IN DEFENCE OF SPOTIFY
Access Vs OwNErship
Hear me out, refuseniks …
My perspective is that we have gravitated away from an era of ownership to an era of access where the majority of people value immediate access much more highly than physical 'stuff'.
Spotify provides that access.
Music Discovery
It's also become an outstanding platform for music discovery. Its algorithms are often spot on, and as a result, I find myself listening to LOTS of music that's new to me. It's also brilliantly integrated into a whole host of other Apps and works seamlessly on every device.
Not only do I now not have to manage what *I see* as the clutter of a physical collection of music, but nor do I have to manage that even more hellish world of managing a digital music collection. Everything is meticulously tagged and curated so that the listening experience is pretty much seamless.
The Loudness Wars
Streaming platforms have also gone a long way to pushing back against the loudness wars that have plagued electronic music for many years. These services now aim to standardise the perceived volume of tracks for a balanced and equitable listening experience. This means we are now seeing a tendency to move away from the dick-swinging contest of brickwall EDM and back towards a more musical and nuanced approach.
Not only that, but Spotify have brought about a massive boom in intelligent electronic music that's being made primarily for people to listen to, and not just to be danced to. In my view this has helped usher in a slew of really exciting new artists (and great quality music from established ones) who no longer feel like slaves to the dancefloor and the tedious conservatism of the vast majority of DJs.
Getting Heard
Spotify has also done a lot to democratise the process of getting heard. No longer are we, as artists, reliant on a creaking and horrendously dated business model that involves an endless procession of middlemen. Over the years I saw 4 artist albums I made (at a cost of at least 6 studio years) get utterly destroyed as a result of corporate power-plays, distribution failures and record companies going bust. I also had the usual music industry dramas with PR and management that had sub-optimal outcomes.
With the balance of power shifting away from the traditional media outlets for being heard (radio, print, online) a degree of control has reverted to artists who have, for so long, struggled to be heard.
You can now go from completing work on a track to having it available to the world in minutes (if you so choose). There’s also a staggering amount of back-end analytics to absorb and weaponise: this, allied with the sheer volume of detailed targeting you can apply using the likes of Facebook, gives you all the tools you need to self-promote your work.
Unfair Pay
From a financial perspective, I would LOVE them to pay artists more to address the unfairness weighing in their favour ... but it's worth bearing in mind that this is a totally different business model than the one we've lived with for so many years. The shelf life of a song is now largely indefinite, especially once you reach a certain tipping point of listeners - this in itself could well sustain artists WELL beyond the traditional shelf life of, say, a vinyl release. If you didn’t sell heavily in the first week or two of a vinyl release, the stores would pull them and if you were on a sale or return deal you could easily end up with palette loads of unsold plastic. Yes, plastic, planet earth fans!
It doesn’t help Spotify’s case that they have a somewhat loathsome CEO with suspect politics, and I personally detest seeing the likes of Joe Rogan’s conspiratorial frothing being given such a high-profile platform. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here, though. We all use social platforms that are owned by power-hungry tyrants who have created tech that is more addictive than crack cocaine. We’ve become desensitised to the fact that they have become the global gatekeepers of information, and more importantly the primary amplification vessels for MISinformation.
We, the people, get the media we deserve. If we don’t like it, we need to change it. But this piece isn’t specifically about that.
Supporting Artists
I would have closed this missive with something along the lines of ‘in this brave new world of streaming’, but it’s no longer a ‘new world’ at all. This is how an overwhelming majority consume their music - so let’s let them do that without judgement… and if we want to support the artists in other ways, then it’s up to the artists to provide us with compelling products and reasons to do so, whether that be via Bandcamp, websites, experiences, physical product, live shows or NFTs.
There’s no denying the fact that someone purchasing one of my albums from Bandcamp provides me with the equivalent income to them streaming my album every day for 3 years. What streaming does give me that the Bandcamp purchase doesn’t, however, is almost unimaginable exposure to a truly global audience. There’s a way for these two models to live very comfortably alongside each other.
