The Future of the Future of Music
From its inception in June of 2000, the Future of Music Coalition (FMC) has championed itself as an artists-rights nonprofit. Its public profile has risen steadily in recent years, due more to the participation of celebrity keynote speakers like David Lowery, Ian Mackaye, Wayne Kramer and Tim Westergren than the exhilarating minutiae of American copyright law.
This month, FMC began publishing a series of editorials lamenting the terrible specter of streaming music. Joe Steinhardt of Don Giovanni records launched the first volley in A Future With No Alternative, and was quickly followed by Emily White, who proposed Equal & Transparent Streaming for All. Emily, it should be noted, runs a PR firm called Whitesmith Entertainment, which, if you know anything about favor-trading in the promotions sphere, is a curious perch from which to clamor for equality and transparency.
Granting that it was written fifteen years ago in the throes of entrepreneurial ecstasy, I could forgive the FMC’s histrionic mission statement, if the tenor of its rhetoric, and that of the authors it publishes, had matured. The tenets are comically pejorative:
- No longer will corporate media and big money be able to frame the discussion of music solely in terms of their industries.
- No longer will business interests or [lobbyists] drown out the voices of the musicians on whose art they have built an industry.
- No longer will idealistic techies and idealistic musicians find themselves locked into opposing sides of an issue that profoundly affects both of our communities.
These egalitarian, self-righteous pronouncements have no relationship to the real world.
Music has no intrinsic market value. It can change the world, mend hearts, and break them, but it is not an asset. It’s not even a commodity. No piece of music is more valuable than any other: it is either popular, or less so. The only aspect of capitalism available to music is its use value, which is prohibitively variable. Whatever capacity music has to interface with commerce, it is subject to the whims of fashion, and the consensus of the marketplace. Music’s value is a rolling referendum.
You cannot build a framework of objection on a false premise, yet we are still subjected to monotonous editorials that would convince us musicians’ rights are being trampled upon; that streaming services fail to provide “fair” income to these “creators.”
Do It* Yourself
However a musician or rights-holder defines “fair,” Spotify grants them access to over fifteen million (claimed) paying customers. The artist’s only job is to perform, advertise, or recommend their music to this captive audience in a convincing manner. That opportunity is literally impossible to valuate, because it has never existed. Viewed this way, Spotify has set the table for advertising dollars, concert tours and even general, anecdotal interest in music to translate into a quantifiable result: people can conveniently and actually hear your work at any moment. That action is recorded by Spotify, and determines exactly how popular and profitable you are inside an ecosystem built on the strength of their product. If you think your shaggy two minute Guided By Voices knockoffs are the gas in that engine—that without your “art,” Spotify wouldn’t exist—you are fucking nuts.
Implicit in these arguments is the notion that a musician should expect to earn a living wage from their art, or, in more sensible propositions, defray their cost of living. At face, the latter suggestion seems attainable—a few hundred dollars helps with the rent—but I am at a loss to explain how this was ever consistently accomplished in the past, via broadcast and performance royalties, mechanical and sync licensing, and recording contracts, whether with “independent” or “major” labels. On the most cursory examination, it is glaringly obvious that none of these constructs ever provided musicians a comfortable living, unless they were already famous.
Famous musicians are in an exclusive position to wage economic war on streaming services, whose royalty structures do not translate beneficially at scale. As the most famous musician on the planet, Taylor Swift has market leverage: her audience is comparable to Spotify’s entire subscription base. The service’s utilitarian royalty scheme offers her an embarrassing pittance, even compared to YouTube’s streaming royalties, let alone international advertising campaigns, sponsorship deals, concert revenues, and compact disc sales. We’re talking about an artist currently seeking to trademark the words “This sick beat” as a component in the extension of her terrestrial brand.
This Sick Brand
Ms. White’s essay is rife with ostentatious pronouncements. “I am in a unique position in which I deeply understand how we got here,” she boasts. “I have devoted my life to championing and defending artists’ rights.” Yet she has appeared in fawning industry profiles recommending that musicians submit to and feed the SEO machine, wielding the usual marketing new-speak about “fan engagement” and “growing your brand.” The only devotion Ms. White seems to have is to the transmutation of music into an interpretable commodity for lifestyle advertisers.
Mr. Steinhardt, who is no fan of mine, has penned a vacuous lament for an imaginary level of control he fears we will lose when streaming music services are the only game in town. It smacks of viewing any business bigger than yours as “the man.” Spotify, and soon iTunes, will be cloud-based gated communities, and the parent companies will decide who gets access to their platforms, how little it will pay artists, and how much it will charge their fans. At best Steinhardt points up the potential for excluding small artists, and independent labels, much the way YouTube screwed indies last year, by changing their terms midstream.
I contend the opposite: that no streaming music provider will ever behave in an exclusionary way toward content providers. It will be on the artists and labels to accept or reject these platforms. This is again a matter of perspective, of understanding Spotify as an unparalleled promotional and functional opportunity you should probably be paying for, not expecting to fund your vanity pressings.
An illustrative story: four years ago, I paid a completely shady (but still operative) UK company somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 to front my music into Spotify. I made up record label information, provided all the data points Spotify requires to ingest digital music, and was shepherded every step of the way by this company’s website. The money was really for two certifications you must have to place music in a digital ecosystem, which are supposed to vett that you’re a real, going concern, and not my daughters joyfully (if tunelessly) singing along to “Dark Horse.”
Here’s the funny thing: I have never renewed my subscription to this service. I deleted my credit card information from their website in 2012, and have received only faceless promotional emails from the company ever since. Yet every album I submitted to Spotify in this way, in 2011, is still there in 2015. The trick is you have to think like a content provider: the door is always open. Everything enters, nothing leaves. Lost content is a lost opportunity, a wasted click. Unless you legally infringe upon or embarrass the company, they will never have incentive to delete material from their archives. That is antithetical to their very function.
Mr. Steinhardt’s chief error is a first-principle presumption: that, in order to compete with streaming services like Spotify, he would need to build a comparable infrastructure, to control distribution and storage of his material. This ethical primacy is at odds with his label’s current and extensive use of YouTube, but I don’t posit that as a total rejoinder.
The fact is, storage is agnostic. Access is the political determinant, and that is the wedge Steinhardt should drive more clearly. Make no mistake: access to music will dictate the future of the medium, and it is very concerning for anyone who wants to spend their time promoting music they love. Apple’s absorption of Beats Music is complete, and later this month, the corporation is set to debut a retooled iTunes platform. Assuredly, it will be painted with a slick interface, and overflowing with the sort of celebrity endorsements that made Beats a thorn in Apple’s side.
Curate me, my friend
The future of music is going to look radically different than at any point in the past. Never before have musicians enjoyed the kind of agency they will soon wield. Apple is known to pay for celebrity and/or talent, understanding the time-tested maxim, “money talks, bullshit walks,” and we are about to see just how loudly money can talk. Spotify’s efforts to maintain a sparse, user-friendly interface and a near-total lack of advertising (for premium subscribers) will come back to haunt them in a matter of weeks.
iTunes is going to launch as a world-eating hydra, with celebrity endorsements and advertising saturation unseen since the launch of the iPhone itself. Beyond the billboard-and-bus stop campaigns, musicians will function as brand evangelists within the application itself, via curated playlists, interviews and exclusive content; cross-brand partnerships—brand-shares—with Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed, and anyone else who wants access to the entire Apple ecosystem will be negotiated on draconian terms; and most frighteningly, exclusive, discounted, one-click subscription offers to all AT&T customers will hit every iPhone on the planet at once. This model, tested by Beats before the acquisition, was a chilling preview of what’s to come.
In my previous piece on this topic, I lampooned the wedge marketing Beats employed to distinguish itself from Spotify. Their Big Idea was the supposed need for “trusted curation” in the face of data and interface overload. “In a world of infinite choices, Beats can better-predict your needs! More fully enrich your enjoyment of music! Broaden your economic footprint in the digital music ecosystem! Connect more fans to more artists!” And so forth.
Curation implies that people are too stupid to figure out what music they like on their own time, and further that there is always more of it around the corner, right now and forever. In practice, it is an elitist contraction of available options, brokered by the musician as an agent of recommendation. In this role, they may finally earn a living wage.
