Thoughts on how to make music streaming better/fairer
Before I get too far into this post about how to “fix” music streaming issues (originally written September 2020), for the uninitiated, the main issues are: none of the big streaming services pay artists fairly, while at the same time managing to earn millions/billions of dollars for non-artists + add in the fact that most people don’t pay for music outside of their streaming subscriptions (and some of those subscriptions are free)—I feel there is a much broader conversation that needs to be had about how art and the people who make it are never going to be fairly compensated in this corrupt capitalistic society we’ve all been taking part in for as long as anyone can remember.
Sure, we can make tweaks to payouts and whatnot, but the way Capitalism works is that there can only ever be a few winners, and when everything & everyone has to be turned into a commodity, nothing is ever going to work fairly for everybody. Especially when you factor in just how many people are making and releasing music these days (and I think the ease/freedom of anyone being able to create & release art these days is a good thing — but it’s also not lost on me that my small music blog receives over 1000 submissions a month, and I only accept submissions about 8 days a month). When we apply capitalism solutions to capitalism problems, instead of making things better, all we ever do is just rearrange who gets the limited slightly better seats on the Titanic while some shadowy characters continue to count ticket sales onshore.
So, if we seriously want to fix music streaming, we first need to tear down ALL of the current systems and structures of our exploitive and wasteful society, not just the parts overtly connected to music streaming issues, and then we need to start over fresh. Because, try as much as we keep foolishly trying, you just can’t add more capitalism to a dumpster fire burning on capitalism. You’d think this pandemic would have taught us that by now, but… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course, breaking down and rebuilding society is no quick & easy task—just look at the two rich old white guys America ended up getting to choose between for their recent election to get a sense of how slow progress in the correct direction is ever allowed to move by the powers that be—so if we want to be realistic about how we can start trying to fix music streaming issues sometime in the foreseeable future, we probably need to put a pin in that overall conversation about ‘breaking down Capitalism entirely and starting fresh’ and we need to look at how we can start making improvements to streaming while still living amongst the broken society we’re currently stuck with. Because, let’s be honest, taking down our corrupt Capitalistic society is probably going to have to be something we take apart piece-by-piece anyways (but here’s a blog post about getting to the root of the problem and setting some new societal “normals” if anyone is interested).
Ok… So back to the music streaming issue
I think the conversation needs to start with what’s good about music streaming, and, for me—someone who grew up pre-widespread-internet and who only had access to the music listening discovery provided by the not so very good FM radio stations available in rural Alberta (Canada) in the 1990s—the thing that is good about music streaming is that it gives listeners so much more control over the music they can listen to and discover. I can’t speak for everyone else, but music streaming is my FM radio replacement and it’s my way of checking things out for myself instead of taking someone else’s ear’s word on whether an album is worth more of my headphone time (ie. back in the day, I used to read about an album in Rolling Stone and go, “that sounds like something I would like… oh well, I guess I’ll never know for sure because I live in a small town with no record store and the radio just plays the same things over and over again”). Compared to how controlled the music we got exposed to was before everybody started carrying the internet around in their pockets, not to mention there no longer being barriers for any artist to make and release their music, our current listening/discovery options are a MASSIVE improvement. And we shouldn’t be fighting to go back or reminiscing with rose-coloured glasses, as things weren’t great for most artists back then either.
One of the areas where things go wrong with the current setup is too many people have made music streaming not just their replacement for FM radio, but they’ve also made it their replacement for actually purchasing any music at all. And given how little penny dust makes it back to artists from the current streaming model, this has been a bad development for anyone hoping to earn some money for their art.
But before we start shaming people for not buying enough music, I think it’s important to bring back up the whole ‘corrupt capitalism’ system we’re all living under and acknowledge just how much everybody is struggling to get by on a day to day basis. It’s not fair that artists are getting the short end of the stick when it comes to people trying to find ways to not spend money in one place in order to have enough money to spend elsewhere (ie. on things like food and rent and staying alive), and it’s wrong how a small handful of people are getting rich exploiting this issue, but, again, this is the kind of stuff that happens when you turn everything into a commodity and promote self-interest over community, all the while constantly being misdirected to never get mad at the real crooks.
So while we work on pushing society to transition from being a slave to chasing the lie of infinite growth at the cost of everything & everyone else, what we need in the meantime is more and more people to start stepping up as people who don’t just think of themselves and who are willing to sacrifice their own narcissistic ambitions for the collective good. Put more plainly, we need more people to start being uncompromisingly “good people”. And I’m not just talking about consumers doing a better job of voting with their wallets, we need more companies to start doing the right thing despite the rules of our compromised society not requiring them to do right things.
For starters, there is no reason why we could not have a more stripped down version of a streaming service that provides access to a giant music library and lets people make playlists to share & discover, but instead of bloating running costs by overpaying CEOs and executives and marketers and shareholders and shady record label people and etc, this streaming company could be run as bared bones as possible in order to just provide the technical aspects of keeping a streaming service running and the accounting services of making sure artists are paid as fairly as possible. And not to get too off-track again, but there’s no reason why we can’t create (and support) better versions of companies like Amazon and Facebook and Et Cetera as well while we’re at it — businesses where similar services are provided, but instead of lining the pockets of evil narcissistic billionaires, employees are paid fair livable wages and excess money is used to better society instead of finance some jerk’s space fantasies. We have the technical capabilities to do so, and surely we have the moral fortitude to start wanting to have less things, a little bit slower, especially if it means we can stop empowering the shittiest kinds of people.
And yes, I know that ‘taxing the rich’ and regulating industries is one way to do this, but I think by now we should all be fully aware that we’ve got a major ghoul problem running through our governments. So, rather than waiting on 4-year election cycle after 4-year election cycle for our “leaders” to continue to intentionally take 1 step forward and 2 steps back, we’re going to have to pull our fingers out and start creating (and supporting) non-shitty companies ourselves. Start working and living outside of the systems we’ve been sold. Because we just can’t keep waiting for the people that benefit from the problems existing to fix the problems — that’s never worked and it never will (although, The Alternative’s Henderson Cole has proposed an idea called The American Music Library, which involves taxing the rich to pay for a government run streaming service, and you can read more about that angle here and here).
Ok… BUT back to the music streaming
Personally, I like the payout model of ‘after the streaming service takes its cut to cover their streamlined running costs, my monthly subscription fee should be divvied out between only the artists that I actually listen to each month’. Sure, in order to do this fairly we would have to get rid of the free accounts, but that seems fair enough to me (plus a lot of free accounts get used for sketchy bot streaming stuff anyways). I’ve seen conflicting opinions online about whether this kind of payout model would work better, but I really don’t see why my monthly streaming subscription fee can’t be given exclusively to the people whose music I actually streamed each month (and why I can’t be given a receipt at the end of each month to see where my money has gone).
And that’s another thing we need: way more transparency. Not just with music streaming, but with life in general. There is so much untracked money exchanging hands + so many people with their fingers in pies that should have no business having their fingers in those pies, and we need to start chopping that stuff off at the knuckles. And we can start the process by showing us where exactly our money is going with our subscriptions, our taxes, our et ceteras.
Which segues nicely into another major problem with the current streaming services: the major labels. We hear a lot of artists complaining about the unfair payouts, but we hear a lot less of the big labels complaining about the payouts and I imagine that’s because a lot of them are getting paid out pretty nicely when compared to the cut their artists eventually get (I wonder if that has anything to do with some of the big labels being part-owners of the streaming services?).
And I’m not talking about all record labels being shady here, but we all know of the ones that treat artists like expendable employees instead of the partners-at-minimum that artists really are, and if we’re ever going to move forward with a better streaming solution, we need to get rid of all the predatory leeches that went from being in control of all the money in the old model, to moving straight in to being in control of where all the money goes in the new model. If we ever want to make things better & fairer, we can’t keep letting the foxes be in charge of the hen houses, no matter how much more modern and chicken-friendly the new hen houses appear to look on the outside (and, again, this is a problem we keep allowing to happen in every industry).
Getting rid of past grifters will be a major challenge of building a fairer streaming model, as so much of the music industry is embedded with sleazy people + so much great/popular music is already locked down with unfair contracts (especially from previous decades). Unfortunately, that probably means if we’re ever going to move forward with something that will work with the best interests of ALL artists in mind, we’re going to have to stop supporting all those big labels of yesteryear that have taken advantage of artists for as long as music has been getting released — which means we’re going to have to stop supporting a lot of those bigger than life artists that prop up all those big labels and that people like to stan at unhealthy levels (which is probably for the best anyways). At least until those bigger superstar artists start sticking their extra comfortable necks out enough to come hang out on the ground floor with everybody else (aka: we need people to stop pulling the ladder up behind them).
Because the trick in building a fairer streaming model is not so much in the technical aspects—as complicated and challenging as those may be, there’s plenty of smart and capable people out there + a lot has already been figured out —what we really need is all the artists and labels that are voicing complaints about the current Spotify/Apple/Etc models to actually start putting their music where their mouths are and help push the fairer streaming models along when they come. At the moment, there seems to be more talk about what’s wrong than boots on the ground action. And I know that getting stuff done is easier said than done, but, unfortunately, fixing broken systems and building better ones actually takes people taking on all that ‘easier said than done’ stuff.
It’s not like there aren’t already some better & fairer options trying to take on these unfair streaming models, but they need help — especially from bigger name artists using their bigger name leverage and audiences to help push things along. Because the majority of listeners are going to go where the music they love/want is at.
For example, there’s a streaming service called Resonate that launched an artist-focused collective-based model over the last few years, but despite getting some decent press coverage & write-ups, the amount of recognizable artists or labels shouting them out and making their music available in the Resonate library to try and get listeners interested in this fairer streaming model has been pretty non-existent so far.
And when I say “recognizable” I’m not talking about the big names that the average music fan would recognize, I’m talking about me as a guy who has run an unpopular music blog for the last decade having trouble finding enough ‘unpopular music blog’ recognizable names on the platform to entice me into signing up. Perhaps artists/labels are not convinced that the Resonate streaming model is the correct solution, or perhaps most artists/labels still aren’t aware of it, but something tells me it’s more the classic case of complaining about the ‘bad thing’ while continuing to use the ‘bad thing’ instead of putting in the effort, and usually losing some comforts & conveniences, to help make the ‘good thing’ alternative take-off. A fairly common problem in our society that, unfortunately, we’re all guilty of doing & one of the reasons why progress moves so slow.
I mean, it took forever for bigger name bands and labels to start making their music available to purchase on an obvious ‘good thing’ service like Bandcamp, and, despite providing a space where fans can buy music while taking a smaller cut than other digital storefronts, there still are plenty of artists and labels whose music you can’t find on the Bandcamp platform. And when you talk to your average normal person / casual music fan, most still don’t know of or have never actually used Bandcamp before.
It reminds me of when Thom Yorke was talking about how Spotify was the last dying fart of the music industry back in 2013, while at the same time having no Radiohead or solo music available to purchase on Bandcamp — which meant that none of his big stage complaining involved pointing his massive audience towards a music service site that was actually putting artists first. And since I had a blog back then, I wrote a ‘Why U No Talk About Bandcamp?’ post that, 7 years later, still rings pretty true (although, things have gotten a lot better over the years as far as Bandcamp gaining more exposure & credibility, especially with Bandcamp continuing to do ‘good people’ moves like running ‘Bandcamp Fridays’ in support of artists/labels struggling even more to make money now that Covid has taken away live music income — Thom Yorke and Radiohead even sometimes temporarily make their music available on Bandcamp).
Which leads us to the most likely candidate of ‘good people’ bringing a viable ‘good thing’ streaming solution to the table: Bandcamp.
Bandcamp already have a great reputation & relationship with a very large chunk of people releasing music these days (they don’t have all the big names involved, but there are definitely a lot more big names involved than the first handful of years + as we’ve seen with Spotify & Etc, not having the biggest names involved can help keep things from being corrupted right from the start, as established ‘big names’ and their suits often demand to be treated differently than everyone else) and Bandcamp has already shown themselves to be both technically capable & ethically sound in their approach to the music business, so I can’t help but think that they have the very particular set of skills needed to pull off a better/fairer streaming model.
Bandcamp’s hesitation to start dipping their toes into offering something that more closely resembles “streaming” probably comes from a concern that doing so would conflict with their current position that the best way to support artists is to actually purchase music directly from the artists — but I think they are missing how important the music discovery aspect provided by shareable playlists & FM radio replacement listening would be to drawing more people into a Bandcamp community where buying music is both pushed and celebrated. It just feels like there are ways to unlock more streaming and discovery on the Bandcamp platform without completely blowing the doors off of music purchasing.
For example, instead of having EVERYTHING available to stream, artists could select which tracks from their available-to-buy-on-Bandcamp albums could be used in the streaming / playlist sharing ecosystem — and perhaps the monthly subscription fee could be tied to how much a user spends buying tracks/albums directly from artists on Bandcamp? I think we underestimate how much only being able to sample a few tracks from each album is more than enough to meet our monthly listening/discovery needs, especially spread over a huge library (and we definitely underestimate how having access to stream almost EVERYTHING EVER RELEASED is way too much choice for anybody to take in and completely destroys how we value music and the humans who make it). By not having the entire album available in the streaming/playlist ecosystem, there’s still motivation left for listeners to want to buy the full album, all the while providing the FM radio replacement listening that makes streaming/playlists so useful for pulling in new users to a platform.
I know as a music blog, I would LOVE to be able to move the playlist promotion part of my site away from Spotify and towards a site like Bandcamp that actually encourages the supporting of artists, but so far the only way to make playlists with Bandcamp music has been with 3rd party playlist services, and those sites always eventually shut down & all the playlists you spent time making on them disappear from the internet forever (rip Playmoss, Songdrop, ExFM, etc — related update: I’m currently using 3rd party Buy Music Club for sharing the available-on-Bandcamp tracks from a Spotify playlists). Especially when it comes to turning people outside of the ‘blogosphere bubble / music twitter’ worlds (aka: regular people) on to a site like Bandcamp, easy music discovery tools like playlists and curated radio options are going to go a lot further to pulling people in than the current capabilities of putting a track embed in an album review post.
And I know it has been pointed out on Twitter recently that Bandcamp may have some royalty/copyright issues that need addressing when it comes to the streaming that is already available on the site (ie. you can’t make Bandcamp playlists currently, but you can listen to albums/tracks for free on an artist’s Bandcamp page), so this is probably where Bandcamp’s resistance to providing better music sharing functions like user-generated playlists comes from—but perhaps royalty/copyright stuff is another one of those outdated things from our corrupt capitalistic society that we need to be doing a serious rethink on in order to ever get somewhere better & fairer in the modern online world?
For example, if we stop trying to think of streaming as a replacement for buying/owning music, and instead focus on making streaming a much better replacement for what FM radio used to provide (ie. finite music discovery that leads to music purchasing) maybe we could get away from trying to figure out how many fractions of a penny every listen should be worth? Maybe we can build something better if we don’t keep referring to the rule books written by the past rulers? Maybe we can find a way to get more ‘good people’ supporting ‘good people’ doing ‘good things’ if we just really lean into valuing the ‘good’ bits?
But maybe that just brings us back to the original caveat: the solution for music streaming, much like the solution to all our other societal problems, can’t get filtered through all the old ways of neoliberal colonial/imperial capitalistic thinking that got us to this place in the first place. In order to make something work the way we wish things would work, we have to stop accepting that the way the world currently works is how things have to continue to work.
Now, somebody smarter and more ambitious than I, please get to work on some solutions (but I am available to help if needed).
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