Artist friendly platforms (or not): Spotify
In this series, we’re looking into various platforms for artists, within the context of how artist friendly they are.
Last time, we talked about membership style all-in-one platforms. Today, we’re talking about consumer facing music streamers. You probably use some of these yourself as a music consumer.
Remember, the ability to own your audience is a defining feature of an artist friendly platform.
Spotify: the elephant in the room
Let’s talk about this as it relates to Spotify, one of the world’s largest music streamers. Full disclosure: I am a Spotify subscriber. As a consumer platform, I’m happy with it.
But, that does not mean that I also think it’s either:
a good platform for all artists to be on.
a net positive for our musical culture.
Spotify gets trashed on a lot, in a pretty uninformed way. But, I’d like to present a bit of a more balanced perspective here, and give the company proper credit where it’s due. There are a lot of very positive contributions that Spotify has made to the music industry, and these are often left out of the discussion.
I think it’s really all about seeing how the net positives and negatives play out over time, and the net impacts of Spotify’s “disruption” in this space are finally starting to become clear.
If you’re a streaming music subscriber like I am, it’s very important that you also put your money where it really matters: buying directly from artists as best you can, as often as you can. $5 at the merch table goes miles farther than that same $5 given to a corporate middleman.
Do both of these things, not one or the other.
The Pros of Spotify
Spotify was the original technical pioneer in the streaming music space, combining high quality streaming music with social features to follow your favorite artists, and share playlists.
A lot of potential music fans are here. This is a huge platform, with a large potential audience of people who might never have heard your music before. Emphasis on potential audience.
A lot of Spotify’s technical work really did help usher in a whole new era of better quality music for everyone.
More people around the world are listening to better sounding, higher quality recorded music than ever before in human history, right now.
This is a super legit technical contribution to our musical culture that Spotify was very much responsible for. They did it pretty much single-handedly, and it’s something really exciting and valuable for all of us.
Hint: just don’t let that fool you as to the motivations behind the technical chops.
They didn’t do it for the artists, they did it for the shareholders.
Before Spotify, the only way for artists to get paid was to professionally record, release, and tour a whole new set of songs every 2-3 years, often in association with a predatory label deal that siphoned most of that money away from them in the end.
After Spotify, smaller artists now have the ability to record/release songs themselves, and then continue to earn money from those songs forever, while being paid directly.
No more label middlemen, at least theoretically. This is another super legit economic contribution to our musical culture, and it didn’t really exist before Spotify made it mainstream.
The problem with economic theory vs. reality
Legit contributions or not, there’s a big problem here:
Artists being paid directly is a great theory and all, but it doesn’t actually work out in practice for 90% of artists in the real world.
Unless you’re a major, well-known artist performing in a highly mainstream popular music style, you’re not making any truly sustainable money through digital music streaming and its direct payments.
That makes it really hard for the smaller independents that drive the industry forward creatively to continue to make their music.
While there’s certainly nothing wrong with mainstream pop stars, they are often not our creative cultural drivers; many times, the biggest artists are simply reacting to innovations made by smaller artists years prior.
Musical innovation or popularization?
Here’s a fun modern example of how this works: the famed indie folk artist Bon Iver, in this concert excerpt live from AIR studios in London, is using a strange piano technique called “prepared piano”. It’s where you put objects in between the piano strings to make weird sounds.
Seems super innovative and forward thinking, right? Nah.
In 1925, the relatively obscure classical composer Henry Cowell wrote a piano piece called “The Banshee” that uses these exact same techniques.
Bon Iver just popularized something that already existed. Which is also great, to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with popularizing older techniques by using them in new ways. That’s how art works.
But, when it gets out of balance to the point where only the most mainstream, vanilla styles of music make any money, that’s the only thing that’s going to get made and distributed widely. When smaller artists can’t make a living too, it leads to a pretty bland homogenization of our musical culture over time.
That’s not good for anyone in the long term: artists, music fans, or music distributors.
Are we over the endless Star Wars spinoffs and trash-filled Netflix feeds yet? Is that what you want your streaming music feed to look like too?
So, what should have been Spotify’s single biggest economic contribution for the smaller artists in the music community has now backlashed, and become a perpetuator of the mainstream status quo.
In a lot of ways, Spotify is the new major label.
How Spotify makes money, and why its industry disruption is a myth
Just like the old major labels did, Spotify makes money for their shareholders primarily off of the music released by the 1% of the world’s largest pop stars, while simultaneously chewing up all of the smaller artists on the platform through an endless churn.
The more of the world’s most popular music is on the platform, the more people listen, and the more Spotify’s stock price increases, even though the company has never consistently been profitable from the sale of its actual products.
The biggest difference here? Spotify is way bigger than any of the legacy major labels ever were. Spotify’s current market capitalization (at time of writing) sits at over $30 billion, while Warner Music Group’s is $13.5 billion.
Hint: this is also the same argument that underpinned the recent writers/actors strikes in Hollywood.
Seen any of those actors who worked on these massive mainstream TV shows sharing their $2 residual checks on social media? Any small indie artist who’s released music directly on Spotify can show you numbers that are quite similar.
The issues surrounding the Hollywood writers strikes already happened to the musicians 20 years ago. It’s just nobody really noticed, because musicians unions are not nearly as strong or as visible to the general public.
Hopefully, that’s starting to change. Very exciting to see so much successful union activity getting national attention lately.
There’s a lot more work that needs to be done on the musician’s side to push this ball forward, and the musician’s union issues are more complex then they might appear to be on the surface. United Musicians and Allied Workers has a great basic primer on these complexities available on their Instagram here.
So, a lot of the pros surrounding Spotify are starting to get some holes poked in them, and we’re just getting started with the cons. Next time in this series, we’ll get into that.
