{"id":20,"date":"2011-12-13T01:39:49","date_gmt":"2011-12-13T01:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/?p=20"},"modified":"2013-03-19T23:29:05","modified_gmt":"2013-03-19T23:29:05","slug":"the-kids-are-alright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/?p=20","title":{"rendered":"The kids are alright"},"content":{"rendered":"

(edit cleanup 3.19.13: On Spotify \/ Internet-music-service payouts and the tenuous link made by some other guy on the Internet between those low payouts and today’s general lack of musical innovation, re: which I disagree and instead put the blame on both musicians eager to find their way through the worst signal-to-noise ratio in content history and<\/em> the modern-day listener with a 15-second attention span. Whatever.)
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\nLike I said, yesterday I was Twitter-pressed by the incredibly talented Mr. Wedren to read an interesting op-ed piece<\/a> over at a college newspaper, The New School Free Press. Didn’t realize it was (probably?) a student piece at the time, but it’s a well-written one that does at least raise a few interesting questions about the worlds of music and finance these days.<\/p>\n

In essence, the editorial draws a straight line between Spotify, in particular, and the death of music. We could argue whether that in and of itself is fair. Spotify has only existed stateside for six months, less than three years internationally in very select markets. No one really seems to know what labels or artists are paid for streaming play on the service, which seems to be by design.<\/p>\n

Much has been made of a famous report that Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” generated $167 in Spotify revenue for over a million plays. This is really the only “revelation” that’s yet been publicly made as to how Spotify compensates artists, and of course the company itself has responded with “yeah, but see, but this, but that, conclusion: this report is bullshit.” Hard to know what the truth really is in this case, and it’s really the only one available to point at when the issue of Spotify artist compensation comes up.<\/p>\n

So after he tweeted this, I politely asked Craig over Twitter what his Spotify royalties looked like so far, knowing that I– a paid Spotify mobile-subscription user since day one of its US availability– have listened to his latest record Wand<\/em> on the service four times in its entirety, and that said listens were about 45-60 days ago. With a release in mid-September, I reckoned he might at least have some initial reports as to earnings on that record through Spotify. His other solo record, Lapland<\/em>, is also available there, as is much of the Shudder to Think back catalog. Mr. Wedren said he didn’t have a clue at this point what Spotify would eventually pay him, but mentioned that– in his experience– compensation from ALL download purchases is pretty much laughable.<\/p>\n

Right, so here’s the rub. This is what little I know, and only from book larnin’, as a guy who’s only had a couple of pitiful songs out on indie labels (with no after-the-fact compensation resulting, ever) and has otherwise spent his entire life giving everything away for free: The old-school music industry’s method of artist compensation was the reason why most pro musicians from that era have had to have lawyers and accountants. It was \/ is an absolutely insane kludge of a system with variables upon variables (…upon variables), with absolutely no one trustworthy at the top. Sure, people sometimes actually got paid, and yet I would be willing to wager my whole savings account that virtually no one in the major label system ever got paid anything like what they were contractually due to get paid.<\/p>\n

As a result, even huge-selling artists have always made a huge chunk if not the bulk of their living through live shows. Songwriters got paid primarily through broadcast royalties, managed– somewhat thankfully– by organizations outside of the record labels themselves, who in turn were probably taking more than their signed-on-for share off the top. And yes, this is probably me at least partially talking out of my ass, but this is what I’ve read and heard again and again and again. Re: eager upstarts on major labels, back in the olden days when major labels actually signed eager upstarts, see also: S. Albini’s infamous “Some of your friends are probably already this fucked<\/a>.” I think that guy probably has a better clue than me what he’s talking about.<\/p>\n

Anyway, fast-forward to 2011– or 2005, take your pick. I say this because there have been plenty of questions leveled at Apple re: the compensation of labels and artists on iTunes sales. Like everything else Apple-and-money-related, it’s nothing but a black box to 99.99999999% of the world. All that’s been made clear is that the labels don’t seem to think they’re getting enough of the share, but then again, they NEVER think they get enough of the share. And whatever \/ whenever the labels DO get paid, they don’t seem too concerned with managing the trickle-down to artists in turn. See also: Tim Quirk of Too Much Joy’s semi-famous blog entry from 2009, “My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement<\/a>.” I am definitely sure, from the evidence on display, that that<\/em> guy also has a better clue than me what he’s talking about.<\/p>\n

It’s not just iTunes that operates like a black box where label and, in turn, artist compensation are concerned, with Apple-grade NDAs making sure that no one really has a clear picture just where the hell the money goes. It’s Amazon, it’s Rhapsody, it’s all these people, and in many cases I’m sure it’s the labels themselves (where direct downloads from the label’s site are concerned). This is a whole new level of willful befuddlement of the artist. No tangible product means that it’s strictly their word against the musician’s. Yeah, it’s basically the fucking Wild West.<\/p>\n

So it’s all well and good to demonize a service like Spotify, which offers unlimited access for $0-10 a month and refuses to show anyone its books, and say that– on the basis of just one popular story about a laughable payout, the details of which are naturally in utter dispute– it’s killing music. It’s all well and good to tell people that they really ought to go to pay for a record instead. But this is a system that has been set up from the get-go to obfuscate sales from the artist, and with the new world of purchased downloads, it’s probably never been worse in that regard. Unless you are AT THE SHOW and putting your money directly into the artist’s hot little hands, it’s never been anywhere near a guarantee that going out and buying a record equates to an artist getting to eat 1\/5th of their McDonald’s combo meal tonight.<\/p>\n

I don’t care if you do buy an indie product in physical form from a local record shop. All you’re doing is helping move inventory for that particular shop and allocating a few bucks toward the store’s rent and overhead. The record’s basically already been paid for by the shop itself at wholesale.<\/p>\n

What happens to the money past that point is anyone’s guess– some to the distributor, the rest to the label, which then in turn is supposed to pay their artists their tiny remaining cut. But the history books are full of far more shady fly-by-night indies that demonstrably ripped off their artists for tens or hundreds of thousands before disappearing into the ether, and only a few that actually treated their artists like they said they would treat them when they signed their contracts (or made their handshake agreements).<\/p>\n

A few other questionable assumptions and connections are made in this editorial which are worth considering. Are labels really playing it so safe these days because Spotify isn’t paying them enough to bother with artistic risk? It seems to me that they moved to their current business model– “release nothing but utter bullshit”– long before the concept of legal music downloads was a glint in Steve Jobs’ eye.<\/p>\n

What of the famed Radiohead “pay what you want” model? Should that band also be demonized (for reasons other than their overrated and boring music, that is)?<\/p>\n

Yes, it’s true that only an act like Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails– riding on the coattails of their old-industry successes– can take a seemingly “take it, here, free” record and turn it directly into millions of dollars straight into their pockets. Yes, it’s true that, post-In Rainbows<\/em>, even fewer people think that $15-25 is a reasonable price for a record in the wake of that particular marketing campaign. If it hadn’t been In Rainbows<\/em>, though, some record using this model would have turned up much sooner rather than later. (And it did turn up well before Radiohead; there are countless artists like me who put their stuff up for free and\/or with suggested-but-not-required donation for years beforehand.)<\/p>\n

Does all of this equate to the lamented lack of musical innovation? Do artists really go for the cheap buck rather than creating something truly new, because the payout is so small that larger quantities than ever must be sold to make up the slack? Hogwash.<\/p>\n

I recently read another, professional-media op-ed somewhere which drew a connection between the New World Order of music downloads and the incoming personal wealth of artists. The argument goes that only the already-rich can afford to make music now, like running for office. Of course, getting elected pays out a lot better than making music ever has, especially now– which was the crux of the argument: Without a backup source of income, there’s no time to make music. I would argue that, the centuries-old violence of the economy against art being far from a new thing, much of the music-making world has always been the domain of the well-to-do. I mean, just ask a few orchestral violinists what their instruments cost. Compare your mortgage payment.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I digress somewhat. The lack of musical innovation now has very little to do with the lack of literal payoff for those who innovate, or those who aid and abet innovators. If there’s no money in music anyway, if it’s so impossible to get noticed through blogs or Youtube or whatever (and I would definitely agree that it is), then we should theoretically be in a golden era where musicians have no motivation other than to make music purely for themselves, purely as they hear it in their crazy imbalanced heads. It’s never been cheaper to record; frankly, since everything is done on a computer now and you have to have a computer just to live life at this point, it’s free <\/em>to record. And it’s never been easier for musicians to spend all the time they want (or can possibly spare) working on the weirdest, wildest shit they can dream up.<\/p>\n

Critics are historically the frontline of promotion when the weirdest, wildest shit emerges out of the artist’s bowels, and have helped facilitate such materials’ move from the darkest recesses of the artist’s mind to something resembling a visible movement. Those critics are instead busy currently promoting whatever cultural retread has just been released for the nineteenth time with a new crop of twentysomethings charmingly revisiting the music their dad lost his virginity to.<\/p>\n

I don’t blame the critics either. I blame the musicians. If you’re young and strong and wild enough to handle the grueling torture that is a self-financed tour, you’re definitely young and strong and wild enough to produce truly interesting, compelling, groundbreaking music.<\/p>\n

I have never been more bored listening to new music, for the most part, than I have been over the last ten years. I hear something truly exciting and new about once every 1-2 years, maybe, if I’m lucky. And yes, I still hear about those things from critics (or armchair critics) most of the time. Nothing coheres. Nothing becomes a movement capable of further developments, or at least nothing really interesting does (read: yeah, dubstep can go fuck itself with a pointy WUBWUBWUBWUB). That’s an interesting phenomenon \/ sign of the times. It’s good in a few ways, but mostly incredibly bad. Innovation isn’t being stifled so much by lack of money as it is by a vast glut of content, and equal access to the podium for both innovators and rehashers alike.<\/p>\n

Look, there’s no arguing that music has been devalued for many of us in the Internet age. It’s a case of so much music, so little time, more than ever before, with the incredible accessibility of home studio technology playing a huge role in this “devaluation” that is rarely considered in this debate. There’s absolutely no question that there are hundreds of millions of people who no longer see the point in paying for a record. I would argue that they’re right<\/em><\/span> in that thinking. Naturally, there’s a point in supporting the artists you love, like supporting the causes you love. But as ridiculously connected as we are now, there are many ways to do it other than buying their albums.<\/p>\n

I surely wasted thousands of dollars as a kid buying albums that were mediocre-to-unlistenable. The artists in most cases probably never saw a cent anyway. But should you only pay for something in the world of music if you like it? Well, we’re allowed to return damn near everything else at this point if it sucks. It was only the record industry’s tireless lobbying and home-taping-related excuses that got them special consideration at the Wal-Mart customer service desk. That special consideration has always been totally undeserved, especially since you also ended up paying special hidden taxes to the RIAA on things like blank cassette tapes and music CDR blanks, thanks to our oh-so-agreeable legislators. It’s time for that model and way of thinking to end, just like it’s far beyond time for the existing music-industry model as a whole to disappear.<\/p>\n

If Spotify didn’t exist– and again, until very recently, it didn’t– the try-before-you-buy genie would already be out of the bottle in the form of BitTorrent, thousands of MP3 blogs, any form of P2P you can name; only a Google search and thirty seconds stands between you and the object of your aural desire. Spotify just makes it slightly less criminal to try out records the modern way… and hopefully, if you listen on Spotify, SOMEONE will eventually see some money even for the “meh” records that you deleted from your playlists after track four.<\/p>\n

What I think the world needs is a nagware version of Spotify. The details of such a service in my eyes bring up a whole other can of worms where the financial worthiness of modern-day downloads are concerned. I think I will leave that for another post (and\/or to be summed up succinctly in my lone anonymous comment on this student’s op-ed piece… I feel so lonely in my ire!).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(edit cleanup 3.19.13: On Spotify \/ Internet-music-service payouts and the tenuous link made by some other guy on the Internet between those low payouts and today’s general lack of musical innovation, re: which I disagree and instead put the blame on both musicians eager to find their way through the worst signal-to-noise ratio in content […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223,"href":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blargh.lossfoundation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}