we've still bought somewhere in the region of 40 CDs this year so far, I'd wager.

Taxes are our shared contribution to a decent society; if you moan about paying them then you're an asshole, btw.

Taxes are our shared contribution to a decent society;

agree

if you moan about paying them then you're an asshole, btw.

disagree

Ppl who earn decent incomes should not tell anyone poorer than them what to spend their money on

― lex pretend, Tuesday, August 4, 2015 6:09 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I totally agree with this btw, this isn't about browbeating anyone into buying CDs. Just saying that what people feel they can afford is often dictated in part by what's available. I mean, I earn a decent income and I still use Spotify for most of my music listening -- there's always something you feel like you need the money for more when the choice is presented, like I can buy a few CDs a month or sign my daughter up for a swimming class instead.

i've always tried to get as much music as possible for the least amount of money, which used to involve primarily buying used cds. streaming actually gives artists more money than that did, so i won't really take any guilt-trips about streaming unless the guilter is going to go the full garth brooks and deride purchasing used products as well.

however, i'm interested in the economics of creative work and i think streaming as it stands is a horrible deal for musicians and independent labels. if they don't, i have no major compunction about taking advantage of it.

and while i dream about buying more pristine vinyl reissues of great music if i ever go up a tax bracket, i'd probably use streaming to find out whether albums are good, cuz i don't want pristine vinyl reissues of albums i don't like on the shelf. now if you're smart like bob seger, you don't give me that option.

i should say "if you're smart like bob seger's manager." seger has said he'd love to give us all a chance to find out whether we like against the wind, but that his manager has some issues with the label re: online platforms, and as seger likes the size of his many houses he's going to let his manager do what he must.

i bought a bunch of new cds this morning for the first time in a really long while, it kind of felt great. i have two kids and less disposable income than i used to when i would buy like 60-70 cds a year so i mainly use spotify or buy used cds but it was kind of amazing to just say "i'm going to buy new music"

also one of those albums i bought today was a three disc set for $25 that i have never listened to before but read positive reviews and heard a strong recommendation from a friend, i haven't made a purchase like that in forever and i felt like i was 20 again or something

joanna newsom thanks u for your business

lol it was kamasi washington

I bought that Kamasi Washington thing too, even though the publicist sent me a download. Going to see him play later this month, too.

I am actively holding bob Seger and Taylor Swift up at gunpoint and making them perform duets, also I'm streaming stuff on Spotify with the sound real low 😎😎😎

We all (I assume) agree that minimum wage should be raised even if it means paying slightly higher prices but I doubt many of us would voluntarily pay a higher "support workers" price where a lower one was offered.

Back when the economy wasn't shit the standard tip at restaurants was 15% and that's what I tipped. Now I tip >20% because the economy is shit and I have a salaried job so the economy is much more shit for a waiter than it is for me. Lots of people do the same. Doesn't that amount to paying a slightly higher "support workers" price? Admittedly, only slightly higher.

When you download a record from bandcamp, and it suggests a price you can pay the band if you like the album and want to keep it, do you pay it? I do. I think lots of people do.

Ppl who earn decent incomes should not tell anyone poorer than them what to spend their money on

― lex pretend, Tuesday, August 4, 2015 6:09 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

look, i get that capitalism is rigged and specifically rigged against the poor, as well as that more money does not make one a better or wiser human being, but there are still such things as good decisions and bad decisions.

there's such things as shuttin the hell up about other ppls's shit too

^^^^^^^^^^^^otmmmmmmmmmmm

Sometimes advice is good.

maybe some people feel they need it but I have never known good advice (unless any answer to a question counts as 'advice', but then credit for asking the question imo)

i think j gets to the root of the real problem, which has nothing to do with money and everything to do with people who feel compelled to give unsolicited advice to strangers, particularly when that advice is based on vague and inappropriate categorizations. talking about what "the poor" should do is just as stupid as talking about what "the muslims" or "the gays" or "the latinos" should do.

also tbh when you're condemned to lose no matter what budgetary decisions you take then being told how you could've done things better is less help than getting yr teeth kicked in

like, nobody is more acutely aware of when they shdn't've treated themselves to those cigarettes/that drink/that pair of shoes/the nice bread than people who have to weigh those decisions daily

Personally, I'd be grateful for a smart friend who regularly challenged my choices of how I spent my time and money. I made a lot of poor choices and I didn't always have the self awareness that I was screwing up that badly. I don't think that's unusual at all.

But I have heard some friends complain about particularly annoying friends/acquaintances who acted like a life coach with no good advice.

Or maybe we're just talking about giving advice to people you know nothing about?

the key thing being not to assume people are unaware of or interested in your views

http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/811#Shaftesbury_5987_284

sorry for libertyfund link

I HAVE often thought how ill-natur’d a Maxim it was, which, on many occasions, I have heard from People of good understanding; “That, as to what related to private Conduct, No-one was ever the better for Advice.’’ But upon farther Examination, I have resolv’d with my-self, that the Maxim might be admitted without any violent prejudice to Mankind. For in the manner Advice was generally given, there was no reason, I thought, to wonder it shou’d be so ill receiv’d. Something there was which strangely inverted the Case, and made the Giver to be the only Gainer. For by what I cou’d observe in many Occurrences of our Lives, That which we call’d giving Advice, was properly, taking an occasion to shew our own Wisdom, at another’s expence. On the other side, to be instructed, or to receive Advice on the terms usually prescrib’d to us, was little better than tamely to afford another the Occasion of raising himself a Character from our Defects.

In reality, however able or willing a Man may be to advise, ’tis no easy matter to make Advice a free Gift. For to make a Gift free indeed, there must be nothing in it which takes from Another, to add to Our-self. In all other respects, to give, and to dispense, is Generosity, and Good-will: but to bestow Wisdom, is to gain a Mastery which can’t so easily be allow’d us. Men willingly learn whatever else is taught ’em. They can bear a Master in Mathematicks, in Musick, or in any other Science; but not in Understanding and Good Sense.

otm

i feel like this whole debate is pretty much typical of modern capitalism, huge corporations construct a system that's a massive scam then all the blame is placed on individuals for their small, insignificant little choices within that system.

like i saw someone post a thing to facebook about like "IF YOU EAT ALMONDS IT'S YOUR FAULT CALIFORNIA HAS A DROUGHT" like really? my fault they let nestle suck their water dry and wouldn't even impose fucking lawn watering bans until it was too late?

also otm

UMS OTM

do people really have music they stream every time they want to listen to it? The hassle of that is prohibitive imo - I often have shitty wifi. If I really like something I want to make sure I have it for keeps.

I'd say I'm streaming 90% of the time I'm listening to music at home.

I'm only 10% of a good person.

David Byrne weighs in:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/opinion/sunday/open-the-music-industrys-black-box.html?_r=0

I usually will stream a full album from youtube because it is quicker to type in "_____ full album" than to wait for iTunes to open and search in there.

do people really have music they stream every time they want to listen to it? The hassle of that is prohibitive imo - I often have shitty wifi. If I really like something I want to make sure I have it for keeps.

― kinder, Thursday, August 6, 2015 9:52 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i pretty much only stream at work, and use streaming only to discover new music and check things out i've heard about. at home & in the car it is music i own. i think if i had an aux port in my car though i would stop buying music and just do spotify premium for the download-to-phone option

wow, this Richard Street-Jammer post on Invisible Oranges really opened our eyes

It's kind of hard for me to attach any moral dimension on streaming music. Knowing the history of labels screwing artists over, all kinds of dirty accounting tricks, albums 'falling off the back of trucks', artists getting screwed out of money even when they have supposedly solid deals, etc.

It's not artists making deals with the streaming services, it's the labels. It's not consumers deciding what amount goes to artists, it's the labels. The moral imperative to treat artists well should fall on labels alone imo. The idea that the consumer is morally responsible is great for taking that load off the labels. Now they have multiple scapegoats: streaming services AND consumers.

I asked Apple Music to explain the calculation of royalties for the trial period. They said they disclosed that only to copyright owners (that is, the labels). I have my own label and own the copyright on some of my albums, but when I turned to my distributor, the response was, “You can’t see the deal, but you could have your lawyer call our lawyer and we might answer some questions.”

Insane that this is David Byrne, one of the most well-known musicians in the world, and a smart cookie who has given lectures and written books on the topic. And even he can't penetrate the fog.

I buy albums first. Then I stream them anyway. I'm a very good person, obv.

how do you DJ with streamed music? how do you sample streamed music?

my listening habits, for a long time, have involved making myself gapless mixes of recent listening or based around a theme. that's a big part of why i can't stand a stream.

how do you DJ with streamed music?

use a hard wired ethernet connection, not wifi :)

how do you sample streamed music?

analog output to digital recorder

how do you get your hair to shine like that?

here's the pertinent graph:

http://f.cl.ly/items/2n2e0L1V1z1m161j153y/ClouDrop%206%20Aug%202015%2015%3A44%3A16%206%20Aug%202015%2015%3A44%3A16.png

interesting timing on that drop there around 2007, I wonder if any confounding factors could have caused it

http://i.imgur.com/dKoBZl7.png

MORE VINYL IS BACK THINKPIECES WE NEED MORE VINYL IS BACK THINKPIECES

That slope is probably an inverse curve of piratebay traffic numbers.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/history-pirate-bay-will-return/

I dunno, that chart is saying CDs were outselling cassettes as early as 1985. That can't be right, since CDs were still twice as expensive, and players were REALLY expensive (and not nearly as ubiquitous as cassette players).

I don't think you're reading that graph right. Looks more like around 92-93.

the height of curves in that chart is cumulative, so in 1985 CDs are the tiny light blue segment on top of an even split between cassettes and vinyl.

I'm thinking that as digital music gets sorted out and services gradually up their price and ad rates, it will get to about where the early 80's collapse was, and flatline there, 8.5 billion. No more Saturday Night Fever or format change anomalies.

most people i've met who make music for a living (or are involved in the production of music, live or recorded) pulled themselves up by their bootstraps

man, feel old saying this, but "what are the trends with the young people" in regards to purchasing digital music/subscribing to streaming services vs. just downloading it somewhere or going to youtube? my guess is that anyone who came of age after early 2000s is pretty used to easily getting what they want for free at this point. might be hard to ever get them back to the idea of paying for it on a regular basis.

for my kids it's all youtube. they're happily amazed when I provide them with mp3s they want but it's totally unnecessary for them

when I was my oldest's age I was already scamming/being scammed by BMG/Columbia House. those were different times...

I don't think you're reading that graph right. Looks more like around 92-93.

― schwantz, Thursday, August 6, 2015 4:30 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the height of curves in that chart is cumulative, so in 1985 CDs are the tiny light blue segment on top of an even split between cassettes and vinyl.

― juggulo for the complete klvtz (bendy), Thursday, August 6, 2015 4:33 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OK, yeah, that definitely makes more sense.

for my kids it's all youtube. they're happily amazed when I provide them with mp3s they want but it's totally unnecessary for them

― droit au butt (Euler), Thursday, August 6, 2015 4:48 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My dad has a pekingese and I don't think he even cares about music at all!

does he like pugs?

my mother in law is thinking about getting a pug. she just got an iphone too! don't know what her position on streaming music is.

your moms like my pug

That graph is fascinating -- I hadn't realized that there had been a brief period where CDs' dominance meant massively more spending than ever before on recorded music.

Also interesting that CDs are still well ahead of streaming, though probably not for much longer

i mean it is crazy - someone was just talking on twitter about how almost 15 million people paid between $12-$16 for hootie and the blowfish's first album.

Great interview with a Columbia House insider about that 90s CD $$$$ heydays

http://www.avclub.com/article/four-columbia-house-insiders-explain-shady-math-be-219964

stop telling me how to think, and how to feel. there is too much second-person directive since the beatles broke

with a love like that, you know you should be glad

yeah yeah yeah

you've hypnotized me with those crazy eyes of yours
you've cracked me open like a coconut
you've got me crawling round and round you on all fours

yes yes yes yes yes

you are inside a building, a well house for a large streaming

watch out
you might get what you're after

A Kiwi perspective, Russell Brown is pretty otm as usual

http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/friday-music-not-just-consumers-but-patrons/

I always use Bandcamp if I can. Monetarily for small artists, the margin between streaming and piracy seems so tiny as to be negligible. I was surprised that it took so long for Apple to encroach onto Spotify's turf (streaming). Is there any sign that Spotify will retaliate by offering paid downloads?

my guess is that anyone who came of age after early 2000s is pretty used to easily getting what they want for free at this point. might be hard to ever get them back to the idea of paying for it on a regular basis.

i'm likely to pay for spotify and apple music in the longer term because they both offer their own unique discovery features (curated playlists based on my tastes, radio-like streams &c.). i can't speak for ~the youth~ obv but imo it's that sort of play that will keep subscription services going. not everyone will pay but that's been the case since compact cassettes.

not everyone will pay but that's been the case since compact cassettes.

Those bloody compact cassettes! You make a good point - lots of this stuff has older equivalents. People find a way to get more music for less money. (No judgment on them, I include myself in that.)

Just like how 2nd-hand record buying has existed ever since Edison sold off all his old wax cylinders. There's not really a way to measure how much money from all 2nd-hand sales goes back into buying new music... hopefully more than 0.5c per track, but it's not a great benchmark.

It annoys me that Spotify, etc, are acting as if they think the way forward is streaming without owning music. It's disingenuous on their part. If they offered paid downloads alongside streaming, it would benefit all parties, as far as I can tell. And it would put downloading back on the agenda, at least.

I just can't foresee a time when everyone will be paying $10/month, even people who barely listen to music, or wouldn't listen online. It's a great deal for some, but meaningless to others.

What is the target number of subscribers to make the business model work? (i.e. replace music sales :-)

I just can't foresee a time when everyone will be paying $10/month, even people who barely listen to music, or wouldn't listen online. It's a great deal for some, but meaningless to others.

subscription services have always had a base though: newspapers, magazines, doubleday book club, that record club i can't remember the name of that was constantly a full-page ad in the nme, even gym memberships that 80% of people never use but keep paying for anyway. this model is not really all that different, and if they can really get a grip on discovery/curation as the differentiator, loads of people will think nothing of starting and keeping a pretty cheap monthly subscription.

services like curation will also address the fact that an industry that was built on 100 years of scarcity (e.g. controlling how many cds/records/amberol cylinders get made) and ~fucking ads~ (radio stations, video clip shows on tv) can no longer treat music as a manufactured commodity, and needs to shed generations of defensive behaviour if it's going to survive.

the other factor (which we forget easily) is that in loads of developing countries with a burgeoning middle class, buying music was never really a thing like it was for us, and downloading music off grey-market sites is pretty much normal.

streaming has huge potential to make new profits in those markets, especially when their governments suddenly close the gaps and promote streaming as a cheap and viable way to get music.

but again, the music alone won't be enough for people who have only ever got free music off the web. if those people believe they're getting good value from the extra stuff that streaming platforms offer, it's likely that more and more will pay a relatively low cost (e.g. apple music in india costs r120/us$1.90 a month) without really thinking about it.

At this point, Apple Music should probably team up with VNYL to regain the public's trust.

Or maybe the Chinese government (mentioned in your link, AA) could team up with Vnyl. Basically I just want someone to enable Vnyl to spread chaos throughout the world.

The price differences in different countries are interesting. As we've said itt, people *within* countries aren't all the same - it confuses me that the streaming companies haven't explored this. The pricing still seems very "one-size-fits-all". If Spotify, say, (beating the BC drum again) added a store for CDs/vinyl/dl/merch, I'm sure they already have some users who would be willing to pay extra for that, if it were easy to obtain.

I feel a bit left behind with the curation stuff, I'm still more of a radio person atm. Whatever happened to that Zane guy... :)

Spotify does have links to buy merch n stuff but only some bands do it despite it being available to all.

ok, let's talk about me in the '90s when i was still buying cds, and what kind of cds i was buying. i was a white college kid. i bought a lot of pink floyd cds, used if i could get them. my listening habits were far more insular and restricted than they became in the age of piracy (and streaming, i think, is basically just a form of legalized piracy). the uncompensated model of music has allowed a great many people, myself included, to broaden our horizons and open ourselves to other perspectives the music industry juggernaut necessarily marginalized. billy joel has stopped seeming so fucking important. in the 1990s, i might have read somewhere about algiers, but the chances of my actually hearing it would be somewhere around zero. algiers aren't being paid when i listen to them, but they're being heard. it's not good enough, but it's something.

what's happened, what perhaps inevitably happens with capitalism, is that my appetite for consumption- no, let's use a different word, for _experience_- has far outpaced my ability to provide just and fair compensation for what i've experienced. let's say i have the budget to buy twenty cds a year, which was about what i purchased back in my college years (because my financial situation hasn't actually improved any in the past twenty years- i'm sure you understand). that covers old music and new. how do i decide which twenty are most worthy of that income? do exclude smokey because he's dead? that doesn't seem totally fair to the people who worked very hard to reissue his stuff and bring it to a larger audience. do i exclude kendrick because he seems like he's doing fine, maybe doesn't need my money as much as some other people do? or does that simply make it more likely he'll lose his position as someone who can actually have some influence on all the garbage that's going on now? do i exclude fucked up because they're anti-capitalist anyway?

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.

this board was started by (mostly white etc) people who were broadening their horizons in the 90s, by paying for a shitload of cds (AND stealing them ha)

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/

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?

― lil urbane (Jordan), Tuesday, August 25, 2015 10:26 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh sorry that should say how revenue gets distributed. i'm wondering if the collapse of the market resulted in artists taking a smaller share of a reduced pie

i just read this https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150204/07310329906/yes-major-record-labels-are-keeping-nearly-all-money-they-get-spotify-rather-than-giving-it-to-artists.shtml which argues that it's not that streaming services don't give enough of the revenue back (they keep 20% (also spotify is not currently profitable)) but that labels only give 10% of that 80% to artists. it argues that while this may have once made sense when labels had to actually press records, that no longer applies and they're just ripping off artists.

also did some googling and found these stats from ifpi.org

- number of paying subscribers doubled from 20 to 41 million between 2012 and 2014, and increased fivefold if you go back to 2010

- digital (includes both streaming and downloads) sales overtook physical world-wide this year

- overall industry value in 2014 is about 15 billion $, still down about 25 billion $ from 40 billion $ peak 1999. couldn't find what the nadir was

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?

― usic ally (k3vin k.), Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:03 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if what i wrote above is true they're not getting shitty deal because of streaming but because of how label distributes revenue from streams and "NO ONE IS STOPPING YOU FROM PURCHASING A NON-STREAMING VERSION OF THE MUSIC YOU LIKE IF THAT'S ACTUALLY IMPORTANT TO YOU" is not a good way to think about it.

like, if your only metric is "how much money am i spending on music" and you think you're robbing artists because you're not spending enough on music, well... it could be that if you spent more money on iTunes or buying compact discs, the same absolute amount of money would go to the artist than if you streamed. you can't think about the ethics until you know how revenue is shared for each medium

it's not exactly comparable to sweatshop shoes, like if you really care about musicians having money you could write them a cheque, they're generally identifiable people.. also depending on the contract artists get paid per record sold, so you could just stream, go to best buy and buy 20 compact discs then throw them all in the trash

another article with the blame-the-labels line

https://pando.com/2015/06/07/can-apple-save-the-music-industry-from-the-destructive-greed-of-record-labels/

That URL is a trick question, the greed of record labels IS the music industry.

read the actual article not the url. it's good

The revenue generated by ads on the free tiers of these platforms is dismal in comparison to the revenue generated by subscription fees. According to the most recent IFPI Digital Music Report, the revenue created by ads served up to the estimated 400 million people who use free on-demand streaming music services each month -- that includes YouTube which we often forget is the most-used streaming music platform on the planet -- was only $610 million, Meanwhile, the revenue generated by the 41 million users who pay subscription fees to use Spotify, Rdio, or Deezer is 1.6 billion. That means one-tenth of the world's digital listenership generated over two-and-a-half times more revenue than everybody else. Extrapolate that as a per-user figure, and you'll find that each paying customer created 26 times more revenue a year than each freeloader who generates revenue solely by suffering through -- and likely tuning out -- audio ads.

another interesting thing that i think wasn't considered by DJP & co in the big quote upthread is: the amount of music people consumed increased A LOT after it became free. but the amount they were purchasing before was really small. from panda article:

Even in the 1990s at the height of the music industry, when Americans spent more on music than ever before, the average US consumer only dropped $28 a year on the medium.

so now you have all these people who got used to listening to free music all day... and if you can somehow figure a way to charge them just 10$/month, revenue would explode to tenfold of the nineties peak

As of June, Spotify had 75 million users and 20 million paid subscribers ($10/month). Like I said above, it's a loss leader, and I'm quite sure their plan will be to soon start restricting access to certain content to free users, hopefully converting a certain percentage of them to paid subscribers.

As I discussed in my article, just limiting free content will not be enough. They are going to have to add value to the experience that currently does not yet exist. Columbia House is for sale. Imagine if licensing of all the music and labels CH had would be inherited. That would be extremely valuable. Even if not, the brand is worth something. It would be really interesting to see a company like Netflix buy the brand, adapt it to their model in a modified form, such as $15/month for 3 digital albums a month (all the common formats, including lossless and hey, why not the option of renting the CDs like they are doing with DVDs), $25 for 6, $35 for 10 and so on. If they want to really do it right, offer incentives for the more dedicated fans such as concert tickets, fan clubs, t-shirts, special edition CDs/digital albums with bonus tracks, etc. Maybe partner with Spotify, or a competitor.

Are you saying subscription rental streams? Because emusic already did subscription downloads.

> ($10/month)

£9.99 a month in the uk = $15

Emusic didn't do it very well (interface, available selection, competitive pricing, lossless, etc). It doesn't mean it wouldn't work when done properly.

I see on the Spotify Foals page they have three t-shirts on display to buy from the band. It's a start, of sorts. Friggin' ridiculous there's no links to buy the music.

Hills - Frid is out today, but still only one song from the album is available from Spotify. They should make it so subscribers can stream it the first month, and free users can buy the download for $4-5 and also be able to stream.

"Even in the 1990s at the height of the music industry, when Americans spent more on music than ever before, the average US consumer only dropped $28 a year on the medium."

People listened to the radio more back then too.

t flopson: you've heard of this thing called bandcamp, right?

paying for self-released digital content thru bandcamp is the only time I feel like an "ethical music consumer" ever anymore. everything else is bullshit

ok

even if they get most or all of the money i don't think bands make very much money off bandcamp cause people don't seem to buy tonnes of music off bandcamp and streams are free and i don't see it taking off in a huge way? but i'm glad it makes you feel good i guess

i guess i don't think "which way of buying music online gives ilx posters a warm glow" is as interesting as "what's a viable model for the music industry" maybe this is the wrong thread

> paying for self-released digital content thru bandcamp is the only time I feel like an "ethical music consumer" ever anymore. everything else is bullshit

buying cds at gigs?

only "gigs" I go to anymore are DJ nights haha

... although come to think of it, I would probably "buy" mixes from some of my DJ friends -- I think this used to be called "bootlegging" and I would be quite happy to take part in it :)

Please be more thoughtful when you parrot party lines offered by Pando et al. Tech sites are very snugly in the pockets of the companies they cover.

(I very much believe that the flood-the-zone nature of tech sites and their employees' lack of knowledge about the music business/pandering to the crowd that thinks culture appealing straight to them is just hatched because they've been used to having marketing directed at them all their lives helped accelerate the current untenable situation. Remember when all those sites thought QTrax and SpiralFrog were going to be huge?)

Please be more thoughtful when you parrot party lines offered by Pando et al

do you have a debunking of any of the stuff i quoted from it or you just don't like the url/byline?

oh I just realized Pando is the website that the posted article I pointedly ignored upthread v_v

it was directed at me

(I very much believe that the flood-the-zone nature of tech sites and their employees' lack of knowledge about the music business/pandering to the crowd that thinks culture appealing straight to them is just hatched because they've been used to having marketing directed at them all their lives helped accelerate the current untenable situation. Remember when all those sites thought QTrax and SpiralFrog were going to be huge?)

― maura, Friday, August 28, 2015 11:04 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you should read the article i posted it's good it's not related to what you're describing

"even if they get most or all of the money i don't think bands make very much money off bandcamp cause people don't seem to buy tonnes of music off bandcamp and streams are free"

but there are often payment options for CDs and vinyl and i do think people buy these after listening to the streams. maybe not a ton, but if i were an artist i would rather take my chances there than with the big sites like spotify.

the Legendary Pink Dots make a living wage off of their Bandcamp, according to them

That's good to hear. They certainly have a huge catalogue to sell.

I thought maybe "Pando" was a merger between Pandora and Panda Express. Discount lunch deliveries with yr tunes.

Flopson is right, Bandcamp and buying CDs at shows are fine options for the more dedicated fans. But the masses are not going to go out of their way to spend money out of any sense of obligation or guilt. There needs to be a well-planned approach that gets people excited about getting music and paying for it. It really isn't rocket science, and shouldn't be that hard. Music is way more fun to buy than most of the other shit we have to buy and spend way more money on. There have to be incentives, perks, deals, swag, all the stuff that make people feel they are getting value, not ripped off.

Aside from actual physical merchandise, the rest is all ones and zeroes, and it's just a massive, massive failure of the music industry to not even try capitalize on it on good faith, and while treating their customers with respect rather than bludgeoning them with lawsuits, since 2000.

Pando has a much more adversarial relationship to most of the tech industry than any other tech site i can think of.

even if they get most or all of the money i don't think bands make very much money off bandcamp cause people don't seem to buy tonnes of music off bandcamp and streams are free and i don't see it taking off in a huge way? but i'm glad it makes you feel good i guess

some indie artists who focus their thing around Bandcamp (i.e. making it the only place to get the record) make most of their money from it. you can get an idea just from the little avatar squares that show up for each person who has bought a record and also have a 'fan' account. like, looking at a recent fixed-price album for a pretty popular indie rapper, that's $3,600 right there, minus $540 for Bandcamp's cut. And there are probably a bunch more people who bought it without creating a fan account.

Maybe that's not very much money in the grand scheme of things, but it's not nothing either (and you get it in your pocket right away too). And it does feel like the go-to place to directly support an artist. For a couple albums that I found myself streaming all the time, I bought them on Bandcamp and didn't even download.

xxxxp

i have definitely bought vinyl from artists after listening to their stuff on bandcamp. not a lot, but if you can get me to buy something new online you are doing something right. i also like buying stuff from labels on discogs. new stuff. a LOT of people buy new records from discogs as opposed to a label's website! which seems weird, but it's a browsing thing.

Pando has a much more adversarial relationship to most of the tech industry than any other tech site i can think of.

― I wear my Redditor loathing with pride (ShariVari),

"slight pushback that comes after a female founder realizes that the industry she covers has a lot of inherent sexism" is not "much more adversarial."

but whatever, sorry for getting this off topic.

(that said, like... the question posed in the headline assumes that apple doesn't also have 'destructive greed' tendencies, which seems like a BIG leap.)

People listened to the radio more back then too.

― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), Friday, 28 August 2015 14:32 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not much more, though. Average Time Spent Listening is still about 2.5 hours per day in the US, compared with almost 3 hours a day 10 years ago. It's a bigger fall for young people (obviously) - but under 21s still listen to more than an hour a day

Lots of food for thought in the article Flopson posted upthread. I was surprised that Apple only wanted to charge US$5 a month for Apple Music, but the reasons given are solid – higher takeup, probably higher revenues. An idea the labels sensibly shot down, if Pando has it right.

Apologies if posted before:

[quote]Earlier this year, analysts at Ernst & Young estimated how streaming revenue is shared [...] after the IRS takes 16.7 percent of the revenue, streaming music platforms collect 20.8 percent. That's not a bad haul, but out of the remaining 62.4 percent, the record label keeps three-fourths of that, leaving only 10 percent of the total to be split between publishers and songwriters and only 6.8 percent for artists.[/quote]

That percentage looks quite familiar – the cut an artist gets from a major-label CD sale is talked about in this article from 2006, and another from 2013 that's somehow more dated. There are obvious differences in the business models and amounts of money involved, but streaming seems less like a new world, more like "seen it all before".

That isn't a defence of major labels. Just shows they're very slow to adapt, maybe, unless it involves upping their own percentage. (On past evidence, the way to create another Beatles will be to pay new artists at the Beatles' rate of... 1.87%?! Get on it, EMI-UMG.)

But the way it is today, I'm cautiously optimistic – I hope the labels' greed will reduce their power in the long run. In April, the "Information Is Beautiful" graphic of all the different music-revenue sources was updated. Who knew Youtube would be so stingy?

But the way it is today, I'm cautiously optimistic – I hope the labels' greed will reduce their power in the long run. In April, the "Information Is Beautiful" graphic of all the different music-revenue sources was updated. Who knew Youtube would be so stingy?

How the hell can the percentage of "signed users to hit minimum wage" on Beats be 140%

300,000 users, but 420,000 plays needed in a month, apparently. Guess we'll never get to see if it actually happens.

xp Because it doesn't have enough users? (Only 300,000 according to the chart)
That statistic means "What percentage of the entire Beats userbase would need to stream a song for the artist's cut to exceed the monthly minimum wage" and the answer is >100% because even if every Beats user listened to a song, it still wouldn't be enough!

Oh my bad I thought users here meant artists (as in, percentage of artists who use the service to hit minimum wage), hence it didn't make sense

I've worked in the music business for twenty years now, the last twelve as my day job - I don't obsess over digital distribution so this is a casual observation, not an "I looked at all the data and I'm telling you all the TRUTH" or anything, but many smaller labels (Hells Headbangers and NWN! are the ones I'm most familiar with because that's stuff I listen to a lot, but this is also seems to be true among the label owners I know) have made Bandcamp a pretty huge part of what they do; nobody's becoming a millionaire off Bandcamp, but it's making an actual I-noticed-that difference in people's monthly paychecks. It compares to the P&D/distro places that dropped like flies in the post-Napster era: it gets the stuff up & available on a place people know about and feel comfortable using. I'm an outlier but I've been buying new music almost exclusively from Bandcamp this year. People can minimize "oh, cool, you got twenty dollars instead of a dollar, go buy 1/4 of a cart of groceries" but that's kinda the Bandcamp difference imo. Its impact isn't minimal, I think -- it'll remain niche, I guess, but it has given actual relief to already-extant labels and bands.

i enjoy buying on bandcamp. since I have the disposable income I still buy all my music, esp since most of it is made by bands who are lucky to sell 10,000 copies of anything.

Bandcamp also has FLACs available and I like the format of the site - BandCamp is getting notorious enough to where if you can't immediately find the album you just type the band's name and bandcamp in google.

LOL 90's...

https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/11902430_10154189395117137_3466540928732263849_n.jpg?oh=115a170cbd930b7c9340b860336314a4&oe=5680A69E

Ï don't understand how this would work. (Not saying it wouldn't work, it's just not well explained in the article.)

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/13/musicians-back-pay-as-you-play-coding-solution-to-win-fair-deal-artists-streaming

But there's a few tidbids:

“They claim to share their vast advertising revenue with creators, but they make the rules. YouTube only shares 55% of advertising revenue with those who achieve over 700,000 views per upload in a quarter [3mths], so it is in YouTube’s interest for multiple people to upload the same content to dilute the viewers so they pay out less money to creators.” (Hélène Muddiman)

I was gonna post this in the forks thread, but fuck that thing. I'm posting here instead.

Spotify have no control over what record labels or publishing companies do with royalties once they hand them over. It's funny how people villify Spotify while using YouTube, since YouTube pays significantly less in royalties even though it has more than 10x the users and streams than Spotify has. YouTube also takes 80% off the top of all ad revenue earned by a YouTube video and only pays royalties on "monetized" videos, a.k.a. videos with ads. It's usually only the official artists' YouTube videos that receive ads in the first place, meaning that artists often do not earn royalties on most unofficial YouTube streams. It's possible that the industry and the artists are fighting against the wrong enemy here. The labels, who use outdated borderline-crooked methods for paying royalties and YouTube/Google who can't bother to pay artists a fair rate even though they have all the money in the world.

Nice post.

I can't possibly read this whole thread but anyone who thinks that Spotify is any better or worse than the music industry has always been should google the name "Morris Levy."

they're just more of the same, which is the problem.

i feel like people consume things differently on youtube. yes you can listen to almost anything on it, but it doesn't function as smoothly as a replacement music library. i'm probably building a strawman here but fuck it.

let's tax inherited wealth at rates that produced the 1950s blues and 1960s rock booms again. oh wait, wrong thread!

I thought this was a good summary of where things stand in 2019:
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/22/743775196/the-success-of-streaming-has-been-great-for-some-but-is-there-a-better-way

This article repeats, again, the reasonable-sounding but incorrect assertion that the pro-rata payment model is biased towards the most popular artists. In fact, as a general pattern the people who stream more than average on Spotify tend to stream less-popular artists, so the current pro-rata model acts as a slight subsidy of the less-popular by the most-popular, rather than the other way around.

The thing that has a bigger effect on streaming equity is the current industry practice of counting any stream of :30 or more of a song as a "play". This penalizes artists for producer longer/fewer songs, and allows abusive gaming of the system like this:

https://open.spotify.com/album/3glK7aKuf8ZccIvLTQBGC2?si=N_srvhXaRm-L8pnL0zOZJQ

(an 18-hour German audiobook delivered as 2,037 :31-:35 tracks)

Spotify’s payment rates to all artists are bad, and pointing out that consumers based on your data stream less popular artists more doesn’t change that. Seems like you’re just saying less popular artists algorithmically could be be paid less and should just just be grateful for this insignificant subsidy they allegedly receive based on amounts of streams.

Also your subsidy argument doesn’t account for the other factors :

Streaming payouts to artists vary wildly however, depending on whether they are signed to a major or independent label, and whether or not they're songwriters of an individual tune, as well as the performers. And within these situations, the terms of these contracts can make one artist's pay stub unrecognizable to another's.

Also your subsidy argument doesn’t account for the other factors :

Streaming payouts to artists vary wildly however, depending on whether they are signed to a major or independent label, and whether or not they're songwriters of an individual tune, as well as the performers. And within these situations, the terms of these contracts can make one artist's pay stub unrecognizable to another's.

I thought it was a given that Spotify et al. were just a convenient way to steal music for a small fee, as opposed to the less convenient but completely free methods that the under-40 set have been using to steal music for the last 20 years.

How is streaming a song stealing it? You don't have a copy of it to keep when you're done.

lol good point

how is leaving the restaurant without paying stealing, you don’t get to keep a copy of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZ

that was not a serious post, please don’t respond

I don’t understand the section of the NPR article where they talk about how great the Bandcamp model is, but then dismisses it (and other alternatives) because they won’t “topple Spotify.” This paragraph in particular:

And while many independent musicians, artists, and critics have positive things to say about Bandcamp, and how its model allows for more equity than anywhere else right now, they're hesitant to hinge the future of streaming on it. "My great optimism would be that more people who have engagement with the archive, for example, or more of an emphasis on the kind of deep cultural aspects of music would think like that, rather than trying to pin their hopes on something like Bandcamp. Which I completely like," says Dryhurst. "But long-term, I don't see it as being viable, it feels like... retiring into your fantasies or something, to think that will ever compete at the level of a venture monster like Spotify."

It seems to me that if every artist and label (with the power to do so) pulled their music from other streaming services in favor of Bandcamp, then its model would win out, no?

"And actually, the internet and music might be a whole bunch more exciting if artists were given the tools to make the experience of consuming their work as unique as, arguably, the work is in itself."

this is a gross and perplexing sentence

no wonder https://breakermag.com/mat-dryhurst-musician-iconoclast-on-helping-artists-with-blockchain/

My main frame of reference here is Hollywood, where there’s nothing artsy-fartsy about these issues, it’s very cut-and-dried — actors, writers, etc. belong to guilds which negotiate, with the studios, residual rates from distribution of movies & TV shows across all platforms, including “streaming.” But I understand that doesn’t apply to the music biz, for many reasons.

Bandcamp is absolutely the better model

I’m a bit sceptical that this trend for shorter songs works, except if you’re a mega selling artist - if nearly everyone gets paid close to zero anyway, why make it 1.5x zero by making your songs two minutes instead of three?

Because “close to zero” is not zero

I mean, as a regular non-mega star, why not tailor your songs to your live shows which can make you loads of actual money instead of squeezing out another three bucks a year from Spotify?

I don’t understand the section of the NPR article where they talk about how great the Bandcamp model is, but then dismisses it (and other alternatives) because they won’t “topple Spotify.”

I interpreted it as being about the fact that Bandcamp is still a download-based model, and most people don't care about downloads these days. They don't pay anything for a stream, the streaming function is just 'try before you pay'.

So people paying for music on Bandcamp are either doing it because they still like to own mp3s, are a DJ, or use it as a tip jar for musicians that they otherwise stream.

Actually, I'm not factoring in the Bandcamp app, that must be more about offline streaming? I've never used it.

You can stream on Bandcamp (website & app); it just makes you pay after you’ve streamed an album for free x number of times. At least, that’s the setup I most frequently encounter there.

(And yes, you also get to download the album once you’ve paid)

Bandcamp is the only place I routinely pay for digital copies of music, in part because they offer lossless as well. In this high bandwidth age the trivial savings of mp3 compression vs the audible defects make this a line-in-the-sand issue. I want to hear the audio the artist made, not an approximation the engineers at Fraunhofer tell me is good enough because "Tom's Diner" sounded fine through the codec.
I used to nearly always buy the physical releases as well, until the US postal service lost its mind and started charging $15 shipping (Australia) for a $10 CD. Now I buy the digital and add a few bucks for good measure. I don't know if the perception is wrong but I feel like it goes more directly to the artist on Bandcamp. I used Spotify for a month a few years back, but deleted my account and have never been interested again.
But then I have the overhead of maintaining a digital library of more than 40 000 tracks - it's my equivalent of gardening.

Bandcamp is the online indie label. Everything they do, from stressing downloads over streaming, to the relatively artist-friendly profit split, to the user interface, to the carefully rolled out editorials/curation, to not checking for samples with bots, reflects independent sensibilities. Users love it, and increasing numbers of professional musicians feel comfortable there. But it remains a place for self-driven music fans who enjoy the hard work of searching for things themselves.

Yes, Bandcamp is filled with the same kind of recommendations that Spotify is. But there are 10,000 underlying business & UX decisions that keep the content indie, keeps the music feeling unmediated, and keep out blatant monocultural intrusions / recommendations. And if Bandcamp ever started tilted towards those 'trusted' (subsidized) recommendations that allowed it to scale, and Drake links started showing up when I went there to buy a Blue Gene Tyranny CD - the game would be up. It's already astonishing to me that Bandcamp has scaled as big as it already has, while staying what it is.

I think the low-key most impressive thing about Bandcamp is that once you've paid for an album once, you can upgrade for free if you want. You can download it as 320kbps MP3s when you first purchase it, then come back later and download it again as WAV files, without having to pay twice.

It's already astonishing to me that Bandcamp has scaled as big as it already has, while staying what it is.

yeah. I mean it's just spectacularly good. I hadn't even considered the possibility of Bandcamp turning heel in my mind until your post, honestly, and I get depressed contemplating it

You can stream on Bandcamp (website & app); it just makes you pay after you’ve streamed an album for free x number of times. At least, that’s the setup I most frequently encounter there.

― the last Berry La Croix in the work fridge (morrisp), Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:59 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, but artists don't get paid per stream (just for downloads), so I hope there aren't people feeling good about themselves for only streaming on Bandcamp instead of Spotify.

Also the limited number of plays thing is configurable by the artist, I believe.

(just to be clear, I really love Bandcamp, but I get that it's always going to be a niche music nerd thing in some sense)

I guess I’m still confused — if I pay for an album on Bandcamp, I’m certainly not going to feel “bad about myself” for continuing to stream it from there... that’s the payment model.

And if certain artists allow unlimited streaming without payment (which I haven’t encountered) — well, obviously you should buy the album if you enjoy it. Seems those artists have chosen the promotional / “honor system” model.

As for Bandcamp being “niche” — that’s the point I made above... if Taylor Swift had kept her music off Spotify & Apple and went to Bandcamp, it wouldn’t be “niche” anymore, right?

(And not to put this all on Taylor Swift; but clearly it’s not all ok the “users,” either — the industry has chosen to embrace the streaming services, and fans are going to use them. The article discusses these better models that exist, but then dismisses them because... the industry won’t embrace them? So what are listeners to do? I still buy my favorite albums on CD, but that’s obviously not happening for most listeners anymore.)

*...not all on the users

I was talking about streaming without paying for a dl, not after.

And it would be great if a huge artist went bandcamp-only, but most people still aren't interested in downloads (which I think of as bc's focus). But like I said, I personally don't use Bandcamp for streaming all that much, mostly dance music downloads, I just wasn't thinking of it like that.

Saying it's not all on the users because "fans are going to use them" never held water with me - the argument basically being "can you blame ppl for not being able to resist this great temptation?" I don't expect people to resist temptation, but just bc they cant be expected to resist the unethical thing being offered to them doesn't make them blameless.

I mean, as a regular non-mega star, why not tailor your songs to your live shows which can make you loads of actual money

People have been repeating the argument "replace your lost revenue via live shows" since the dawn of file sharing, and yet so many of these clueless artists still haven't chosen to just unilaterally decide to make more money via "live shows"... sad!

Blameless for what? For accessing music via the Spotify/YouTube links that their favorite artists are tweeting out?

We spent the 2000s gently clicking at friends that they really shouldn’t be downloading music, b/c it’s screwing the artists. Now that that the industry has a new model, our message is supposed to be, “The artists promoting this are still getting screwed, so you should... go back to iTunes or buying CDs?”

*gently clucking

And like I said, I do still personally buy some CDs and downloads (in addition to subscribing to YT Music); but I’m not gonna tell a 15-yr-old to do it, that ship has sailed.

Kind of imho, yeah! The artists are only being forced to go all-in on participating in this new model that vastly undercompensates them bc consumers are unwilling to buy CDs anymore? And the reason no one is willing to buy CDs anymore is because they have access to this new cheaper way of hearing music, which has the side effect of vastly undercompensating artists.

Saying "what are people supposed to do, actually buy CDs?!", as if thats some kind of bizarre behavior akin to eschewing electric lights for oil lamps or something, is part of the problem and exactly what the big labels & tech companies wanted to trick us all into thinking.

xp

btw there's another reason to stop thinking of yourself as a good person while streaming music which i don't think has been addressed itt

Although the shift from physical media to streaming has reduced cost and plastic pollution, using services like Spotify and Apple Music is driving up carbon emissions and contributing to climate change, a recent study says.

The Cost of Music is a joint venture between the University of Glasgow and the University of Oslo, and warns that the energy used to store and stream digital media is just as harmful for the environment as plastic waste.

Although the amount of plastics consumed by the industry dropped to 8 million kilograms in 2016 from a high of 61 million kilograms at the CD’s peak in 2000, when the study translated the production of plastics and the generation of electricity into greenhouse gas equivalents (GHGs), streaming generates far more. While GHGs peaked at 157 million in 2000 under the physical era, the generation of GHGs by storing and streaming digital files is estimated to be between 200 million kilograms and over 350 million kilograms in the USA alone.

Dr Kyle Devine, Associate Professor in Music at the University of Oslo, said: “These figures seem to confirm the widespread notion that music digitalised is music dematerialised. The figures may even suggest that the rises of downloading and streaming are making music more environmentally friendly.

“But a very different picture emerges when we think about the energy used to power online music listening. Storing and processing music online uses a tremendous amount of resources and energy – which a high impact on the environment.”

link ?

https://www.factmag.com/2019/04/09/streaming-music-emissions-study/

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/183249/

ty

Hakuna repeatedly otm upthread

People have been repeating the argument "replace your lost revenue via live shows" since the dawn of file sharing, and yet so many of these clueless artists still haven't chosen to just unilaterally decide to make more money via "live shows"... sad!

― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open), Monday, July 29, 2019 11:13 AM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes, I love this. "Just get in the van and play, man, you'll build an audience that way!" As if venues are just scrambling to fill their calendars with bands who don't draw.

And the reason no one is willing to buy CDs anymore is because they have access to this new cheaper way of hearing music, which has the side effect of vastly undercompensating artists.

Never accept the "just make money from live shows" argument from anyone who hasn't carried a drumset and Ampeg bass cab up a narrow flight of stairs

Saying "what are people supposed to do, actually buy CDs?!", as if thats some kind of bizarre behavior akin to eschewing electric lights for oil lamps or something, is part of the problem and exactly what the big labels & tech companies wanted to trick us all into thinking.

― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open), Monday, July 29, 2019 10:28 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

first, i think this is kind of an unimaginative and not very constructive response to the Streaming Question. the reason that young people don’t, and other people have stopped, buying CD’s is tied in with a gigantic cultural, economic, sociological shift in the ways in which humans interact, share information, and experience art in the 21st century. a future with equitable pay for musicians needs to address this systemically, e.g. via expansion of public funding for the arts

secondly, it ignores that (a) more profits via CD or other physical media sales doesn’t necessarily translate into more money for the artist and (b) there’s absolutely nothing about a physical CD that makes it more valuable than a dl in any meaningful way: at the height of the CD era, labels could charge that much because people perceived the experience of hearing the music to be worth many dollars. now that that illusion is gone, you can’t just go back !

morrisp 100% otm, these artists are SHARING THE LINKS to streaming sites on social media, but we’re supposed to wag our fingers at the fans who click and stream ? because they didn’t buy a CD instead ?

also the “i still buy CDs even tho the big labels don’t want me to” is the lamest genre of noncomformity

lol UMS otm

also morrisp otm, again

xps

morrisp 100% otm, these artists are SHARING THE LINKS to streaming sites on social media, but we’re supposed to wag our fingers at the fans who click and stream ? because they didn’t buy a CD instead ?

Whether or not the artists engage with the new model is irrevelant - they have no choice due to the changed habits of consumers. Saying such-and-such capitalist structure must be ethical because producer/workers are participating in it is backwards logic.

Sometimes being an ethical consumer means paying more than the barest minimum that you are legally obligated to by the existing consumer system, this is not a radical idea, no?

Remember the ‘80s and early ‘90s, when the story was how artists were getting screwed on CD sales b/c their contracts still treated them as an “experimental” medium? There was no movement to shame listeners into getting back into LPs; it was treated as an industry issue for artists’ management to solve with the labels (which they did).

This is a different beast imho bc under the current status quo the biggest & most powerful artists are also profiting inordinately from the new model - the artists who are being screwed the most are the ones with the least negotiating power. Saying "I'm sure it will all work itself out behind the scenes without anyone having to change their consuming habits" is some magical thinking.

i didn’t say it was ethical

i just said it’s misguided and ultimately ineffective to situate a critique at that particular node in the system

xp

More misguided and unrealistic than expecting all that lost sales revenue to get magically replaced with an wholesale systemic change in the way arts are funded? Ok.

the artists who are being screwed the most are the ones with the least negotiating power.

And how many of those artists have sufficient control over their music to bring it (exclusively) to Bandcamp or SoundCloud, with their superior “pay to stream after x plays” model? No one has answered this, other than to tautologically reply that those services are “niche.”

Or you could just... buy the album?

some very tortured arguments itt for solving the problem of musicians not being paid fairly by somehow spending less money on music

duh why didn’t i think of that

xp

xxp That IS buying the album. It costs the same. You’re just not burdened with a physical CD, which (as b.j. adeptly pointed out above) is an outdated medium for numerous reasons.

solving the problem of musicians not being paid fairly by somehow spending less money on music

who is saying this ?

xp Yeah morrisp I agree but this is what you wrote

And how many of those artists have sufficient control over their music to bring it (exclusively) to Bandcamp or SoundCloud, with their superior “pay to stream after x plays” model? No one has answered this

What other platforms the artists work is available on is irrelevant, if you can buy the album, buy the album, problem solved.

So much effort is expended to make this issue seem like some responsibility of the artists to make their music more available, or more available in exactly the right ways, or less available in some ways but more available in other ways, etc etc. But the option to pay a price for music that fairly compensates the artist hasn't changed, whether its buying cds or lps, paying on bandcamp or whatever. Saying "if only the artists did this" or "if only the indie labels did that" doesn't change the fact that you almost always have the option to buy the music at a rate that fairly compensates the artist.

Saying "since they've been forced by industry changes to offer their music on the most popular platform for consuming music, it is therefore fair for me to consume it that way" is a nonstarter.

More misguided and unrealistic than expecting all that lost sales revenue to get magically replaced with an wholesale systemic change in the way arts are funded? Ok.

― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open), Monday, July 29, 2019 11:33 AM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i never uttered the words “an expansion of public funding for the arts would be easy and uncontroversial”

i do think it’s something worth fighting for, though, and implying that it could only happen via “magic” is both shitty and kind of weird coming from the person who insists that this very simple problem could easily be solved if we just get the generation raised on smart phones to start buying CD’s en masse and also this money will go straight to the artist of course

buy the album, problem solved.

you’ve got to be joking

What other platforms the artists work is available on is irrelevant, if you can buy the album, buy the album, problem solved.

I do "buy the album" (if I like it and want to keep listening). Who is the "you/me" you keep addressing? The vast majority of listeners (especially young ones) are going to listen via the path of least resistance -- streaming -- and my p.o.v. is that: (a) artists should indeed be justly compensated, and (b) if there are business models which accomplish that (which the article posted above says is the case), then those are the models which artists, labels, and their management should be pushing/adopting/using whatever. It's not a chin-stroking philosophical argument, and nor is it about bullying teenagers into buying DiscMans (cuz that's not gonna work).

budo I half agree with you in the sense that, while each thing would be good (massively structural economic shift to public funding of arts, kids buying music instead of streaming), neither is likely to ever happen imho, I guess we disagree on which thing is less likely to never happen, but w/e, splitting hairs at that point

Budo the catalyst for me posting itt was just morrisp’s statement that “but clearly it’s not all on the users either — the industry has chosen to embrace the streaming services, and fans are going to use them”

Which like, whatever the solution is, considering how previous methods for buying music still exist, then clearly the blame is on the consumers who shifted their spending habits? Doesn’t seem like a controversial conclusion to me. Not arguing for government-issued DiscMans for every teen or w/e, but it seems obvious on its face that the drop in compensation for music is the result of ppl finding ways to justify not paying as much for music as they used to.

buy the album, problem solved.

you’ve got to be joking

― budo jeru, Monday, July 29, 2019 1:02 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

2019

my whole point was that public arts funding would only be one aspect to address a structural problem

changing consumer habits could potentially change things for the better, my problem is that you haven’t considered the disparities between artists re: retail price vs. paycheck. the music industry is really complicated !

morrisp already made the point that, at a time when p much one’s only option was “just buy the album,” this did not necessarily mean better material conditions for the artist. in a utopian world where everybody shuns streaming and buys CD’s, what guarantees the welfare of the artists ?

xp

Which like, whatever the solution is, considering how previous methods for buying music still exist, then clearly the blame is on the consumers who shifted their spending habits? Doesn’t seem like a controversial conclusion to me.

anyway if this is your starting point we’re never going to get anywhere constructive so, i disagree

what i mean is, i now see what you’re saying, i disagree but don’t want to elaborate beyond that, and sorry for derailing

I concur w/b.j. -- it seems like if there's a "blame game" to be played here, we're not going to convince each other that the "blame" should fall on listeners.

(or vice-versa, whatever)

Never accept the "just make money from live shows" argument from anyone who hasn't carried a drumset and Ampeg bass cab up a narrow flight of stairs

or lived in a place which used to get cool up+coming bands coming through in the 90s when 15 of the 20 people who turned up might have bought a record and/or told their friends, and now gets 0 cool bands coming through because bands save the live shows for established fan bases in big cities now they can no longer break even by treating them as loss leaders for the album

^^^ this

Of course, festivals are also at least partly to blame for this

Yes, the gradual transformation of the tour from "promotional effort for new album" to "only realistic source of income for the year" for many bands has not exactly been a boon to music fans outside of major cities.

lol at whoever was making fun of Mat Dryhurst, he's a lovely guy and a sound and visuals designer, not a fucking orator. get over it.

also, while i actively use Youtube, i still don't have a Spotify account. i don't even know what it looks like, tbh, and hope i never do.

Not to discount any of the problems with streaming and recompense, but I frequently Spotify-stream albums that I have paid for and own when I could just rip them and play the MP3s, so the artists in this case are getting extra money from me. Obviously this isn't much on its own, but I can't be the only person doing this.

If you're using YouTube but you think Spotify is evil, you...are not making decisions on principle.

How many streams of an album are roughly equivalent to a sale (in terms of royalties paid), does that metric exist?

top royalty rate is like 1 cent right? So roughly 100 plays per dollar. and then that gets split up between the artist and label etc I think

So per album, I guess around 10 plays? just rough estimate

whatever, head math while typing on a phone

If that’s true, and everything above 10 plays is gravy, that’s not so bad(?) Based on how many times a fan plays their favorite albums.

If you can’t be bothered to buy an album you probably shouldn’t call yourself a fan

Tell that to the kids who stream nonstop.

I have a more pithy version for them

Some of you seem to have a bizarre fetish around the idea of “buying the album,” almost as if it’s not actually about earning royalties for the artist at all.

I mean I know this is the labels’ fault more than anyone’s, they got so terrified of being demolished by piracy that they let tech firms dictate the playing field and they left out artists in the bargain. But to my dying day I’ll reserve the right to be angry at every asshole who decided music was something they deserve for free unless they decide to put some spare change in the donation cup, and turned everyone into a busker, because that just doesn’t seem right. Even if it is what the market supports.

Right, you’re mad at Limewire (and with good reason). I work with a guy in his 30s who’s never bought an album in his life. But people who embrace streaming today aren’t the assholes.

music is free now go chase your dreams

top royalty rate is like 1 cent right? So roughly 100 plays per dollar. and then that gets split up between the artist and label etc I think

― brimstead, Tuesday, 30 July 2019 01:23 (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

So per album, I guess around 10 plays? just rough estimate

― brimstead, Tuesday, 30 July 2019 01:24 (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

whatever, head math while typing on a phone

― brimstead, Tuesday, 30 July 2019 01:25 (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

If that’s true, and everything above 10 plays is gravy, that’s not so bad(?) Based on how many times a fan plays their favorite albums.

― the last Berry La Croix in the work fridge (morrisp), Tuesday, 30 July 2019 01:29 (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

one cent per play is an overestimate, but even allowing for that it would take 100 album plays, not 10 (assuming 10 tracks per album), to approach the average album retail cost.

but how much of the retail cost of a cd do the artists see?

> the kids who stream nonstop.

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. </old>

but how much of the retail cost of a cd do the artists see?

the store will take a cut that is probably roughly the same % as spotify takes from this mythical cent per play, the label still gets their fat chunk regardless of the source.

From that Damon Krukowski article in pfork last year: Spotify had sent songwriting royalties of $1.05 for the 5,960 times our single “Tugboat” was played that quarter—split between the group’s three members, each of us had made 35 cents.

Breaks down to $0.00017 per stream. Obviously every deal is different, but still.

this site (which I found in a Google search, have no clue about its legitimacy) says “One Spotify stream is worth about $0.006 to $0.0084 to an artist”

the store will take a cut that is probably roughly the same % as spotify takes from this mythical cent per play, the label still gets their fat chunk regardless of the source.

Lol, at "paying" for an album by streaming it 100 times. Where are you getting this shit? Try like 10,000 times or more.

This also ignores that the largest investors in Spotify are the major labels who basically gave away streaming royalty rates as cheaply as possible in exchange for ownership interests in Spotify and/or non-royalty payments, which solely benefit the labels and not the artists. Therefore, the artists' cut of the streaming equivalent of a "sale" of an album will be far less than their cut of a physical sale (which was jack shit to begin with).

Basically, the way streams are paid is the Albini article on bad faith label accounting on steroids.

xxp It also says Spotify has “36% of the global streaming market” — surprisingly low to me. Do other services pay more? Wasn’t that Tidal’s deal

Tidal's deal was jacking people's accounts to generate fake streams for Beyonce & Kanye iirc

I read about that, lol

Here’s a detailed breakdown of royalty rates from different sources, by someone who seems to know their stuff. Apparently that “$0.006 to $0.0084” range (cited above) comes from an old Spotify FAQ that has since been taken down.

Somewhere between 20 and 50 plays of a recent album, I'm breaking down and buying the thing on vinyl... and continuing to use Spotify out of the house for it (downloaded, mind, not wasting bandwidth constantly). I get exposed to more music with streaming so... I feel fine. The title of this thread, from the original article linked, seems to be making people extra heated.

One thing I never hear of in this equation... When we discover something we like, say, over a few years old, and not easily available directly from the artist online, isn't it better off streaming a bunch than buying the one new copy at the store, that they aren't going to re-order?

All the math I ever see seems to take as a given that we're talking about recent releases.

Buying digital from Bandcamp is pretty easy and doesn't involve having a CD. Most artists seems to suggest Bandcamp is pretty fair.

Love bandcamp for buying digital. Would get physicals there more often if I weren't usually in a different country from where it's gonna ship from.

isn't it better off streaming a bunch than buying the one new copy at the store

how do you feel about Bandcamp morris?

whoops, thread title not from an article. OP's summary of previous conversations? sorry

It's tough to recall a time when listening to music — and making it — wasn't completely synonymous with streaming.

This is a bizarre first sentence.

Even overlooking live music, I don't see why that would be tough for anyone whose memory extends back 10 years.

xxxp I like Bandcamp! And what I’ve asked above is why more artists don’t use it exclusively, if it gives them the best deal. It’s a “niche” service right now — but couldn’t a critical mass of artists, inviting fans to find them on Bandcamp, change the equation?

maybe the writer was super into RealAudio

(I'm going to actually read the article, just got O_O there.) xps

Drag City resisted streaming for the longest time; then finally went to Bandcamp-exclusive; then threw in the towel and went full streaming not long afterward.

A year after this guy gave this interview, he made his music available on Spotify: http://exclaim.ca/amparticle/bonnie_prince_billy_decries_disrespectful_irresponsible_music_streaming_calls_spotify_really_horrible

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

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.

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.

It's almost like people will follow the path of least action and couldn't give a shit about art at all - even when that was paying £15 for a new CD. Who knew?

That burden shouldn't have to be on the backs of the consumers, though. The industry was supposed to have "solved the problem." It's not music fans' fault that a heavily promoted, artist-endorsed music distribution channel is so exploitative.

It seems to be taken as a given in this convo that the labels are inherently and irredeemably exploitative, and just aren't going to change, so there's no point in leaning on that particular pressure point in the chain. Like a force of nature or something.

It seems to be taken as a given in this convo that the labels are inherently and irredeemably exploitative, and just aren't going to change, so there's no point in leaning on that particular pressure point in the chain. Like a force of nature or something.

The last innovation major labels came up with was the "360 deal", where they get a cut of all revenue streams (merch, touring, etc.) rather than just record sales. Does that sound more or less exploitative than what was going on before?

I only seem to speak in a bland register but why are we painting consumers as ethical, sentient beings? We're not, broadly. Even on here, which is, I assume, a relatively invested subset, there's at best a grumbling passivity.

xp More! But again, I work in a creative industry where the artists have well-established avenues for ensuring favorable compensation. You can watch mainstream movies & TV shows via any legitimate avenue, and generally feel comfortable the participants aren't being financially exploited (..."creative" Hollywood accounting notwithstanding, LOL). I know the music biz is a very different ballgame, for a host of reasons, but it's hard to get my head around.

well we don't have functional unions anymore, for one thing (thx rock n roll!)

It's clearly true that Spotify only exists because we (long before I worked here) agreed to work with the majors instead of against them. But Apple had already done that. Unless you really believe that Bandcamp could have beaten the iTunes Store if streaming hadn't happened (and that streaming wouldn't have happened without Spotify), which seems implausible to me, then it's hard to see how this part could realistically have been different.

It seems to be taken as a given in this convo that the labels are inherently and irredeemably exploitative, and just aren't going to change, so there's no point in leaning on that particular pressure point in the chain. Like a force of nature or something.

If we can't convince companies to change to save us all from terrifying global catastrophe, how will me make them change to make themselves less money from music?

It’s the artists (and their management) who negotiate contract terms with the labels, not listeners — though apparently (and sadly) most don’t have the leverage to get favorable terms w/r/t streaming royalties.

i know almost nothing about the film industry, way back or right now, but are there similar discussions happening over on the film threads on ILE ? anywhere on the internet / academia / wherever ? like about netflix / amazon prime / filmstruck / criterion / streaming films in general

are there any useful analogues ?

don’t mean to detail but if anybody has pertinent links i’d be v grateful

See my post 5 slots up, for starters...

ha, sorry.

i need to stop posting on my phone.

thanks !

any other insights also welcome :)

(Basically, everything’s negotiated with the guilds, at least in terms of residuals. This doesn’t mean everyone gets the same upfront deal for the same project, of course — but that’s negotiated between talent and studios/prodcos, and is highly dependent on multiple factors, same as it’s ever been.)

Yeah, the film discussions I've seen centre much more around the dangers to film preservation, stuff getting pulled from services due to rights issues and such.

I think the difference is that the barrier to entry is so much higher on the film side, so there are fewer filmmakers complaining. The hypothetical career path is also still in existence (get your parents to fund your shitty horror script -> take it to Sundance -> direct the next Fantastic Four film) so the discussion is different. But I totally see filmmakers complaining about streaming sites and being asked to work for free, etc.

Also the means of distribution have traditionally been so limited in the indie film world — if you managed to get a film financed & produced, it’s a labor of love, you’re thrilled it gets into a single festival and some ppl see it, etc. Streaming sites that pad out their catalog with low-budget docs & features may not be offering great terms, but the filmmakers probably see it as an avenue that wasn’t open to them before.

It’s not like they could have gotten their film into theaters on an “indie label” and gotten the equivalent of “album sales,” there’s no analogy w/music.

Few years ago, I edited a film website, one affiliated with Indiewire. I am not a cineaste, so I found much of the carrying on therein by self-identified cineastes (who were largely very poor —bordering on incompetent— writers who had only ever written for internet outlets for nothing or for peanuts and never had an incentive to, yknow, get better) utterly tiresome. In my experience, film enthusiasts were handwringing about the integrity of the cinematic experience, i.e. you-must-see-if-at-the-theater-or-it-ain't-film. Also, the sense that post-millenials have no interest in film qua film, to the point that these kids may not even —gasp— have a favorite movie, they just watch shit for 5 minutest on youtube, portended tremendous ill.

Actually, to complicate what I wrote above a bit — it may the case that the rise of streaming has led to a rise of “blockbuster culture” at theaters, where fewer exhibitors are taking chances on smaller films and would rather just book Avengers Pt. 126.

my kid loves movies, her friends love movies, my nieces and nephews love movies, who are these theoretical young people?

Yeah even indie films require the input of so many more skilled/paid people than music, which even on the 'blockbuster' side of music, is a producer team that cranks out a few hundred songs a year plus a few hours from the singer in the vocal booth, I don't think that's a useful model/comparison at all. Even if there's no way to monetize it, still people all over the world will record hundreds of thousands of songs a year, and they'll want to distribute them somewhere: Youtube, Spotify.

The percentage of songs that recoup their cost of recording (including getting paid for the hours writing and recording) from physical sales, digital sales or streaming has to be very close to zero, even back in the heydays of CDs.

Actually, to complicate what I wrote above a bit — it may the case that the rise of streaming has led to a rise of “blockbuster culture” at theaters

This book is six years old and predates much of the handwringing over streaming, but the beginning of blockbuster culture is already in place: 360 deals, winners take all, the Long Tail as entertainment balkanization, etc. etc.

Here's a recent (and long) article which also crunches some numbers:

...there’s a widespread claim that ticket sales have declined because Hollywood’s obsessive focus on sequels, franchises, blockbusters and IP (“SFBIP”) has led many people to stop going to theaters altogether. In fact, the segment of the population that doesn’t attend “the movies” has been unchanged since 2002 at one in four, and a greater share of the population goes to the theater today than at any time between 2009 and 2017.

Nearly all the decline in theatrical consumption has instead come from a reduction in the frequency of attendance by the most intense moviegoers. This reiterates the idea of secular decline; those who loved the product most, love it less each year. (...)

The explanations for this are simple. Over the past 40 years, viewers have added more high-quality screens and sound systems in their homes, the quality of television content has improved, the ability to access this content (e.g. ad free and on demand) has improved, and bigger (and more social) alternative entertainment experiences have emerged, such as Call of Duty and Fortnite. This is similar to the first secular decline of theatrical attendance. Before household TVs emerged, audiences attended the theater 40-70 times per year – after all, it was the only way to watch video news (attendance peaked during World War II). As families added more TVs to their homes (thus allowing family members to individually watch), consumption dropped.

Today, movies earn their keep by displaying content that is best able to defeat at-home consumption and alternatives – to persuade audiences to turn off Netflix, get in their cars, drive to a movie theater with convenient showtimes and available seats, park, buy $10 tickets, sit through 10 minutes of commercials and 20 minutes of trailers as the adjacent seats fill up with strangers, watch the film for 150 minutes while holding off the restroom, then drive home. The only way studios can reliably do this is by offering a spectacle that simply needs to be seen on a big screen (Avengers: Endgame) or has such cultural relevance you can’t wait until the home video release to catch up (Us, or again, Avengers: Endgame). It doesn’t seem to matter if a film like Booksmart is terrific (it is), widely available and evangelized. The role of the movie theater has changed.

HoC going to take this up:

Streaming has changed the music industry - but do the economics of music streaming work for everyone?

We're launching an inquiry into the economics of music streaming today and want to hear from you.

Find out more and submit evidence here: https://t.co/tj3lUEVnZ2 pic.twitter.com/7fov9s99of

— Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (@CommonsDCMS) October 15, 2020

forgot about this thread.

so did we get this sordid

This sounds like a cool idea: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/inside-the-fight-to-fix-economic-inequality-in-dj-culture/