“Where is Music Going?”
by nick alan
The following article is not intended as a comprehensive treatment of an admittedly broad and complicated subject, but as a way into the discussion around current and future trends linking the arts and commerce.
[Note: this article links to the streaming service Resonate’s blog. I am an artist listed on Resonate who happens to share their vision of alternative outlets for artists and labels.]
Introduction: two versions of a question
For the past few days a question has been rattling around my head, one which, for all its apparent innocence, turns out to bear some serious implications. It has taken this simple form: “Where is music going?” Now on to take the simple form in a complex direction.
By “going” I identify two main strands of interpretation:
The first strand interprets the question in economic terms: to ask, “Where is music going?” in the economic sense is to ask about the future of music as an industry. The second strand concerns the music itself, and focuses on the future of music as a cultural artifact. We find ourselves in an era of dangerous tension between these two realms—business on one end, art and culture on the other. Now, before moving on, let it be stressed that selling music is not the issue per se. The real point of tension gravitates around how and why music is sold, if it is sold at all.
The current streaming market represents the state of the problem well, wherein the subscription-based models of the dominant service providers (Amazon, Apple, and Spotify) obscure any rationale for how subscriptions translate into fair payment to artists. Compare the subscription model to Bandcamp’s, which places market control in the hands of artists and labels, thereby treating their primary stakeholders more as autonomous users than as content providers to a parent company.
The subscription model is useful—for the owner of the platform—but the blanket approach of the subscription model fails to overcome key concerns about such things as the market value of individual plays and the ultimate value of the artist-listener connection as fostered by the artists and listeners themselves.
The goal of an alternative model to the big names should be to preserve the integrity of both the industrial and the artistic: that is, to allow for the flourishing of artistic freedom within a market context that places maximum control in the hands of the artist. But good approaches to an alternative marketplace require a deeper understanding and respect for the social-cultural role of the arts themselves.
Art and Commerce within a Community Context
community |kəˈmjuːnɪti|noun (pl.communities) 2 [ mass noun ] the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common: the sense of community that organized religion can provide.
(taken from the Oxford Dictionary of British English)
•••
The basic attitude of a community toward the arts is determined by the cultural, and moral foundations that guide the daily life of that community. Just as music itself can be both art and commodity, so the community itself can be both the living subject through which art is created and the marketplace in which music is performed, distributed, experienced and supported.
Common between the senses of community-as-subject and community-as-marketplace is their being public or social realities. Communities of any size, form, or purpose have some shared end or goal that binds all of its members, rendering certain individual actions pertinent (sometimes essentially) to the success of the given community in achieving its end—team-based athletic competitions exemplify this in easily identifiable ways. As we move deeper into the age on-demand streaming at whatever cost to artist we need to be asking ourselves and one another whether the product is not categorically different from those products the value of which is determined principally on utilitarian or commercial terms. If we, as a community of artists, listeners, and service providers, are nothing more than functions of a user-base or consumer culture, then the so-called art that arises in such a community must be considered a result of that functionality: it must be, contrary to the evidence of intuition and experience, a thing to be either used, bought, or sold, but never to be comprehended beyond these categories of use and consumption.
What interest does Spotify have in the arts? The answer is none, at least, not necessarily. Insofar as artists on Spotify are content providers and not the owners of their own marketplace, the relationship between artists and Spotify can only be defined as a community in some incidental sense, which is to say the goal of such a community is not grounded in the success of the whole in and of itself.
Instead, the “community” around Spotify is grounded in some external good, the character of which may vary from one stakeholder to the next. When the goal or goals are changeable, so the community in proportion with the change in goal: the people demand a different product or service, and so the relevant provider changes according to the demand; the community was one thing and now it is another.
Closing Remarks
Artists may function within a given market, but this does not make art of itself a function of the marketplace. As a function, art is first and foremost a function of the human capacity—indeed, the natural desire—to create with a view to contemplation and understanding. As such, art is not a product in the market sense and can never be so but incidentally. The practical corrective to the Spotify mentality, which requires that art be a product for personal consumption before it is anything else, must strive to develop models of support over and against models of mere consumption. The former recognizes two features of any community striving to flourish in and of itself:
(1) that of common humanity, and (2) that of justice. According to ‘(1)’, there are some goods that pertain to human beings in virtue of the kind of being humans are, and as such, these goods are more appropriately the determinants rather than the functions of a given marketplace. According to ‘(2)’, the fair payment of artists is a matter of justice, and one that is more easily attained when the artists themselves control the terms by which their art is accessed, distributed, and sold. The further we move from the principle of subsidiarity by which artists are ensured this autonomy, the closer we move toward a system that profits from the need of artists by burdening them with the demands of a marketplace that is not essentially theirs.
