The news that the music streaming platform Spotify is fiddling with its royalty model was welcomed with as much enthusiasm as, to quote Billy Connolly, a fart in a spacesuit. Spotify wants to stop doling out royalties (which work out at about $0.003-$0.005 per play) to artists not doing the numbers. No more money for acts that garner fewer than 1,000 annual streams. The tweaks will, apparently, also take aim at bot-generated streams, “functional” tracks (white noise, as an example), and maybe even add more money to the royalty pool that most musicians, besides big stars, earn a pittance from. This shuffling of streams on the decks of the sinking ships that are the earning power of most musicians was greeted the way these things always are by musicians: a collective upraised middle finger.
Spotify can tweak its model all it wants. But the reality is streaming models are inequitable from the jump. Paying €23 for a CD wasn’t exactly a fair price for a customer who might end up leaving it to gather dust after listening to the song they liked on the radio, but at least the people who made it were getting paid something. Abundance is a great thing for creativity. But for consuming its output? For one hundred million tracks and five million podcasts? At just €10.99 a month? We all know that it’s such an uneven exchange, it’s hard to fully comprehend.
I have never met a musician whose facial expression doesn’t fall into something approaching despair when the inequity of such a model is mentioned. Streaming platforms do not adequately compensate musicians for their labour or its product. Artists not being appreciated isn’t news, but some hold more sway than others. Last week the US actors’ strike ended. A deal was struck. Screenwriters also recently celebrated their own deal in the US. The television and film industries were thrown into chaos by both strikes, but the outcome shows unionisation and collective power works.
While actors and writers had a seat at the table in negotiating the terms of their employment compensation, musicians don’t even have a chair. And where is the table anyway? Actors’ and writers’ work – and that of crews – is governed (at least in theory) by regulations, rules, the sort of “tools down” assurances when lunch break comes around, or rush hour traffic kicks in. This is more real for crews and actors in the context of sets and stages than it is for screenwriters in the creative process. But musicians? Their lives operate so far away from the basic tenets of labour law that I doubt many of them even question how fair or reasonable it is to assume that a band would load into a venue themselves, guitarists drive through the night to the next city, producers pull all-nighters in studios, drummers design posters, DJs take charge of their own bookings, singers waste time filming TikToks.
The music industry is exploitative and hierarchical. When physical sales crashed and the digital era commenced, with major labels chasing their tails, this was, essentially, accepted as a new reality, despite the fact that it would make it almost impossible to carve out a fairly-paid career as a working musician. All of the eggs in the leaky basket were put into “live”. Touring was to be the main route to earning, and everyone would just have to get on with it. But that’s not exactly working out either. Increasingly, post-pandemic, musicians talk about how financially draining touring has become. Touring amplifies cost-of-living issues; rising airfares, fuel prices, vehicle hire cost, food prices, accommodation costs, and the ridiculous situation where many venues take a cut of merchandise sales.
But when the systems within the music industry are designed to make Spotify a mind-boggling €11.7 billion in revenue last year, how can the fan move the dial?
The reality is, some creative industry workers are operating in one universe, and musicians are carrying the weight of their careers in another. Collective power is chronically lacking in the industry. Unions exist, but compared to workers in other creative industries, they’re not an integral part of the music industry’s landscape.
Putting the responsibility for a musician’s career being sustainable back on to the fan, the audience and the consumer is all well and good. Sometimes it works. Some independent musicians flourish with income from Patreon, for example. Of course, everyone should be more ethical and conscientious when it comes to all of our choices. Of course we should support local, buy direct, pay for art. But when the systems within the industry – especially when it comes to recorded music – are designed to make Spotify a mind-boggling €11.7 billion in revenue last year, and the convenience of the platform is so tempting, how can the fan move the dial?
[ Spotify’s zero-royalty plan tells musicians their work is worthlessOpens in new window ]
Without collective power, musicians will remain at sea. Unless musicians organise nationally in every jurisdiction en masse, and build powerful union structures, they will still be at the whims of what Hunter S Thompson characterised as “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs”. Then he added the punchline: “There’s also a negative side.”