Artist friendly platforms (or not): Spotify Pt. 2
In this series, we’re looking into various platforms for artists, within the context of how artist friendly they are.
Remember, the ability to own your audience is a defining feature of an artist friendly platform.
Last time, we talked about some of the positive developments Spotify brought to the table in the music industry. Today, we’re concluding the discussion around Spotify.
It’s 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 cons of Spotify
This platform pays out some of the lowest rates around.
Not the best quality audio anymore. They’ve been surpassed by Tidal and others in this regard.
Spotify owns your audience, not you. For any direct contact between you and your fans, you have to go through the platform. Big red flag.
Full of vanity metrics like “monthly listener count”.
Spotify has never been a consistently profitable company in its almost 20 year existence. That’s a clear sign of short-sighted management, and a flawed business model.
But, can’t artists just make money in other ways?
For those who might say: “Quit whining, artists, you have lots of other ways to monetize your artwork, so just focus on selling your T-shirts and don’t be so negative and entitled”, I would counter:
You’re not being helpful.
Artists asking for a fair, limited cut of the value their work continually creates for society on an ongoing basis is a perfectly legitimate concern.
Dismissing those concerns offhand with some emotion-based negativity argument is not much different than arguing that “artists should just be grateful to be here”. And, as we’ve all seen recently, gratitude and positivity (while essential character traits) don’t actually pay the bills for anyone: money does.
The dream demands of writers in the WGA/SAG/AFTRA strike accounted for around 2% of net profits from the major film studios, all of whom enjoyed record profits during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That still leaves 98% of their profits to be returned to the public shareholders and the founders/executives of the business, if those are the people you care to prioritize, while also compensating artists fairly at the rate they are requesting.
Artists are not the ones being unreasonable here.
And, Spotify currently being unprofitable doesn’t change this equation, either. That’s because it’s also not the job of workers to suffer at the hands of poor leadership.
If Daniel Ek (CEO) can’t make Spotify profitable, that is on him, because that’s the risk and responsibility he freely chose to take on when he decided to start his own business. Nobody forced him to do that. Let’s not transfer the risky business choices of one person over to an entire population of artists.
Artists are doing their job, simply by providing high quality artwork in a professional manner, and they are taking on a lot of risk of their own in order to provide that essential service to Daniel Ek’s platform.
The cons of Spotify, continued
A lot of potential music fans might be looking for new music on this platform, but what is the quality of those fans really? Impossible to tell, at least if you’re the artist. That’s how the platform designed it to be.
My opinion: most consumers using Spotify are more loyal to the platform and its super convenient algorithmic playlisting and social features than to music of any one artist, specifically.
While it’s basically required to have at least some of your music on Spotify at this point regardless of how unfair a platform it might be (as I do myself), you should also expect it to be difficult to connect with your fans directly, or to ever move those fans off of this platform.
Spotify conclusions
It’s probably obvious that I consider Spotify, on balance, a net loss to our musical culture, almost 20 years into the grand experiment.
Even though Spotify is also responsible for some of our biggest positive technical developments in recorded music over that same time period, and even though I’m currently a paying customer using their service.
In my opinion, the increased homogenization of our musical culture this platform engenders, plus its opaque, inequitable treatment of smaller artists outweighs the new technological benefits like artists being paid directly, or smaller indies having a larger potential distribution reach.
The long-term positive theories surrounding Spotify don’t actually work out in practice for anyone except the platform in the real world. And, the negative consequences of this “disruption for disruptions sake” have immediate and concerning human impacts in the short term.
Let’s ask better questions of our technology platforms
Perhaps some better questions for us all to be thinking about might be:
Are the gains and losses associated with new technologies historically distributed equally among populations over time? If no, who typically benefits and who typically loses? If yes, defend your position citing historical precedent.
Is the open access to large audiences available through the Internet something meaningful, if the equitable financial rewards associated with that access are held back by gatekeepers?
How might we better quantify the true gains and true losses associated with technological progress and change?
Where do we go from here?
I’m not calling for a Spotify artist boycott. At this point, we’re all locked into streaming music, and it's not going anywhere.
And, I would probably change my tune a bit if Spotify began to act more like Netflix, which has a long history of significant financial investment into creatives (at all levels) that provide ongoing value to their platform. Netflix certainly ain’t perfect either, but that’s another article for another time.
In the end, the answer to all of this is: it’s complicated.
But, it’s still important for artists to examine all of these pros and cons. Then, you can decide for yourself exactly how much of your creative output you’d like to freely donate to large corporations, but on your own terms and to your own benefit, with your eyes wide open.
So, where do we go from here? Anywhere you want to!
Informed use as an informed consumer of music, and informed creative output as an informed musical artist.
