Last month, I posted a lengthy piece on how to be an ethical and socially conscious music fan in the age of streaming. As I mentioned in my story, Neil Young, a Polio survivor and longtime vaccine advocate, went forward with removing his catalog from the streaming platform. Now, Joni Mitchell (another Polio survivor), Graham Nash, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Nils Lofgren, India Arie, Failure, and others, have since removed their music from Spotify due to the company’s support of Joe Rogan and his dangerous spread of misinformation around COVID-19 and vaccines.
In light of this, you might be wondering why I continue to link to a Spotify playlist via my Gold Soundz newsletter each week. Well, I don’t think moving from Spotify to another streaming service (as a fan), is the best move in this situation. Sure, TIDAL is backed by musicians and has a better payout than its competitors, but it’s also partially owned by Sprint and Jack Dorsey’s Block. Profits are still not best positioned for musicians, however if you are looking for streaming alternatives, TIDAL does seem to be a better choice. However, Spotify is still the biggest streaming service on the planet and I still want to pass along music recommendations and get more exposure to deserving bands and artists. I believe it’s also the most adopted platform by my readers so that has been another factor coupled with the fact that this is written by a fan (me) and I’m not paid for it so having multiple streaming subscriptions just to host playlists feels counterintuitive and would exacerbate the problem.
Truth be told, the issue with Spotify, and streaming services in general, has existed long before they signed Joe Rogan to an exclusive contract. In recent weeks, the story has blown up and hopefully, many are recognizing the problems that are presenting themselves to artists. Currently, Spotify is being dragged down for allowing Joe Rogan to deliver dangerous messages regarding vaccine safety, but really, the issue for many is that artists cannot make a living wage via streaming and while the pandemic continues to impact touring and the consumption of physical media remains in question, many are left without any other options. In a recent piece for The New Yorker, esteemed music critic Alex Ross quoted a fan who said “I love that people are looking for alternatives to Spotify and I don’t know how to explain to them that it has never been ethical or sustainable to expect to have unfettered access to the entire history of recorded music for $10/month.”
Ross, himself, goes on to say “the rage against Spotify falls into a familiar American pattern: instead of addressing systemic issues, we stage morality plays involving the misdeeds of individuals. One miscreant falls, another rises, and the song remains the same. Young, to his credit, has made a quantifiable sacrifice: without Spotify, his royalties will suffer, although he may receive a compensatory boost from youngsters who approve of his stance. Are consumers willing to sacrifice as well? The magic of Spotify is its convenience. You can get almost any music you want, any time. Apple Music offers you the same gorgeous infinitude. What if, in order to support musicians that you care about, you were asked to give up the very idea that all music should be available on demand?”
Yes, as I’ve said, there are alternatives to Spotify that have slightly better shares for the band. T-Pain points out, almost any service is better (in terms of payouts), but are any of them actually good? After Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify, he alerted fans that they could get four free months of Amazon music if they chose that as their new service of choice. But is that really better? Indie band Speedy Ortiz, “along with bands including Deerhoof and Downtown Boys, pulled [their] catalogue from Amazon in 2019 as part of No Music for ICE, a campaign protesting Amazon’s contracts with Palantir, a data-mining company that provides software for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” So sure, Spotify is paying Rogan millions, but Amazon doesn’t feel like a better alternative. Choosing another streaming service is fine and a good thing to do in light of Joe Rogan’s asinine comments and if you’re trying to combat one single issue, but it’s not a solution to a problem that was invented by a tech company. Of course music fans would relish the idea of being able to play any song by any artist from any moment in recorded music history at the click of a button, but just because that idea was introduced to us, doesn’t mean it’s sustainable or ethical.
Ten or fifteen years ago, if you wanted to hear something, you had a few options. You could likely find an mp3 on the internet and download it, possibly find it on YouTube, or you might even buy a CD or the song on iTunes. All of this felt normal and the collective attitude of sharing music was a great communal experience. Spotify changed that and in turn, created a problem that many had already lived with and never acknowledged. Being able to play any song at any time, for free, wasn’t a reality and we all knew how to live with it. However, in the past decade, younger audiences who never knew the past and those of us old enough to remember it simply chose to forget it and live with our new modern convenience. In my opinion, this is not the fault of fans. We were spoon fed by Spotify, hooked on the convenience, and now we’re left with a dilemma. Is it OK to continue to essentially rob artists of their income, or do we go back to a time when we needed to be able to afford to curate our own collection.
I recently faced this question head-on after binge-watching Yellowjackets on Showtime when I wanted to buy The Cranberries’ remarkable debut album Everyone Else Is Doing It So Why Can’t We? On vinyl and was frustrated to learn how hard it was to find a physical copy of it to purchase. My usual go-to record stores had none in-stock and used copies start at $45 including shipping on the online marketplace Discogs. On Amazon it’s around $51. I faced a similar problem when trying to find a Smashing Pumpkins album for under $100.
You might say, this is a self-enforced problem. I could easily buy a digital copy of the album, listen to that guilt-free and you’d be correct. However, as someone who enjoys the collecting aspect of music fandom and the idea of holding something physical in my hand (that also won’t disappear if my computer were to crash) is still appealing to me. I chose vinyl as my format of choice nearly twenty years ago and I’m now deeply committed to my record collection which is currently sitting at around 1100 records. I also live in a New York City apartment where I don’t have the luxury of space to accumulate another format.
The answer here shouldn’t be for me to cough-up an exorbitant amount of money to buy a record because, as I’ve said, music should not be something only for the wealthy or those who can afford it. What should be happening is a service that still allows me to stream an album until I complete my quest to find an affordable physical copy, but the service needs to also PAY the artist and that is something that currently does not exist. However, to make that happen would also mean we’d need to revisit and fix an entirely broken system.
According to a recent Twitter thread from living legend and industry expert Steve Albini:
big mainstream record labels have historically exploited musicians dreadfully, using contracts constructed around the notion of recoupment of advances. I’ve written about it before, feel free to google, but I’ll explain it briefly here so we can get to the important part. Major label contracts are structured such that the band earn a royalty, a percentage of sales, expressed in percentage ‘points’ of that sale value. Nominal contracts range from 10 to 14 points, but the figure is less important than the mechanics of the deal. This royalty, whatever it is, doesn’t go directly to the band. First it is attached, or taken, to ‘recoup’ any money ‘advanced’ to the band. Lay people assume an “advance” is just cash given to the band, a kind of signing bonus, and okay there is a small component of that, but the ‘advance’ is actually the total figure of any money spent in the recording, making, promoting, packaging, selling or distributing the music. The physical pressing and shipping are typically not included in this figure, but recording certainly is, along with fees paid to producers, lawyers, agents (as finder’s fees) studio musicians, tech services, art direction, rights and clearances, promotion, payola, video production, store displays, advertising, tour support… in short, anything other than the plastic in the press. So this figure balloons to enormous sums at the outset of a deal, and whatever royalties might otherwise go to the band first go to the label to “repay” this outlay. I want you to notice something very specific about this accounting. Essentially 100% of the costs are being paid for by the band, out of a tiny fraction of the total revenue. The rest of the income is being kept by the label from record one. This sharecropper arrangement essentially ensures that unless a band is wildly successful, they are unlikely to ever see a penny, because they ‘remain unrecouped,’ while the label is making a handsome profit from their 80+%. All the functionaries who get their piece added to the cost figures (producers, A&R, lawyers, managers) are also getting their pieces, while reducing the share the band are accounted. When a producer takes a point or two in a contract, that isn’t ‘extra’ money. Those points come off whatever sliver the band have in the deal. If a producer gets two points, a mixer gets one and their lawyer or A&R gets one from a band with a 12-point basis, the band now gets eight points. And they have to pay for all that other bullshit out of those measly eight points. If a band is unrecouped when it’s time to make record two, then all those expenses just pile on the unrecouped amount, and so on until the band is dropped or destroyed.
You might try to argue that indie and underground bands still need to essentially give away their music at first so they can get discovered by fans which will then lead those people to attend shows, buy records, and wear t-shirts, but historically, indie bands were actually in a better place, in terms of contracts, than those signed to a major.
Albini continues:
I’ve made a distinction here about major labels, because during the punk era, independent labels sprang up, labels like Touch and Go, Dischord, Drag City, Merge and others, who operated differently. By and large, these labels used a profit share model rather than recoupment. In a profit share, all the income from a release goes to pay off the expenses of that release, and whatever profit is left is shared between the band and the label, typically 50-50. My bands have enjoyed this kind of deal since the early 1980s, and let me tell you it’s great. At one point in the 80s there was a kind of arms race in major labels giving superstars record-setting deals. Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Prince all made news by getting record deals on a basis of 20+points, unheard of at the time, when many bands were at 10 or less. Well I did a little ciphering at the time and my bands were beating them by a mile. We worked frugally, so the profit sharing arrangement worked out to the equivalent of nearly 30 basis points. Independent bands were all getting a vastly superior deal to major label bands. This meant our records were viable at lower retail prices and lower sales figures, and we made more money selling a few thousand records than big bands made selling hundreds of thousands. Our ways were unique to independent labels and bands, so bands like Eve 6 were trapped in the major label paradigm with no option but to sign the kind of recoupment-based contract I described. In the Spotify discussion and before, I’ve seen laypeople (ignorant, capitalist laypeople) shift the blame for these deals onto the bands. ‘You signed the contract buddy, it’s your fault you didn’t get a better lawyer…’ is the typical line, and it’s bullshit. Every single band who signed to a major label had a good lawyer look over their deal and say, ‘yep, looks pretty standard.’ Because it WAS standard. The standard was corrupt, exploitative and unfair, but it was an industry standard. So bands like Eve 6 and their peers remain bound by these awful deals, executed years prior to streaming, with terms that have never risen above grossly unfair. In the streaming era, the majors engineered for themselves part ownership of services like Spotify in exchange for blanket licenses to their catalogs. Literally when Spotify makes money, they make money, and they do not give half a shit if any money is accrued to royalties for the bands. And if a fraction of a penny is ‘paid’ to a band’s royalty account, no matter. There’s still an unrecouped amount on the books to allow them to keep that as well. Life is different for us on independent labels. Our labels weren’t part of that initial buy-in, so we get a lot more per stream, and the money paid to our accounts is income like any other, split halfsies with our label. A band like mine, which gets a fraction of Eve 6 plays makes something into five figures annually from Spotify and other services, a nice little bump. If my bands were more popular, I could see that amount getting big enough to sustain us, as I’m sure it is for some of our more popular peers. So for the bands stuck in the ghetto of the major labels (I tried to think of a less loaded term but this seemed to fit, given the protofascist tangent) their prospects in streaming look bleak, and if they can engineer an exit from Spotify, bully for them. Independent bands may leave Spotify over their platforming a dishonest right-wing anti-vaxx mouthpiece like Joe Rogan, but please understand that it is a much bigger sacrifice on their part than for a major label band, who would literally lose nothing. If you see an exodus on the part of independent bands, it is a genuine sacrifice, not a no-cost demonstration of protest. It is egregious that these services pay so little, another manifestation of the greed of predicate labels and the practices of a corrupt industry that predates them. It gives me peace thinking that the streaming model is unsustainable and will collapse eventually, but in the interim remember that the music business that fucked mainstream bands always had in parallel the contrasting independent scene which was more fair then and remains so. Seeing ‘not all indies were good and pure…’ replies. Yes, I’m aware, and I’ve fought the proto-professional mindset in the independent world since it appeared. A few indies were bad, yes, okay, I said as much. ALL major labels operated in an exploitative manner. ALL.
Independent labels have generally always favored and had an interest in their artists. However, as Steve points out, many contracts were written prior to streaming as a service so some artists are still feeling the pain. Kieran Hebdan, the electronic producer better known as Four Tet, recently took his former label, Domino Records, to court over how his streaming royalties were being paid out. His 2001 contract with the label pre-dates the launch of Spotify which happened in 2008. Four Tet is pushing for 50% of streaming rights vs the 18% he’s currently getting. In a poor outcome, Domino removed his records from streaming services all together (although they appear to be back as of writing this) in an attempt to stop the case from progressing. In this example, fans and the artist both lose out. But then again, was this ever something fans should’ve expected? Should they always just be allowed to reap the benefits without worrying about how those actions would impact an artist?
If fans do truly start to boycott streaming services, it’ll be a start. Big tech will surely notice when users begin to drop off and it could start to force some kind of change. Yet, like so many other issues, it’s hard to see this working out for artists in the long-run. For now, I will continue to link to Spotify in the hopes it leads to artistic discovery and eventually some kind of profit for the bands. So, if you discover something via this newsletter that you enjoy, I encourage you to seek out a way to actually support the creator which is why I link to direct purchase methods whenever possible. In short, the issue, to me, is streaming services at large aren’t here for artists (it’s wage-theft at mass scale) no matter what service you use, so moving from Spotify to Apple, Amazon, or TIDAL isn’t really doing anything for the bands in the long run. Streaming services aren’t built to support those who rely on them most and they’re not companies that have the interest of the creator at heart. So sure, ditch Spotify until they figure out how to handle Joe Rogan’s BS or Amazon until they stop contracting with Palantir, but really, just buy music directly via an artist’s Bandcamp page, their merch table at a show, or from your local record shop.
