Spotify is clearly far from perfect for artists, but what’s the key point creators are missing in the streaming debate that could actually bring change?
OPINION: Spotify Streaming Debate
There’s an enormous elephant in the room most artists ignore when discussing Spotify’s role as a music streaming service, and it’s causing somewhat of a broken record scenario within this long contested debate (no pun intended).
Firstly, we should get right into the root cause of this issue, and ask whether Spotify is solely responsible for music’s decline in monetary value over the past couple of decades?
No, and here’s why, plus an actual solution…
First of all it’s important to mention that there’s no denying Spotify should pay more per stream to creators, but many artists make the mistake of thinking this is a platform built primarily for them, which it is not. Spotify is a platform built first and foremost for the listener, and without wanting to sound too controversial, it was the listener who sent the monetary value of music into free fall long before Spotify launched their subscription service some 15 years ago.
And now to address the big elephant in the room which always seems to get left out of the debate today, that being the MP3 torrent boom around the turn of the millennium.
Essentially, people who listened to music had two choices to make shortly after the year 2000 which would impact the music industry for years to come – they were, continue paying for (and owning) music by purchasing CDs, vinyl or even MP3s themselves, therefore upholding music’s monetary value; or download music for free via pirated MP3s, thus sending the financial value of music into decline.
Many more people did this than we care to admit, and the reason this never gets mentioned anymore when it comes to the streaming debate is because many of the people criticising Spotify now could have been people who opted for Pirate Bay instead of HMV all those years ago.
This completely crashed the industry, and provided an opportunity for companies like Spotify to capitalize on the newfound reluctance of most people (bar DJs and record collectors) to actually buy albums anymore. They did this by providing an offer most listeners couldn’t refuse – for the price of one album each month, you can have access to much of the entire global catalogue of recorded music.
It cannot be denied that the average listener jumped on this convenient opportunity, therefore making Spotify the most successful music streaming platform in history, with by far the most amount of paying customers in the world today (263 million to be precise). And this of course only makes it more of a necessary platform for artists to be a part of.
So, the devaluing of music did not start with Spotify. It is simply one byproduct of the declining monetary value of music, because most people simply stopped wanting to pay for it.
This all might be true, but why does that mean streaming platforms can’t pay creators fairly now?
That’s a fair question, and it’s because they only care about one thing, and one thing only…attracting the most customers they possibly can so they can generate the most amount of revenue possible. They don’t care about your art, or even music in general, and expecting them too isn’t going to change anything.
So to bring the value of music back up to pre-2000 levels and hence get artists better paid for their art, we must start by understanding and acknowledging these two instances; the MP3 “boom”, and massive numbers of listeners using Spotify despite their clearly unfair compensation rates to artists. But they’re not the only ones jumping on Spotify despite this, it’s actually artists themselves too! And it’s not just Spotify.
Streaming giants with huge numbers of listeners are, by their very nature, going to cater to the interests of those listeners more than anyone else. Perhaps that’s why streaming platforms like Tidal, despite paying much more per stream to artists, are still less desirable for the average listener who cares about convenient features and big music libraries above all.
Creators don’t want to lose out on the potentially huge exposure and promotion that platforms like Spotify can provide, or in other words hugely disadvantage themselves by not being on the platform most people use to listen to music. But artists must realise that the average person doesn’t really care about how much artists get paid for their music, let alone the streaming giants themselves.
Ironically, your deal with Spotify is – they offer your music a space on the platform with by far the most listeners globally, but pay you the least compensation for it.
Okay, the situation sucks, so what’s the solution?
Expecting self-initiated change from a platform with corporate shareholders and hence an ever-growing appetite to feed the masses cheap access to music is futile. They must be forced to see the real monetary value of the music they profit so much from on their platform, and it’s up to artists to demonstrate that through more than just complaining or signing petitions.
Artists must get smart in both raising the value of their artwork themselves (which some are already doing through platforms like Patreon ect), as well as truly understanding the power that they have over these platforms as a collective force…which is actually considerable.
Ultimately, if the likes of YouTube Music, Apple Music or Spotify gain huge advantage from the sheer amount of music artists willingly provide to them (which then attracts millions of customers), the tables can be turned when artists realise that THEY have power in numbers too. Why do you think these streaming giants have so much power and leverage in the first place to attract so many customers? It’s because of your music!
Clearly this is not an easy task, but artists cannot simply rely on Spotify to change their platform just by essentially begging them, they must force the change themselves. And it all starts with teaming up and getting organised.
Even though the music listener commercially devalued music in the first place, it’s the responsibility of artists to make music financially valuable again. And even though I have pointed out that streaming businesses will bend over backwards to provide whatever customers want, it is actually artists that could in fact have the most leverage in the end. After all, why do so many people use these platforms? To listen to the huge amount of music that exists on them.
For the most part, it’s large amounts of music that attracts people to big streaming platforms, so it’s large amounts of artists that have the power to tip the balance. Read that again.
This issue is never going to get fixed by simply demanding more money from Spotify, because they are always going to do what their paying customers want more than their vendors; well, for at least as long as their vendors queue up to join the platform despite being paid pennies themselves – this reveals perhaps the only solution artists collectively have at their disposal…stop providing music to Spotify (until they pay more). Spotify only pays peanuts because artists keep uploading their music despite being paid scraps.
Let’s say 5 million artists decided to take their music off the platform, and not provide any more until the rates per stream were increased by at least 50%. This may disadvantage those artists in the short-term, but in the long-term collectively could pay off massively. And with a large enough number, Spotify would have no other choice than to at least listen, and probably take action.
If all artists globally stopped handing over their music to Spotify until they started paying fairly, I’m sure they’d see an increase in rates per stream pretty damn quickly. This is because only when you disrupt Spotify’s ability to attract and retain customers (with the enormous amount of music cheaply available), will they actually listen to artists’ pleas for better rates.
And then comes the Socialist Streaming Revolution
That simple fact actually reveals one very effective way artists could leverage their power towards streaming platforms more broadly and even listeners who enjoy cheap access to music – start a (better) musicians union and begin a strike by removing music en masse from Spotify as well as any other platforms that pay unfairly. This would show those companies, and the customers of them, the true value of music. After all, it was the great Joni Mitchell who said “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” back in 1970.
There is of course a musician’s union in the UK, and some other countries, but considering the situation artists still find themselves in today, they seem to be doing anything other than actually getting streaming pay for artists…whatever the MU in the UK is doing, it’s clearly not working.
With major labels owning shares in Spotify, a union streaming strike would of course have to start from independent artists, and would only have a real impact if large numbers of artists came on board. Obviously this is not an easy task, but it’s not impossible. It’s a lot more possible than Spotify one day out of nowhere just deciding to pay more, isn’t it?
In the same way that workers in other sectors unionise to leverage their power, artists must work together to really demonstrate the value of their art and provide a lasting solution that’s beneficial to them.
Artists must take back control of their art, after years of giving it away for free.
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