Music Streaming from user’s perspective
To Taylor Swift and other people who support her ideas about music streaming
Last Sunday Taylor Swift posted on Tumblr an explanation why she is not releasing her new album on Apple Music and that sparked a discussion on the internet. I decided to join and give my views on this matter.
Taylor Swift and other pop artists should be glad that they are paid for what they are doing and be grateful to Spotify and other music streaming services for supporting them. In my opinion, pop artists produce similar music and Axis of Awesome has made an illustrative video about it. I think only exceptional artists’ material can last long and generate money after the artist is gone. Probably that is why miss Swift wants to get paid every penny.
Maybe it is true that she wants to help new music artists to get paid but there are other ways to do that. By cutting one stream of revenue and publicly protesting, is not the best way to do that.
Additionally, I am not sure if Apple is going to pay to all artists during the trial. Eddy Cue’s tweet says nothing about artists will be paid (i.e. only one artist). In the Recode article, Eddy Cue confirmed that he contacted only Taylor Swift and told her about the changes in Apple music. Probably the media misinterpreted the tweet, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Nevertheless, if everyone will be paid during the trial but on a lower tier than the premium tier as the Verge wrote, it won’t be much of a difference from the Spotify’s payment model. Although the difference will be in the source of the money. In Apple’s case, it’s going to be their bank account. Looking from the investor’s point of view, that wouldn’t look good.
Apple is not a charity, and the three-month period starts for every new user. That is too risky and makes musicians more important than the rest of stakeholders. In the past, I tried Google’s music streaming service for free, but when that ended I just switched back to Spotify. Thus, Apple can’t guarantee that majority users will stay with its music service. TIDAL’s example also shows that without free tier the streaming music business have a hard time to compete in the market.
Anyway, the freemium model will win against paid model, downloads or physical sales in the long run. There are few reasons for that.
First is economics, pop music is listened by a young audience (14–25 years old) who don’t have spare money to buy albums and songs. Nonetheless, they are the main consumers of current music and they have only a few free options to do that: regular radios, freemium music streaming services, YouTube, and piracy. Looking from the artist’s perspective, if he produces good music the chances are that people will listen more than once or ten times (I listen to Queen’s songs at least 10 times a year for the past 20 years). If you apply the Spotify payment model the multiple streams per year from one listener means recurrent streams of cash flow. That is better than selling physical records or downloads in the long run.
Second is culture, today people are creating and consuming large amounts of digital content including music. Most of that content are copies or remixes, which creates little or no value for the consumers. This, also, gives tiny incentive to pay for the music, books or movies if you can’t try it out and evaluated that the material is worth enough to pay for it. The only valuable art forms for which I would pay without a heartbeat are theater plays and classical music concerts because they produce material that has been tested by the time.
To sum up, the trends are in favor to the freemium based music streaming and if music player are going against it, well they are only going to hurt themselves because user will listen to music for free and only pay for an exceptionally good content.
