Let's Talk About Music

Let’s talk about music. I know most of you know me for photography stuff; naked women and all of that, but my first love was and always will be music. The art is not what I want to talk about, though. I want to talk about the business. More so, streaming.

I grew up in a time when I had three ways for consuming music. I was either sitting by the radio waiting to hear what someone else was telling me was hot, sitting in front of the television to watch a music video of what someone else was telling me was hot, and going to the record store and buying what someone told me was hot that I agreed with and wanted to be able to listen to when I wanted to.

That was the late 1980s and 1990s, for me. In 2000, like many other people, I discovered Napster. Napster changed and saved my life. Not only was I able to get all of the music that I wanted by didn’t have the money to go out and buy because I was 14 years old, but I was able to find so much more music that I’d never heard of because even though Napster was a “social” platform as we know them today, it allowed you to interact with people and find out what other, regular people, fans, thought was dope. As I got older, though, I realized that Napster (and subsequently Kazaa and LimeWire) weren’t the best thing that music fans could have been doing to help support the artists that they like, especially in my case where I was getting super deep into the world of independently release music and small label artists. I started taking most of the money that I was being given between the age of 14 and 18 and using it to buy CDs when I could, and even explicitly asking my father if I could have a couple of dollar to go buy a CD or two. I was lucky enough at 19 to get a job working at a local record store, which lasted three years. That place go a lot of “free labor” out of me because most of my money just went right back to them for CDs (and DVDs). That was from 2006-2009.

Fast forward to around 2013 or so, and music streaming it a huge thing and has begun taking over the way that people consume music. It’s a great thing for the consumer, as they could pay $10 a month (or nothing in the case of things like Spotify) and have access to nearly every piece of music every created. According to a Google search, today, Spotify has a estimated 226 million premium subscribers. Let’s say that all of these subscribers are paying at the base level of $10.99 per month. That’s about $2.4 billion dollars a month of income to Spotify. Account for overhead to keep the service going and pay employees, and… pay out royalties to the artists who’s music has been streamed. How much of that do you think is being payed out to these artists?

According to another Google search, Spotify pays out, at most, $0.005 per stream of a song. That’s 1/200th of a cent. That means you get paid one penny for every 200 streams of your song. That’s one dollar for every 20,000 streams of your song. This sucks. But let’s now start talking about the real reason why I decided to write this…

Who is responsible for this being a thing now?

Everyone yells at streaming companies (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc.) for not paying artists the money that they deserve for their music being streamed and downloaded through their services. Although I think that these services can do better when it comes to paying artists what they are owed, are they really the problem here? These companies aren’t going to change a business tactic that is working in their favor is they aren’t forced to. Why would they? I know I wouldn’t. In my mind, this problem falls on the fans. The listeners. The consumers. Everyone wants convenience. Having all of your favorite music in your pocket is great. If you’re not a collector of physical audio media, not having to have a bunch of CD, cassette tapes, vinyl records, etc. piled up in your house is great. But a lot of people aren’t willing to pay for that convenience. I said earlier that there are 226 million premium subscribers on Spotify. But that’s of a total 574 million users. 348 users are using the free Spotify services to listen to music? Hmmm? That means that some of this music is being consumed for free. How are artists being paid for this? Ad revenue? $1.5 billion in ad revenue in 2022 is what Spotify made. Does this cover the money lost on the free users streaming music? Which is a larger portion of the user based that is paying for the service. Is this money being used to pay out artists or is this going into someone’s pocket? I don’t know. But if it’s still going out as 1/200th of a penny per stream, that’s helping no one. So we’re back to the fans.

We have the power to make sure that these artists get paid! But you have to give up your convenience, or some of it, and be willing to spend you money where you want to see it spent. Whether that be spending $10 to buy an album on these services (Do these places even offer the option to buy an album anymore? I know that YouTube Music, my service of choice, doesn’t.), or going out and buying a CD (a lot of artists, especially the independent folk, still offer some type of physical media or even direct digital purchases). I feel like it is our, the fans, the consumers, responsibility to force the streaming services to change, or just shut them out completely, by no longer allowing them to operate the way that they have. Force them to lose money. There are ways that we can still have the convenience of digital music and streaming while making sure that our dollars go where we want them to go.

There’s also another issue that comes with streaming services. They control what you have access to!

I don’t know about you, but I listen to a lot of the older music that I discovered back in my younger years often; not out of occasional moments of nostalgia, but because that music was so damn good that I miss it a lot. But I often find that a lot of these things aren’t available on streaming services because they were super independent releases (something that I bought from a show that they only made 1,000-3,000 copies of through DiscMakers), a record label folded and the music now just exists where it existed in 1999 when it was last distributed physically, or because someone holds the rights to the music and don’t want to or is too lazy to go through the process of putting it on these services. Those are often out of anyone’s control and not the streaming services fault. But! There are situations where a service decides that they don’t want to have something available for some weird political reason (the content of the song, etc.) or some copyright reason (samples, someone else owns the album or ONE song on the album, etc.). Now you can’t listen to Doomsday Production’s “Filthy” album or West Coast Bad Boyz II. This problem isn’t something that the majority of people have when they’re only looking for the big popular music that they know of and enjoy. But I’m sure that everyone has had a problem finding something that they wanted to listen to and couldn’t find, and if it’s looked into, it’s problem a case of the platforms not making it available for their own reason. Also, these services’ prices do not stay consistent or continue to reflect the service that they provide. I started using YouTube Music (back when it was Google Music) in 2016 and was paying $9.99 for the service. It has now gone up to $13.99, but has not added any new features and no improvements on the features other than an updated GUI. So now they have you in their hands and can make you pay whatever they want because you’re so used to this way of consuming music. You never had/have to pay more money on a CD or digital download that you paid for 3 years after you bought it. You have access to it for as long as you can physically access it. People have started to seeing and realize this with film and television streaming, but never thought about it when it with their music. It’s coming. Trust me.

Let’s take back control of what we consumer!

Lastly, I used Spotify as my example, but I have no issue with Spotify specifically. It’s just the one that everyone know, the one that everyone yell at when they’re made at streaming, and the one that has the most information available on them to explain my thoughts.