In the 21st century, the working musician finds themselves operating in a landscape far more fragile and precipitous than that which was prevalent in the hundred years prior. The era regarded as the zenith of the recording industry - namely the last thirty-or-so years of the 20th century - has been elegantly usurped by a new ‘streaming’ model, whereby an inconceivably vast array of music is offered to a listening audience (including both paying subscribers and non-subscribers) while the artist receives a nominal fee as remuneration dependent on the number of plays their music accrues. This model was spearheaded and normalised by Spotify upon its launch in 2008 and has since become not only the pre-eminent manner of music consumption around the world, but indeed so astoundingly ubiquitous that anyone who eschews Spotify’s services (or the services of the myriad alternate streaming companies which appeared in it’s wake as the ‘new normal’ became apparent - ie Apple Music, Pandora or Tidal) is regarded as being either iconoclastic or ignorant.    

This cultural shift away from vinyl and subsequently CDs as the primary means of engaging with music has ensured that most artists outside the mainstream can no longer rely on record sales as a fair income stream and instead are being forced to augment, diversify or re-navigate their practice to achieve a liveable income. With all this change happening so rapidly, the music industry and artistic community have been left reeling in an attempt to steer a course through unprecedented times while those which instigate and perpetuate this new model celebrate massive financial gain - artists flounder while Spotify founder Daniel Ek looks to purchase Arsenal football club with his £3.3bn net worth (1). This pre-eminent streaming model which has emerged over the last 15 years has raised a number of questions about the ethics surrounding the consumption of music and art, the plight of the contemporary artist working in the 21st century as well as the role and function of music and musicians within our society. 

Here I posit that the ‘everything and more’ music consumption model championed by Spotify et al dramatically undermines the cultural weight and value of music as an art form - that the advent of ‘play-listing’ as a primary modus of engagement nurtures the development of a passive listener who is deterred from understanding, empathising or developing an emotional connection with an artist. This passivity manifests as a negligence and ambivalence towards an art form from which they benefit significantly in their day to day life. I suggest that the streaming model inherently relegates music to a background noise, perpetuates the belief that audiences have an unassailable right to access an artist’s catalogue for free, and rewards musicians for adopting a ‘quantity over quality’ approach, thereby encouraging the release of derivative and homogenous works which subscribe to this role of ‘background noise’ as a means to best secure financial gains. By drawing on numerical evidence, article-based research and personal experience I extrapolate on why this dominant streaming model is not only financially unfair and unsustainable for the artist but also how this trend looks to ultimately cheapen our relationship with our inherent human-ness. However, let us look first at the financial ramifications of this new paradigm upon the industry.

It is no great secret that musicians have always been weary towards the huge spectre of the recording industry, for “in the early 1900s, manufacturers of mechanical instruments (namely, the phonograph) paid no royalties for the compositions their machines played”(2)  while simultaneously record labels were portioning themselves a significant cut of income from the purchasing of music (primarily piano rolls and sheet music) thereby leaving the musicians who wrote or recorded the musical works to unjustly collect a smaller slice of the pie. This led to the legislation of the 1909 Copyright Act, which allowed musicians and performers to collect royalties for the sale of records and the playing of their music - otherwise known as ‘mechanical royalties’. With this important change, artists began to garner significant remuneration for their work. Where once recorded music was derided as being “as incongruous as canned salmon by a trout brook”(3) , soon the popularity of recorded music increased as audiences became interested in owning music of ‘strange’ new styles (jazz, swing and blues music, or the contemporary aesthetics of impressionistic composers such as Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky) as an indication of prestige. Social occasions were often organised around the sharing and celebration of this music. This point is important, as it is demonstrative of an era where a listening audience was keenly engaged and inquisitive with regards to new music - where active listening (that is to say, an environment where ones attention is focused upon the music) was common and the artist was not denigrated for their incorporation of unique structures, textures and approaches - rather, the industry thrived on individuality and subversion. Pushing the envelope was how one could expect to sell the most amount of records as audiences were looking to be the lucky ones who were first to discover the ‘freshest’ music.

Later, through the mid/late 1900s, or the LP and into the CD era, record labels still maintained power when it came to the production and distribution of music on a wide scale. Labels would front advances for an artist or band to cover the costs of their recording, then recoup that funding on sales, with excess income being paid to the songwriters and performers at a negotiated fee. Throughout this era artists were able to work in subsidised recording studios while being assured by some financial ‘cushion’ on behalf of the record label. This was the era whereby the archetype of the affluent and luxuriant musician was born and promulgated. With physical record sales at an illustrious high, aided by the advent of the television (60 million people watched Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956), as well as the fact that the only way for the public to hear music in their own homes was to buy it, artists enjoyed a financial recompense for their work as they had not seen prior. Simply the fact that there was money going into the industry meant that the possibility of forging a living out of music was plausible, and assured that even the more left of centre acts could find an audience and cultivate financial returns - this was an era where projects such as Bjork, Sigur Ros, Tool, My Bloody Valentine and so many more artists who were somewhat renowned for their unique compositional approach to a more traditional format such enjoyed huge economic success . To illustrate this point; between 2010-2014 the Global Recorded Music Industry Revenues reported an average of ~$14.6(US Billion) compared to ~$25.2(US Billion) in 1999(4). This trend can be attributed only to the advent of streaming services, which enjoyed a frenzied, almost honeymoon-like period of rampant proliferation since Spotify’s public launch in 2008.

[Addendum; It must be said however that as the music industry steadies instead from the reeling that followed the cataclysmic rise of Spotify in the early 2010s, it has managed to calibrate itself and begin it’s motion towards some semblance of financial normality - “[In 2020] the global recorded music market grew by 7.4%…[and] show[ed] total revenues…[of] US$21.6 billion”(5). While these numbers are still significantly short of where they were in the previous century (particularly when accounting for inflation), it appears to be a positive trend which can be attributed to the canniness (and utter stubbornness) of record labels and those working in the modern music industry as they attempt to navigate this new frontier of music consumption (I invite you to imagine here two pilots madly hammering buttons between futile prayers in the cockpit of a malfunctioning aeroplane, while in the cabin the blissfully ignorant passengers enjoy the new Marvel™ film and eat potato chips). There is an overarching wariness that is necessary here, as a majority of this money (~62%) is being accrued through streaming revenue, which - as this essay will outline - is inherently problematic. Also, this financial boon must also be attributed to the extenuating contexts in which it exists - that is to say, the isolation which a pandemic necessitates coupled with a highly personalised and accessible streaming model is a match made in heaven for the consumer.]

At the end of the 20th century, illicit file sharing services, namely Napster - the notorious peer to peer file sharing service - became the most dominant change in the landscape of music consumption. Prior to its inception, “music futurists [in 1999] were in general agreement that $40 billion was only a sliver of the potential value of recorded music in the digital era”(6) - that is to say, developments in technology at the turn of the century would prove to be a boon for artists, labels, record companies and consumers, and that the industry would enjoy a period of financial success to an extent that it had never experienced. Napster effectively jammed the rod into the gears of this assessment by introducing amongst audiences the not only widespread access to music, but the expectation that audiences should be able to access it for free. Almost immediately Napster was met with ire from the industry and numerous court cases were rallied against it. Napster was forced to cease free file-sharing operations by 2001, but not before the seed of free music consumption had been sowed.

Enter Spotify in 2008, with a model that was remarkably similar though ‘legitimised’ by the nominal payout they offered to their artists. Launched by Daniel Ek and Marten Lorentzon as a startup in Sweden, Spotify proceeded to cement itself as the international pre-eminent music streaming service. Their website names them as “…the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service with 365m users, including 165m subscribers, across 178 markets”(7). Spotify pays royalties based on the artist's "market share"—the number of streams for their songs as a proportion of total songs streamed on the service. It is generally understood that on average, Spotify repayments add up to landing somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084 per song stream on the Spotify service ($600-$840 per 100,000 plays) - a percentage of this income then makes its way to the artist depending on whether the artist is represented by a label, and if so, what is their individual arrangement with that label.“Spotify typically pays a record label around 52 percent of the revenue generated by each stream…The label, in turn, pays the artist a royalty of anywhere from 15 percent to, in some cases, 50 percent of its cut”(8). Importantly, it remains to be seen whether this model will indeed work for Spotify itself, who have only turned profitable in three quarters since its inception and as of 2020 is yet to post a full-year net profit - a statistic which suggests the worrying possibility that this ubiquitous and immensely destructive model may be a kind of chaotic experiment from which there can be no return for the music industry. However, Ek and his compatriots claim they are still in a ‘growth and acquisition’ phase, and foresee Spotify being hugely successful in the longterm (that is to say, somewhere in the ballpark of $300billion by 2030, according to a recent letter by Guardian Fund to their investors)(9).

The financial issues here become immediately apparent as these numbers suggest a respectable return for an artist accruing billions of streams, but financial instability for anyone who generates approximately less than one million streams on their uploaded works - and this is a vastly significant portion of practicing artists and composers. It is in fact, almost ALL practicing artists and composers who are working in spheres outside of the very palatable or the very mainstream. It then logically follows that an artist who releases lots of relatively inoffensive music in a short space of time which maintains a brevity in their song lengths, a simplicity in their structures and a safety in their content marketability is going to dominate the service. I’ll address this in more detail below, but here's the general premise; should the artists who are the least probing, the least iconoclastic, the least unique enjoy the most success?

It is clear that despite all their protests to the contrary, Spotify does not care about their artists - one only has to hear Jim Anderson (described as ‘the man who built the system architecture of Spotify’) call musicians “entitled”(10) or Daniel Ek state “you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough”(11) to know that their prerogative is in building a successful business and not maintaining a healthy, symbiotic relationship with the artists who keep that very business afloat. Spotify from its inception painted itself as the antidote to music piracy - the knight in shining armour - “We’re getting fans to pay for music again”(12), Daniel Ek argues, whereas in reality they are not - at least, not in any way significant enough to be admirable. Rather, Spotify are the wolf in sheep’s clothing. The ‘Artist’s Fundraising Pick’ feature, added to Spotify in 2020, comes off as a thinly veiled attempt to pass the buck and shift the onus of artist remuneration to the listener - but in the context of a system that has thrived under the premise of ‘free music’ it is difficult to expect a significant portion of users to dig into their pockets and foot the difference between what Spotify is paying and what Spotify should be paying. This system is the capitalist ideal - to nurture a stifling environment then shirk the responsibility onto the moral compass of the guilty consumer - and is being adopted by many of Spotify’s contemporaries; “Twitter has just launched a feature called Tip Jar, aimed at channelling donations…YouTube is expanding a feature called Applause that does the same…”(13)

Here the parallels between Napster and Spotify appear so abundantly clear that they need little extrapolation. Indeed, “In 2010, the Napster co-founder Sean Parker…joined forces with Ek. Who would have imagined, as one label head put it recently, that “your enemy could become your friend?”(14). Certainly, one could claim that the rise of Napster assured the climate of music consumption was headed towards a dramatic overhaul and free-access with the advent of the internet, but it is the manner in which this has occurred in the last 20 years has proved to be insidious, parasitic and questionable at best. Both Spotify and Napster ostensibly present the same service - free access to a wide range of music - however it is Spotify who has avoided the slings and arrows of the public’s fervour through the payment of negligible financial returns to musicians who utilise their service - a recompense so small for such a large portion of artists that it almost belies comment beyond highlighting it’s absurdity. The issue is with the apparent normalisation of this approach - where Napster was met with fierce backlash at the premise of ‘free music’, Spotify enjoys public acclaim and fascination. It is ostensibly music theft masquerading as free-market ingenuity - that is, paying out nominal streaming fees to artists while requiring no financial investment from the consumer.

This normalisation allows for an utterly “frictionless” (a google search of this adjective alongside the name ‘Daniel Ek’ will offer a veritable smorgasbord of examples of its implementation among many Spotify-based exhortations or statements. Ek really likes this word.) access to almost all music - simply the click of a button through slick, legitimate channels and there lies your kingdom! In an era where the even the slightest hindrance - from a dip in internet speeds to a difficult-to-navigate website interface - can dissuade a user from adopting a service, Spotify’s apparent legitimacy allows it to be so sleek, so polished and so mindlessly consumable that it is both hugely influential and hugely destructive. This ‘normalisation’ was far more effective in gutting the music industry than Napster’s illegal processes were at the turn of the 21st century, the reason being because they have found a way to rob the carriage in plain sight. Spotify have atrophied the spectre of guilt which until now seemed inextricable from the acquisition of free music - of the consumer, they have turned the villains into the heroes. At least Napster’s inherent illegality was able to deter the user more faint of heart - one had to navigate clunky looking websites, unreliable files, questionable download speeds (begetting an unpredictable wait time) and their own swirling moral compass before they could reap the reward of a single song they wished to have access to on demand. Although now the crime is sexier and slicker, Spotify et al must still be regarded with the same wariness and suspicion as was raised towards their predecessor Napster.

Indeed, this new model of music consumption has led to a groundswell of output which has been specifically moulded to thrive within the context of the new streaming environment. Artists are encouraged to present works that are short, familiar and offer no impetus for deeper listening. Songs which assimilate seamlessly onto a playlist with an overarching ‘theme’ - ie “Run This Town” a 150-165 BPM workout playlist, or “Kitchen Swagger” for pre-dinner party beats. Moulding your music to fit into playlists like these is the 21st century’s most efficient way of receiving any kind of income from streaming services - music becomes background noise, a space-filler, a context setter and nothing more. Exploration and experimentation are discouraged, musical diversity becomes nearly non-existent and banality prevails - “The algorithm pushes musicians to create monotonous music in vast quantities for peak chart success”(15). To where does our relationship with the deep spring of art lead if this trend is allowed to continue? It is impossible to count the number of profound, sacred works which we would be deprived of had this been the accepted model of creating and disseminating music over the course of history. Artists should be encouraged for their daring and rewarded for their iconoclasm; this is how we as human beings grow. 

The result of this endless volley of stream-friendly, playlist-based music we have become subject to is vague smattering of ‘grey goo’, where “singles are tailored to beat the skip-rate that hinders a song’s chances of making it on to a popular playlist: hooks and choruses hit more quickly. Homogenous mid-tempo pop…has become dominant.…”(16) What does this mean for the contemporary recording musician whose creative output does not align with these parameters? The artist who does not subscribe to a homogenised and hyper-curated system will rarely find recompense in a model which celebrates acquiescence - should one succumb to the demands of the playlist or struggle to find a foothold for themselves in this medium? I suggest that anyone who eschews the archetype must not be penalised for their determination to be individualistic in the face of a model which denigrates individualism - rather, they must be commended. Unfortunately this is a phenomenon ubiquitous to our contemporary life - that that which is the quickest, the easiest to digest, waiting readily beneath our anxious thumbs, is what prevails, while that which sits slightly in between the cracks of categorisation and which asks of us just a little more time - a little more patience - falls by the wayside.

[Here I stop for a moment to catch my breath before I resemble too much of an old-fashioned out of touch purist. I do not seek to imply that every artist who achieves success through Spotify or any other streaming service is inherently derivative or trite, nor insinuate that the artists who decry it more profound. Indeed there are a brilliant and lucky few who are truly iconoclastic and with their indelible output become the ones who create and mould the paradigms to which other artists subscribe. They are, however, the minority. What I am suggesting is that it is not only these musicians who should enjoy such a large portion of the pie (artists like Kanye West and Beyonce come to mind here) while others - equal in their ability yet more abstract in their aesthetic - may starve. This is the environment that streaming services have nurtured which is unsustainable, unfair and unprecedented. An ecosystem where everyone gets their due share is what I strive for.]

So life and art imitate each other - the notion of slow and nourishing work is changing and our capacity for undertaking it is being lessened through the influence of technology. Conscientious application to a difficult practice with incremental reward is eschewed for a quick ‘like’ or ‘comment’, esteemed journalistic articles are replaced by Instagram info-graphics, Twitter offers 280-character bites of reactive paroxysm while curious and considered debate suffers, Instagram perpetuates the dissemination of out-of-context quotes-as-sharable-pastel-infographic and Spotify encourages a cavalcade of snappy singles of increasing brevity (“…a steady decrease to 197 seconds in 2020…”(17)) which are clumsily organised into a vortex of vaguely titled playlists. As patience, foresight and longevity become relics of the past it is important to remember that we will not, as a society, benefit from things which only come easily, quickly and without effort - but rather nourishment and fulfilment emerge slowly and not without difficulties - yet the results are all the sweeter for it.

The academy of passive listening that Spotify thrives upon is indicative of a culture which has grown up being shown that music is essentially valueless and profane. Due to the sheer ease of accessing almost any and all recorded music with the click of a finger and no financial or geographical road blocks, a listener needs no longer to engage deeply with the form in the way that they have in the past. There is no tension, no striving to find that record that you’d coveted all year, no revelation on a chance purchase. Rather, music becomes a background noise for other daily activities, curated by an algorithm which simply feeds you what may as well be white noise for all the attention that is paid. As a result of this model, the concept of a ‘body of work’ has been decimated and any music that requires patience or effort from the listener is immediately bypassed by an errant thumb. It is equivalent to skipping through to the action scenes of ‘Schindler’s List’ and forgoing any of the dialogue which carries the weight of the work, it is like tuning out until the murder scene in ‘Hamlet’. We have forgotten that sometimes profundity has to unfurl slowly, sometimes the audience needs to practise patience before the pearl of the artwork to be offered to them.

These may all sound like the grumblings simply of someone who has invested time and energy into an industry who’s blatant exploitation has now become normalised and even celebrated as entrepreneurial — but this argument isn’t solely about musicians being fairly remunerated for their work, it is also about the understanding the inherent value of art to us as human beings. There may be people who aren’t interested in ‘active listening’ or exploring a musicians whole body of work, but it can’t be denied that a focused engagement with art and a reflection upon great works is analogous with a reflection upon the self. To engage with and respond to art is to learn about yourself - who you are, what you love, why you love it and where you belong. These self analysis’ are essential to the fulfilled human and the fulfilled society, but they can’t be realised without a deep interrogation of self through the lens of creativity and art, and these deep interrogations cannot be undertaken while music listening is rendered a ‘passive’ activity. Streaming services like Spotify which promote "frictionless music consumption” (there it is again) are implicit in this advent of passivity and backwards simplicity where there is no venturing or striving to find something that really resonates with the consumer. Always this omni-present word “frictionless” is used by Spotify’s marketing teams in a positive light - as a bright and attractive term that aims to highlight the atrophy of the labours of searching and the doldrums of wanting-but-not-having, however I read it as a pejorative; for without friction, there can be no release. With nothing to overcome or no sense of achievement that is realised after the striving all that remains on this gloomy plateau of “frictionless-ness” (now I’m doing it!) is a flatline of mindless and empty consumption - “everything and more” as David Foster Wallace presciently warned against in his jeremiads wary of 21st century hyper-consumerism. More succinctly, in the words of novelist Nick Hornby, “If you own all the music ever recorded in the entire history of the world, then who are you?”(18).

This phenomenon of frictionless consumption is symptomatic of something greater than merely the manner in which we consume our music. Spotify is the soundtrack to a fast-approaching Huxleyian dystopia where anything non-compulsory which requests a modicum of intellectual labour is immediately cast aside. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than when when browsing Spotify’s visual counterparts such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram where one may witness “a woman from New Mexico…earn[ing] half a million dollars from “a video of her sister deep frying a turkey”, and a high school senior…for “unboxing videos and funny content”, including one clip in which “she spins on a hoverboard while seamlessly appearing in new outfits”(19). This all seems relatively benign until one considers that "1,800 newspapers have closed in the US since 2004, and Rolling Stone magazine has been hosting appeals to help struggling music industry workers”(20). All of these developments and phenomena are born from the same branch of insatiable consumerism upon which streaming services thrive, and it isn’t difficult to draw a line between the glorification of vapidity in music to the rise of a kind of podium of idiocy across other medias. I hear alarm bells ringing! 

In terms of augmenting the music industry, the common argument espoused from those in Spotify’s corner is that lesser-known artists will in fact most benefit from these new models as streaming services allow unprecedented access to listeners who previously would not have been aware of the artist’s music. The assumption is that Spotify and platforms of the like are specifically designed to encourage continued listening - indeed, endless listening - and that this endless listening will lead audiences into welcome unknown territories. Where this argument falls flat however, is on the assumption that a passive-listening, non-paying Spotify user - of which there is a slight majority majority (approximately 54% as of 2021 based on Spotify’s above website claim) who won’t pay $9.99 a month (that’s about $0.32 a day!) for access to 16 million + songs - will support the newfound artist they discovered while listening passively to a playlist. It is assumed that the unengaged, non-paying Spotify user will actively seek that artist out and financially recompense the artist through purchasing physical albums, merchandise or tickets to shows. This assumption is simply optimistic at best, as Spotify et al nurtures a listening audience who understands music to be only a passive, background phenomenon, and that taking these extra steps to truly discover a new artist goes against Spotify’s very modus operandi. Anecdotally, if I had a cent for every time I’d asked someone whose device was hurtling through a streaming playlist; “what are we listening to?” and they replied with a shrug of their shoulders then I would be making a better income than a significant portion of artists relying on Spotify returns.

In the 20th and the first few years of the 21st century before free music consumption became unanimous, a less established artist could still pragmatically manage to accrue enough money from independent sales at least to maintain a consistent output. One could scrounge their funds to make their first record independently on a budget or generate enough label interest from live performance to be offered an advance. The purchasing of physical CDs or LPs (as it was the only way for a listener to own and therefore access music) would cover the advance (in the case of a label-represented artist) or cover the recording cost (in the case of an independent artist) and then accrue profit. One’s career would in this way climb consistently over the course of their releases, with each new release building upon the audience that one had established with their preivious work. An esteemed Australian musician who works both in the art music and popular music spheres shared his experience with this old model, claiming that he had always made enough from a small but devoted pool of paying fans to maintain his creative output. Now he speaks of occasions where audiences he does not most commonly appeal to - adolescents from outside the relatively niche genre he works within -  will accost him in the street saying that one of his songs is on ‘their running playlist’. They concede that this is a kind gesture, and though it does indicate that the artists market reach has increased, however they remark that their most recent record failed to make anywhere near as much money as his previous efforts, and that being added to a running playlist will not help them pay their bills or continue to finance their music career.

This kind of exposure is all well and good as a means to an end and may beget forward momentum in one’s career as their audience reach increases, but too many artists for too long have heard it wielded as a substitute for tangible income, and the promise of ‘things looking up in the future!’ has grown unspeakably tiresome to the destitute musician. The term ‘exposure dollars’ has become a too-often used pejorative neologism for many young artists being asked to work for free with the promise of things improving financially in the future. Hearing Tom Corson, the president of RCA Records, state the assumption that “we expect free [Spotify usage] is going to roll into subscription…”(21) leaves a sour taste in my mouth similar to as if someone asked me to do a years work at an office job with the assurance that “we expect next year you will be rolled into a paid position”. It simply doesn’t sit right.

A common misconception that is often spruiked by those incredulous towards the plight of the artist is that the cost of making a record is now negligible, and so financial recompense is less relevant - that technological progressions have meant that many musicians own a home studio, thereby circumventing the need to pay huge sums of money for professional studio rental and its slew of associated costs (ie engineers/assistants etc). While there is a kernel of truth to this - indeed, home studios have become a more common occurrence and every second YouTube video is an emphatic and self-inflated ‘how-to’ on every minutiae of the act of recording music - it by no means renders the process of writing, recording and releasing music as cheap. Purchasing necessary gear (instruments/laptop/microphones/interface/monitors - even extraneous things like guitar leads etc), paying session musicians/mixing engineers/mastering engineers, paying for design/album art, covering miscellaneous marketing costs (ie publicists/online promotion/posters etc) and so many more seemingly small but collectively significant processes mean that recording music is still, while cheaper than it may have been in the late 20th century, an expensive process. To use guitarist Marc Ribot’s words; “The computer itself, software, mics, mic-pre’s, compressors, A to D converters, etc cost money. Composing, rehearsing, recording, overdubbing, mixing, editing, sequencing, mastering, designing, marketing, and promoting all take time. Farmers deduct what it costs to feed and house their animals during the time it takes to bring them to market. Surely, even those who don’t believe we deserve minimum wage should grant us the same economic consideration as a cow”(22). Couple this with the constant advancement of production values and the fact that Spotify’s ‘play listing’ environment will throw your independent home recording alongside, for example, Dr Dre’s new single on a streaming list and the expectation to create something that sounds expensive but at cost-effective prices becomes an unassailable catch-22. 

Here there is also cause to dispel the suggestion that artists are a group of luddites with their head in the past with regards to the music industry. To believe this is to discount one of the axioms of the creative community - that artists are often one of the first groups to embrace new technologies rather than decry them. One only need look at how the process of actual musical composition has changed in the last 30 years to see myriad examples of rapid adaptation, from the exploration of amplification in the early-mid 20th century to the explosion of electronics and synthesis in the 1970s to the advent of DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) in the late 20th century. Artists have evolved symbiotically alongside and indeed assisted in the evolution of technology over the course of time - it is only when the relationship becomes parasitic that a general reticence among the community prevails.

It is clear that the behemoth businesses which have defined music consumption in the 21st century - namely Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora et all -  are not going away overnight. There is a general sense of disorientation as artists don’t know where to turn now that the proverbial cat is out of the bag. It is unrealistic to expect everyone to boycott such platforms so long as streaming has, as unfortunate as it may be, muscled its way to becoming the primary channel by which music is heard, shared, promoted and disseminated. To speak anecdotally, I have personally heard many use the argument “if you don’t like it, don’t use it!” but unfortunately this thinking is untenable. Streaming is the pre-eminent model, it is the road, it is where things have unfortunately eventuated and how the public predominantly absorb music - therefore it is the system that an artist is now forced to engage with if they want their music to be heard. The stranglehold that Spotify has over the industry is undeniable, and an artist - particularly a burgeoning one - would neglect to engage with it at their own peril. One can either assure themselves the certainty that their music will not be heard by a wider audience, or the near certainty that it may be disseminated though they will receive no respectable financial returns. It is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

To continue along the path under the music consumption model we have now would be devastating for the music culture and community, and yet it is unreasonable to suggest the average consumer could or would be willing to return to a model whereby albums or songs are paid for as per the iTunes model or even the 90s album era. Instead I believe there needs to be a legislative compromise achieved whereby the business, the artist and the consumer are mutually benefitting. An increase in royalty payments that reach the pockets of the creatives is a no-brainer, and Maria Schneider suggests “… a streaming platform where we can all set our own price based on our own budgets and audience size…”(23). Even this process incorporates an active element whereby the consumer is required to be aware of what they are listening to and engaging with as there is a light financial incentive to be doing so. Another option would be to moderate exactly how much of an artist’s output is available for streaming on these services - perhaps offering a few songs but withholding specific content for appropriately paying listeners (a system effectively adopted by Bandcamp, an online music store and adored ally of the contemporary musician - who have adopted a mutually beneficial model of music consumption). Addressing these points would beget a positive effect on the music industry; not only for the plight of artist remuneration but also for the culture of consumption - where an active and reciprocal relationship with artists and the arts can manifest as an distinct emotional connection between the musician and the listener, which incentivises audiences to further engage with an artists work and output - that is; attending live shows and keeping up to date with collaborations as well as purchasing merchandise and even physical albums. From this vantage point the audience enters the music community as one of its most valued assets - an avid listener. It is the antidote to passivity, to background noise; it is a sense of belonging and a death to the ambivalent shrug of the shoulders when someone is asked “what do you listen to?”. 

It is to me unassailably clear that the music consumption model we have found ourselves working under in the 21st century as a result of the advent of the internet is undeniably toxic and pernicious. There needs to be an immediate addressing of legislation which is relevant to the internet age to enforce a more significant recompense for practicing musicians, so that they might enjoy a lifestyle that should be afforded of any worker. Musicians aren’t all the huge international pop stars whose names we see smeared across social media. They aren’t all Drake, they aren’t all Rihanna, they don’t all have “private boats” (as one person may have vindictively suggested to me in 2016 as their reason for not paying for music). Musicians are most often creatives navigating the poverty line - self-motivated, self-funded and pursuing a career path for which they would hope for the same fair remuneration and rights as any vocation would. It’s these artists outside of the spotlight of fame who need to be considered when this discussion of fair payment arises.

Music permeates our lives in ways too numerable to list - its value speaks for itself. It has afforded us great revelations, discoveries and understandings about ourselves as a species. Karl Paulnack, in his Welcome Address delivered to freshmen at Boston Conservatory calls the artist; “…a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well”. An overhaul of the Spotify model would augment these benefits,  encouraging the listener to truly listen by inviting audiences to be active in their decisions, move away from algorithm-generated playlisting and passive absorption, formulate relationships with artists and their work as well as understand music’s ability to improve the lives of the listener in unimaginable ways. To listen is to be human and to engage in the act of listening is so vastly important and rewarding - in doing so, we can hear such beautiful things.

footnotes/references

1.  https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12419864/arsenal-takeover-thierry-henry-reiterates-spotify-owner-daniel-ek-is-here-to-stay-as-potential-new-owner

2.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/john-philip-sousa-feared-menace-mechanical-music-180967063/

3.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/john-philip-sousa-feared-menace-mechanical-music-180967063/

4.  https://gmr.ifpi.org/state-of-the-industry

5.  https://www.ifpi.org/ifpi-issues-annual-global-music-report-2021/

6.  https://medium.com/@nturkewitz_56674/dissonant-intervals-bittersweet-symphonies-musics-past-present-future-d2cacc4f4f82

7.  https://newsroom.spotify.com/company-info/

8.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/06/business/media/spotify-music-industry-record-labels.html

9.  https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/02/05/spotify-stock-guardian-fund-prediction/

10.  https://www.clashmusic.com/news/spotify-architect-calls-musicians-entitled-for-requesting-more-money 

11.  https://musically.com/2020/07/30/spotify-ceo-talks-covid-19-artist-incomes-and-podcasting-interview/

12.  https://musically.com/2020/07/30/spotify-ceo-talks-covid-19-artist-incomes-and-podcasting-interview/

13.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/30/big-tech-cat-video-artists-tips-musicians-spotify-donation?CMP=twt_gu&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium#Echobox=1622380755-1

14.  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/revenue-streams

15.  https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/05/10-years-of-spotify-should-we-celebrate-or-despair 

16.  https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/05/10-years-of-spotify-should-we-celebrate-or-despair 

17.  https://ucladatares.medium.com/spotify-trends-analysis-129c8a31cf04

18.  https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/exclusive-nick-hornby-essay-high-fidelity-sequel-6494722/

19.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/30/big-tech-cat-video-artists-tips-musicians-spotify-donationCMP=twt_gu&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium#Echobox=1622380755-1

20.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/30/big-tech-cat-video-artists-tips-musicians-spotify-donationCMP=twt_gu&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium#Echobox=1622380755-1

21.  https://www.businessinsider.com.au/free-music-streaming-was-a-big-experiment-and-now-major-record-labels-are-declaring-it-a-failure-2015-5

22.  https://www.local802afm.org/allegro/articles/dissonant-intervals-bittersweet-symphonies/

23.  https://medium.com/@nturkewitz_56674/dissonant-intervals-bittersweet-symphonies-musics-past-present-future-d2cacc4f4f82