Don’t blame Spotify; blame the music industry
The recent debate launched by David Byrne in the wake of an article he wrote in The Guardian entitled “The internet will suck all creative content out of the world”, a tirade against what he sees as a future dominated by streaming services such as Spotify has prompted a range of opinions about the music service site created by Swedes Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon.
The difference with the previous high-profile attack against Spotify by Thom Yorke y Nigel Godrich, about which I wrote at the time, is that Byrne is blaming Spotify and other similar sites for paying musicians so little, when, as Yorke and Godrich pointed out, it is the major labels controlling the music industry that are to blame.
The reality behind the changes that have taken place in the music industry is that the big labels, subject to a consolidation process that has simply increased their power to the level of an oligopoly that pays one of the most politically influential lobbies in the world, allowing them to continue paying the same percentages to musicians for their work, despite the significant reductions in production costs compared to those of a few decades ago. While they whined that their business was dying, and with it music itself, the reality was that the profitability of their business was actually increasing: they have taken advantage of the shift from traditional distribution channels to digital outlets to improve their bottom line at the expense of musicians.
To blame Spotify for musicians’ miserable earnings is absurd: the site hands over 70% of its income to the labels through royalties; it is the labels who, at least in the case of the majors, who pay their artists around 15% (some independent labels are more fair, and pay musicians signed to them 50%). The fact that the major labels are Spotify shareholders, the only way that Ek could find to have access to their catalogues, means that the responsibility must fall, once again, on the majors.
At a time when the record companies should have reduced their production costs (technological advances mean that it has never been easier and cheaper to produce high quality music), their format (which is less and less in the form of CD), distribution (moving a bit is infinitely cheaper than shifting CDs), and marketing (a significant proportion of this is now done by fans themselves), they have done nothing to increase the amount they pay artists for their music. Do record companies really contribute so much to the creation of music as to justify these low payments?
In other words, the root of the problem remains the same: the labels say that despite the internet’s reduction of entry barriers, they are still responsible for launching the careers of the biggest artists, while the internet has not produced any major talent. Is that really the case? Or is it really that these big players still have control over traditional channels such as television or FM radio? Let’s be honest here: the reason musicians receive relatively little money from streaming services such as Spotify is because the big labels refuse to pay artists the money they deserve for the work they produce. And if musicians decide not to work with the big labels they find that they are denied access to television and radio, which means, with few exceptions that few people hear their music.
Launching one’s own career in music with the intention of retaining control over one’s music, or even doing so through an independent label means having no access to radio and television, and therefore condemning oneself to a life outside the hit parade.
So let’s not blame Spotify. The real enemy here, the party that is taking the largest share of the cake, is the same as it has always been. In the old days, the music industry could at least justify the significant margins it made on the grounds that its work was costly. Now it can no longer even make that claim.
