A couple of weeks back I jumped in the car and drove a sixteen-hour roundtrip to perform for two hours with one of my old bands.
This is a band that coincidentally formed around the same time as Flight of the Concords, in the same city, performed at some of the same local events, and incorporated the same kinds of quirky topics, unusual instrumentation, and deferential comedy stylings into songs that subsequently turned the Concords in a global household name.
Unfortunately for us, Aotearoa New Zealand is a small place and there simply wasn’t the cultural bandwidth to support a 5th most popular comedy folk group onto the world stage. So, while we still perform together for this sort of occasional nonsense, and our lead singer has been putting the finishing touches on his 7-album opus for around the last decade, and we still have a hilarious time making music together, we are not (yet) actually famous.
I don’t tell you all this to toot my own kazoo, so much as to draw your attention to the fact that, had we cared a bit more, been a bit more lucky, or worked a little harder, I might have been part of an internationally-famous band: And you might be nodding along to songs about ambulances, carrier pigeons, and overlocker sewing machines (after all, none of those are especially more obscure than epileptic dogs, hurt feelings, or baguettes…)
Obviously, my band is not the only group to have gathered up a small and loyal following, thousands of hours of rehearsals and solo practice, creativity, and passion, and fused it all together with a silly logo slapped on the front of a bass drum. There are thousands of bands across geographies, genres, and generations that would exactly meet those conditions.
And I certainly don’t begrudge the ones that are talented or diligent or fortunate enough to “make it”. But, it’s fair to say, ‘bands’ actually rarely make it in the mainstream now. So, that’s where we’re going.
You're possibly already wondering why I haven’t sent you away to Spotify or Apple Music or wherever, to listen to our songs. So let’s talk about that.
I expect there is a general public perception that Spotify and the like work quite a lot like YouTube, with artists writing and recording songs and then uploading them along with a bit of album art and a blurb. Then you just pop your Spotify links on your Instabook page or link-place, and you’re Bob’s nephew.
That is only partially true. Because there are actually two barriers to entry. One amounts to a (fairly-modest) financial one, but the other is a structural one which is mostly what I want to drill into to help you understand why this newsletter isn’t populated with Spotify links, and why we don’t have mainstream “bands” like we used to.
The gatekeepers
Ever since the dawn of popular music, gatekeepers have been involved.
Back in the day, these gatekeepers provided some genuine value: A music label or patron might help fund an expensive recording session or performance; help source other talent like managers, session musicians or album art artists; use their contacts to arrange radio play and venues, and their distribution channels to get physical albums pressed and in-store, tours, and so on.
The musicians themselves could then concentrate on performing and creating, or bedding groupies and doing drugs, depending on their priorities.
And importantly, back then, even the biggest bands never had a global reach or dominance anything like that which Spotify now offers, so the record companies, patrons, and managers were still obligated to diligently do the A&R work, using the big-band-profits to find and promote new and upcoming acts to suit different regions and genres and fan bases. The successful groups therefore helped feed new ones, rather than strangling them via “streamshare”… we’ll come back to that.
But now—and I’m sure you already saw this coming—most of those things can be done by an ambitious performer all by themselves: They can record in their mum’s basement, DM radio station programmers to ask for airplay, get AI or someone on Fivrr to fill in on the saxophone solo they need after the bridge, and basically build up their own global audience directly via social media.
However, one thing they can’t do, is put their music on Spotify without engaging a distributor. This could be a traditional music label, but more commonly now, it’s just an intermediary like CDbaby, Tunecore, or DistroKid. These companies promise to check you’re not just re-uploading Thriller under the name “Jichael Mackson”, and they’ll make sure there are no incompatible fðrēīġñ characters in your song titles etc.
Frankly, for the up to ~US$30 per song1, these distributors charge for this kind of thing, you don’t get really anything that a low-spec laptop computer sitting in the Spotify offices couldn’t automatically do for vanishingly-close to ‘free’ now… but that’s just the price we pay for “chain across a river” middle-man capitalism.
I’m not a complete prude. I realise that $30 is not excessively expensive, but it does add up—especially if you’re a struggling young rock band just trying to get some exposure. We are all adults now with jobs, and could certainly afford to put music on Spotify, but there’s a bit of a principle in play. And it’s actually that principle that I want to lay down some words about because, even if you’re not an aspiring musician, it is echoed across our society in ways that are misunderstood and dismissed.
Why can we no longer have cool, loud things
The title of this newsletter comes from one of our songs.
Tawa, for those unfamiliar with Lynn, Bruce, his kin, or the Bucket Tree, is a small suburb north of Wellington, where we all partook of some schooling back in the day. The gist of the song is about building a local fanbase as a stepping stone to global rock’n’roll stardom: You know, “a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step” stuff.
And we genuinely did have a loyal fanbase. Most passionate bands do, because people love the energy and potential and tenacity of someone creating something, then putting it out there to be judged and shared.
Sure, smartphones have mushed some minds into cyberspace, but plenty of kids and adults still very much play in real, loud, physical bands, and write music with guitars, pianos, pens, and paper—for those exact reasons. I love nothing better than going out to see a live band winning over the audience and delighting existing fans with original music.
Collectively, we haven’t lost any of the creative imperative, hard work, or talent that brought us completely original yet entirely mainstream bands like Queen, The Who, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Clash, U2, Muse, Foo Fighters (to name but an insignificant fraction). But it’s hard to know how much real commercial future there is for bands anymore. Spotify and its ilk are about ‘artists’ now; you have to go back a full decade, to Coldplay and Maroon 5, to find something in the top 5 on Spotify that resembles something other than a “music producer”, “singer-songwriter”, or “boy/girl group”.
That’s fine. Music tastes change.
But there’s also a commercial truth that the comradery of a rock band is likely offset by the conflict and ‘herding’ required of a rock band; at least as far as profit-focused record executives are concerned. It’s much easier to deal with, and promote a talented singer, a militarily-disciplined boy group, or a duo of computer nerds, than four angry young punks with an inherent distaste for “The Man”.
On paper, what Spotify and these other services have done is make it easier to “discover” and enjoy both new and old bands, in line with your precise tastes. And some number of new bands have undoubtedly built up a decent fanbase or attained a global audience they might never have otherwise had. They perhaps even earn a vaguely livable income… Perhaps.
Plus, it genuinely doesn’t bother me if more people want to listen to (or just can’t be bothered skipping over) Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny, compared to The Commoners or The Beths. But it does bother me that we never before had such a perfect machine for ensuring this problem is only going to get worse.
The pay-off
There are loads of places on the internet where you can supposedly find out “what artists get paid by Spotify”. Most of them refer to some fraction-of-a-fraction of a cent per play. But we don’t actually need to look to 3rd parties for accurate information about this, as the source is actually pretty honest about itself:
“We calculate streamshare by tallying the total number of streams in a given month and determining what proportion of those streams were people listening to music owned or controlled by a particular rightsholder.
Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate”
In case some of the jargonize doesn’t make it clear what’s going on, what this is telling us is Spotify pays out not on what you listen to, but what everyone listens to. That’s what is meant by “streamshare”. If I pay my $16 subscription, then listen to nothing but Bruce Hornsby and the Range all month, almost all of my subscription money will still go to Drake and BTS.
And I don’t even especially like Drake or BTS. Even when they collaborate with Coldplay.2
So what does this mean?
Well, to start with, it’s worth noting that Spotify is a modern public company, so it’s controlled by massive shareholders, including investment companies and large record companies. These sorts of ‘interests’ obviously have a preference for any kind of power and profit concentration because that’s far easier to extract value from. Were, for example, Spotify to change the way they distributed the subscriptions so—after reasonable costs and margins—they gave out the subscription money to the actual artists who were listened to proportionately by each individual user, that would dramatically change the music industry.
In a highly-disruptive, redistributive way.
Imagine an enthusiastic young high-school band, that builds up a local following of their friends and family. They have fans who immerse themselves in their music, via paid or ad-supported Spotify accounts. Now imagine, instead of the band getting paid 11 cents after a month of their 40 loyal fans listening to nothing but them on repeat for the month, they got paid $200!
That would still be just $5 a month from each of those $16-odd subscriptions. Instead, right now, Taylor Swift probably gets $2-$3 of your subscription cost by herself3, even if you’ve never listened to a single one of her guitar strums.
Do we not think that would completely change the music industry? It would take all the power away from the massive investment banks and record companies, and give it to bands that work hard and build up a loyal audience and who, now, also have little need for gatekeepers. That kind of democratisation feels like it was Spotify’s original vision… until investors got involved.
Anyway, a couple of months into that new hypothetical, and now the young band is hiring an engineer and producer to refine their latest single. A few months later and they’re printing fliers and booking a venue to perform for an even bigger audience.
They have taken their talent and been given the objectively fair opportunity to take it to the world. $1.30 a year from Spotify (plus, maybe, two teespring shirts) does not give them—or us—that!
Right now, less than 0.1% of the artists on Spotify earn the kind of income that could be used to support a family in a typical city. The silly thing is, we all would say we like discovering new music and supporting creativity. We’d all say, the best job for individuals and for society is one you love. We’d really would like the artists we like to benefit from our choice to listen to them; just as they would (in principle at least) if we’d purchased their CD, or a concert ticket with their name on it.
Of course, many of the artists are playing live and selling autobiographies and so on, and thinking of Spotify as a marketing tool more than anything else. But it’s still telling that over 99% of creatives on the most powerful, “democratised”, and… well, I can’t probably say “profitable” because we live in the most fucked timeline… but certainly ‘financially-concentrated’ music distribution platform in the history of humanity4, need a 2nd job.
For balance, it’s worth acknowledging that most new bands will put their music on multiple platforms; and some do pay better than Spotify. But Spotify is entirely dominant in this sector, with more than twice the market share of its nearest competitor, Apple Music. So, given we’re talking about the future of music, it’s not unreasonable to point out that where the downright dominant player in a growing market goes, the rest either generally wilt, or follow.
You could read all this and assume it’s just the ranting of a bitter man, reliving and regretting the unrequited dreams of a rock’n’roll youth… And sure, I’ve never did get the chance to throw up on a bedazzled tour bus, or toss a CRT TV out of a motel room window into a swimming pool.
But I really write all this because it is symptomatic of the invisible choker-tightening that goes on throughout our society. In every sector, the path to profit—which, remember, is what our economic system uses to ostensibly incentivise innovation, distribute value, and do all the other ‘great civilisation’ things—is via concentration.
And it should be clear this is not benefiting us in the way we imagine it should. The magical promise of every music track you could think of (plus a bunch you’ll grow to love) at your fingertips is, increasingly the reality of an automated playlist made up of a handful of carbon-copied money printers with a guitar around their neck: All supported by stealing from the actual grind of small and local artists whose passionate fanbases keep the money flowing and the magical promise alive, but only in our imaginations.
-T
This is a very rough ballpark, as you’ll find all sorts of different offerings requiring annual commitments/royalty shares/Content-ID checks (to prevent people re-purposing your music for other things)/artist pages etc
It’s worth pointing out, this is a very simplified model. In reality, there are all sorts of financial shenanigans that go on—paying music company advances, different regional royalty structures etc—so not even Drake or BTS make the sort of money they ‘should’, but the gist of it is still the problem as far as supporting creativity is concerned.
I’m making that number up—to be fair, it’s probably less. I did briefly try and work it out but then got bored. Regardless, my point is any amount of money that she receives from a paid subscription that has never listened to a single one of her tracks (such as mine) just seems shit, right?
Approximately 500 million subscribers (ad-supported and paid), generating an average of just under US$5/month revenue each, for your interest.