Yep, no album review this week. Turns out the albums I want to hear are coming out next month. Instead of another video game post or a hastily typed up Tenology list, I thought I'd spend a little time writing an opinion piece about something I've been meaning to discuss.
Don't worry, it won't take up much of your time.
I think it's fair to say we've all used or at least heard of how Spotify works. It's essentially a library for music that you can choose to pay for in order to receive higher quality streaming and an ad-free service. Anyone who understands how music licensing works might wonder how a company with such a vast catalogue can stand to make a profit when it's free to use and yet this billion dollar company only seems to be expanding, recently adding The Beatles to their collection of artists and looking into a system that would make them the Netflix of music videos.
However, despite this apparent display of wealth and success, the amount of money that actually goes to the artists whom Spotify rely on is pretty damn slim. Bands and rights holders make between $0.006 to $0.0084 per play of one of their songs, meaning tracks would have to be played approximately 143 times to make a single dollar for each of them. Understandably, this has pissed off a lot of people ranging from customers who want their money going to the artists who deserve it and the artists themselves who have gone as far as to deny Spotify the rights to their latest albums.
Some notable examples of these artists include spoilt daddy's girl Taylor Swift, recently deceased Pop musician Prince and bandwagon jumpers The Black Keys, Patrick Carney from the latter claiming "I imagine if Spotify becomes something that people are willing to pay for, then I'm sure iTunes will just create their own service, and they're actually fair to artists". Now ignoring the fact that Apple DID create their own service that's more fair to fans but massively unfair and downright sketchy to the consumer, these naysayers do have a fair point. One fair point, between the lot of them.
It is unfair to the bands who are just starting out and maybe get a few hundred plays each week, unless they get lucky and one of their songs is featured on a hip new TV show or advert. In a perfect world, more money would be going towards the people who are responsible for the art you're listening to, I'm not denying that. However, this is where my problem with those mentioned artists begins. It's all well and good standing up for the little guy but you're not inconveniencing a company who are making billions off ad revenue and other big name bands by having your latest album remain absent from their catalogue; you're inconveniencing the fans, especially the ones who are paying.
When a service like Spotify adds features such as fluid playlist making and radio play (or the fantastic Discover Weekly playlist, automatically giving everyone 30 song recommendations based on what they've listened to each week), people aren't going to jump ship just because a few albums aren't available. At this point in the company's timeline, it would take a mass culling of material or a haemorrhage of credit card information to get people to switch to something like Tidal or Apple Music. Spotify aren't going to bend to a single artist's demands without receiving a toe in the mail beforehand.
This means that fans of a band or artist who search for this material on Spotify are the ones losing out...at least until they find a copy on YouTube or decide to take a risk and buy the album without listening to it beforehand. It may only be a mild inconvenience but it's probably a bigger pain for us than it is for Spotify, a company that took a year to fix a shitty update they put out in February 2015 that enraged customers due to the removal of useful apps and features from the desktop version, not to mention the RAM it consumed.
It's commendable for the bigger band/artist to take a stand for lesser known talents (assuming they're not doing it to look alternative, like I suspect The Black Keys are doing) but there must be a better way of doing it than a way that affects the people they supposedly care about. Alternatively, there is another option; they could do nothing. I'm all for fighting against something that you feel is wrong (I'm still pissed off about that Spotify update that I shoehorned into the last paragraph) but unless there's something effective you can do about it, it's all for naught. Besides, these bands that are angry at Spotify are targeting the wrong organisation.
See, even Spotify has to pay out and whilst it may be convenient to picture them as a mega-powerful corporation with businessmen gathered around an obsidian table in a control room built into a volcano, the truth is that it's not money they're absolutely rolling in. To pay for licensing fees, Spotify has to fork out roughly 85% of what they make to the record labels, the real cunts in suits who would probably consider installing lava pits underneath their offices if only James Bond villains didn't beat them to it and give it a bad image.
Whilst they may be responsible for promotion and high production values on certain albums, the record labels behind your favourite bands are the ones who are most likely the main cause behind Spotify's inability to give the artists themselves a bigger cut. Rather than hounding Spotify to give artists the amount they deserve, perhaps the chaps in The Black Keys need to grow a pair, start directing their frustration towards the ones who are responsible and not stop until those businesswankers have the amount that they deserve...you know, once Dan and Pat stop slagging off the ones who ARE taking a stand.
To summarise, several things need to happen in order to create a world where artists are paid fairly through services such as Spotify:
1) We need to get a system in place where the money we're willing to pay bands for their music goes directly to them and they can reimburse whoever helped to make the album fairly, sort of like Radiohead did that one time before their AMAZING NEW ALBUM OHMYGOD GUYS HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEW RADIOHEAD ALBUM?!?!?! RADIOHEAD! RADIOHEAD!!
2) We need to stop thinking of Spotify as a moneymaking device for bands and artists. That's why merchandise and touring exists, bands can make millions without digital distribution. Streaming services like Spotify are for discovering new bands or older material from bands we haven't heard before. From there, we decide to buy their albums and support them if their music is good enough. I'm pretty sure the poor struggling Indie bands don't have to pay to be on Spotify (if they do, please correct me) so they could be a lot worse off.
3) We need to stop giving attention to bands or artists who think they're heroes for not putting one of their various albums on Spotify. It doesn't matter if the reason is poor sound quality (Neil Young), less money for Indie bands (Taylor Swift) or all the cool kids are doing it (they won't be getting their gold on the ceiling), digital streaming isn't just the future of music, it's the present. Refusing to adapt with the times because they don't understand it (Bob Seger) or whatever horseshit they can come up with does more harm to fans who want to legally enjoy their work than it does to literally anyone else.
Naturally, the choice to keep their music off these services is down to the artists, as it should be. Just stop giving them a round of applause for making this shitty choice.
If you have any feedback or additional points for this post, let me know in the comment section or via Twitter. Next week, I'll DEFINITELY write an album review. Which album? Come back next week and find out!
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