Spotify offers musicians under a cent for each track play – but perhaps it's better than nothing, asks DANNY O'BRIEN
SPOTIFY LAUNCHED in the United States last month. It’s a legal streaming music service and, as such, has crept slowly across jurisdictions, torturously gathering the distribution licenses it needs from the major labels.
It’s still not available in Ireland, despite having more tracks in most of its current countries than its only Irish competitor, We7.
In the case of the US, the last of the labels, Warner, signed up less than 48 hours before the launch date. Many of the independent labels that gave Spotify, based in Sweden, its broad back-catalogue, still aren’t handing over rights in the United States.
Nonetheless, Spotify enters a relatively empty market. Americans have other streaming choices such as Rhapsody and Rdio, but neither have caught fire in the way Spotify has in Europe. In countries where it has become established, Spotify has become the way fans can share music without feeling they are committing a crime. Critics include links to tracks on the Spotify service when praising new tracks; friends build Spotify playlists instead of burning CDs.
After months of delay, the entry of Spotify to the biggest music market in the West was accompanied by an all-American burst of near apocalyptic excitement, not least from Sean Parker, the creator of Napster.
“For a decade I have waited for a music service that could rekindle my excitement about music,” he wrote, “\[it enables] music to be shared freely across the world – all the while empowering artists to reap the economic benefits of selling their music”.
Parker, naturally, is an investor in Spotify. But it’s hard to disagree with his assessment that the online music industry has been in a moribund state for the last few years. Music labels fought over ever inch of the digital revolution.
Even after the one singular success of the decade, the launch of iTunes, the music industry complained about the control that had been ceded to Apple – a monopoly that the record companies’ own insistence on Apple’s exclusive anti-copying digital rights management technology all but guaranteed.
Nonetheless, despite the last-minute wrangling, the labels seem pretty happy with Spotify. Less entertained are the artists themselves. Guitarist Krzysztof Wiszniewski crunched the numbers of his payout from Spotify from plays of his work in Viridian, a Polish hard-rock band, on his blog, the Cynical Musician.
Like most musicians, Wiszniewski earns less than a cent from each play of his tracks on the service. The actual figures vary depending on a number of factors, and songwriter payments are processed differently, but the end result is a paltry figure for anything but the most successful of artists.
Why the difference between the music industry as a whole and music’s individual creators?
The industry may be seeking to make the best of a bad bet: cents of income are better than the zero of widespread file-sharing. More cynically, the industry stands to benefit from Spotify in a way that artists will not.
The labels themselves have equity in Spotify, as well as many of its competitors, which means that if the company does well, goes public, or is bought out by the tech industry giants, the music labels will make a significant one-off return, with no obligation to pay that out to their own clients.
But streaming companies, no matter how successful, are not guaranteed to become bonanzas for their equity owners. Sending bits to millions of users costs money. Many users seem to be happy to tune in to Spotify’s ad-supported services, which provide a more unstable income than its premium services. And many of the prospective purchasers of a start-up like Spotify – like Apple, Google and Amazon – have all lined up their own music streaming services in the last year.
As Parker says, Spotify represents a decade-old model for how online music might actually work. You pay a subscription, and get what used to be known as the “celestial jukebox” – any song, at any time.
But my experience is that even as the plodding machinery of both the old music industry, and the new, centralised tech start-ups, sought to realise that dream, both music and the internet seems to have sneaked ahead of them. Most of the tracks I’ve grown to love in music’s last, lost, decade, don’t appear on Spotify’s playlists. That’s because I found them on the net, away from the mainstream labels or even the indies.
The huge tranches of music whose rights are too obscure or too controversial to ever see the legal light again, music from online collaboration sites like Songfight, remixes and mash-ups: none of this music will ever make it to a service like Spotify.
It used to be that the world was divided between those who would fight for the legal rights of artists in the face of the anarchy of the net, and those who promised that the anarchy would herald a new era of music freed from the shackles of a corrupt and grasping system. Spotify and We7 may be the best we can get from a compromise between these two camps.
But perhaps we have simply attained the worst of both worlds: an industry as selfish as ever, with impoverished artists still locked into the limits of what it can reward, and who it chooses to enrich.
