#16 – Is Spotify Actually Evil?

It’s that time of year when everyone is flooding the internet with their Spotify Unwrapped lists and telling the world exactly what they’d ben listening to for the previous twelve months. As marketing campaigns go, it’s a doozie! Get everyone else to shout from the rooftops what Spotify has done for them. Every other social media post is a Spotify Unwrapped shout-out for the Stockholm company, deepening the music consumer’s tie with the streaming service ever further with the company itself not paying a penny in advertising revenue. It’s actually genius level marketing. We gobble it up, this “all you can eat” musical smorgasbord with little or no regard to the quality, craft or humanity behind the never-ending soundtrack, this ear candy, this immoral cynical product.

I have been a fully signed up user of Spotify since about 2008 when it launched in the UK – I was incredulous that this thing called streaming could exist, that I could pay a subscription and have instant immediate and complete access to pretty much any music I could think of, and an infinite amount that I couldn’t think of. It was an answer to a prayer that I didn’t even know I’d been asking for. For a while, I was in love. It was like a honeymoon period… I’d do it in the car, in the bathroom, the garden, at work when I thought I could get away with it, with people watching, in private, with large groups of people. I’d try out different devices to see which was best. I came pretty close to dumping my old music in favour of this new, younger model. But it turns out Shakespeare was of course completely right, all that glistens is not gold. Having infinite access to everything makes it all valueless, meaningless, shallow. We skim the surface picking off the easy morsels to nourish our aural needs because it turns out that an infinite amount off music is just really difficult to listen to. Where do you start? Do I listen again? Do I have any emotional attachment to this music? Is it too easy to click “next”?

I love my records. I love my CDs. I love minidisc. I love things that you can hold, and look at, and store on a shelf. I love the memories of collecting the music, the time in my life when I bought a CD or record, the hours poring over the sleeve notes and lyrics, the relationship forged with a flat disc of plastic. I don’t care what anyone says, it simply isn’t the same with “digital”. What’s your personal back-story to that latest Ed Sheeran track you streamed, or the Taylor Swift tune you found on a playlist? Music seems to be losing it’s magic of being a signpost to significant moments in life because its devalued and ubiquitous. I realise that I am in fact paying good money to make the most important thing in my life, next to my family, less important. The best intentions of having unlimited music available at all times is a dangerous genie to have let out from the bottle. It is a greedy, ugly, unsympathetic genie that cares nothing for the art that is grants you, and cares nothing for you, as long as you keep feeding it your pounds and dollars.

It’s even worse for the musicians, recording artists and song writers. The going rate is $0.003 per stream. To make $1 your song would need to be played 334 times. To make even a modest living from your music being streamed on Spotify, you’d need upwards of 11,500,000 plays. That is an insane amount of single plays. It is an impossible amount of single plays. Being a small and independent artist is hard enough, but by God, does having Spotify as the dominant global musical outlet make it diabolically difficult to forge a career.

To add insult to injury, Spotify doesn’t pay equally for the plays on its platform. It uses a system called streamshare. They calculate the total number of streams per month and divides it proportionally according to the individual licence agreements of the rights holders. Large labels and publishers will negotiate much more attractive agreements than small independent artists so their share of the total pot will be heavily weighted in their favour. Eg, to earn twice as much, a big label might only have to stream half as much as an indie. And you thought your plays counted towards the artist you were listening to? Nope – the vast majority of your subscription is going to Taylor and Ed, lucky them!

But wait, it gets worse. A whole lot worse. For any track that receives fewer than 1000 plays in a year, Spotify will no longer pay the artist for it. It’ll still count the plays, still accumulate the £3 or less generated and sends it straight to the big artists.

So, a small artist isn’t going to make much of a living from Spotify. What else can they do? Sadly for 90% of the artists on Spotify, touring isn’t even an option. People like me. Single musicians creating music from home studios getting a few hundred plays a year. Or studio bands. Or musicians that are retired, or dead. Music that was originally released 30 or 40 years ago by bands that have long since broken up, but receiving fewer than 1000 plays a year. Isn’t it right that they should all receive payment for their music? I’m not against streaming, but I am against the unfairness of how Spotify’s revenue is distributed. Everyone who uses Spotify, whether premium or free via adverts, is funding the top performing artists, and not the ones you are actually listening to. That seems more than a little unfair.

I am at a crossroads with my future and Spotify, both as a consumer and as an artist. I don’t think I will lose out by removing my music from the platform, it’s received such little attention an isn’t exactly setting the world on fire. And I really don’t think I’m going to lose out by stopping listening to Spotify either. What will I lose? What will I gain? For one thing, I’ll gain back some level of meaningful choice to what I listen to. For another, I’ll rekindle my intimate relationship with music, and I will value what I have. At 900+ vinyl albums, 1200+ CDs, 400 minidiscs and a hard drive full of flac files, I’m not short of music. I hear new music almost every day via my YouTube channel. I completely understand that not everyone wants to have shelves and shelves full of physical media, but isn’t that why we buy downloads? It isn’t my place to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t be doing, but I can certainly make an impassioned plea. If you genuinely want innovative, exciting, brilliant new music, support the artist at grassroots level, not the multinational corporation using them as bait to take your money.