Music streaming. Good? Bad? or Ugly?

So this is a piece I've written for work, and as such you will not get my usual word-fatalities, so to say, as well as the presence of images which do not belong in my fortress of text. It is also not something that I usually care for, considering there is no alternative for me to music which doesn't require constant internet connection. But it is something I guess some other people can relate to, and definitely something timely and relevant to the world today, so I thought I'd share it here as well. With that, here it is.

So Taylor Swift has decided to pull all but one of her songs off Spotify.

If you were a fan of hers, you would probably also know that she herself isn’t a fan of Spotify. In fact, she goes as far as to put Spotify in the same boat as piracy and file sharing when it comes to identifying the cause of the drastically shrinking album sales. She justifies this statement by saying:

“Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.”

It should also be mentioned at this point that Taylor Swift is specifically against ad-sponsored free services, which Spotify provides. Her discography is apparently still on streaming services like Beats Music and Google Play All Access, where beyond the artists’ radio stations – you have no control over what songs you get here – nothing else is available for free.

I suppose it is understandable, since each album sold is worth considerably more than the same album streamed on Spotify. Let’s take some local numbers for the sake of a clearer picture. An album which you buy at the average records store would cost about RM50, to give it a ballpark figure. This is in contrast to each song streamed on Spotify, which will net the contributing artist 20 sen thereabouts. Of course, with such numbers, it would seem that by streaming an album, at least on Spotify, we are only giving the artists less than five percent of what the album is really worth. This all makes Ms. Swift’s point really something worth thinking about.

Spotify, on the other hand, says that the ‘per stream’ metrics is a highly flawed indication of their value to artists, and believes that their service is best for allowing music fans to enjoy more music than ever before in a legal way, which will benefit the lives of artists.

At this point, I should point out that I have no idea how the music industry works on the business side of things. However, as a fellow consumer, I would also like to present a factor not yet mentioned, and not just for the sake of throwing a wrench into the works. For a start, there are generally two types of music listeners, at least to my observation. The first listens to their favorite songs over and over until they are bored of them before moving on to a new batch of songs. The second piles up all the music they like into an infinitely long playlist, sets it to shuffle, and treats that like a radio; listening to whatever song is in the queue and generally moving along with the shuffled playlist. To keep things simple, let’s just refer to the first archetype as Arthur and the second as Belle.

So, from these archetypes, it would make sense for Arthur to buy albums so he could listen to the same songs over and over until he is ready to move on, while Belle would just subscribe to a music streaming service, set up her playlist and just listen to whatever song that happens to be playing at the time. But things are not always going to remain that way; Arthur might one day decide that buying a whole album for a single song in lossless quality is not worth it, and Belle may decide that by streaming music, she is paying more than what she actually gets, as she also only listens to a few songs from an entire album.

What I’m trying to say is, having a choice is always good for consumers. This would also mean that it would be a good idea for artists to give their fans choices. Besides, if Arthur wants to listen to a song badly enough but it’s not available for streaming on Spotify, he would probably just get a digital copy off a friend or the many Internet pirates. This might seem excessively thrifty of Arthur, but consider the fact that a 3-month subscription costs about the same as one album.

Spotify has said that an unnamed, real-life artist was earning US$425,000 – which would translate to about RM1.4 million – per month in royalties for a ‘global hit album’. While we don’t know if this number is achieved with the help of people who listen to music the way Arthur does, I can only imagine that the number could only be bigger if Arthur and his friends could get music online legally, instead of having to resort to what the industry hates the most.

Taylor Swift mentioned that she hopes other artists “don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art”. For a thrifty and stingy person such as myself, this sounds very much like a euphemism for
“Milk your work as much as humanly possible”, and no doubt they have every right to do so. But if that was indeed the goal, wouldn’t Coldplay’s method of delaying streaming releases work better, instead of not streaming altogether? After all, albums are sold by the hype of something being new and, of course, the devotion of fans. When the cake has been cooled from being out of the oven for too long, so will album sales. This is when the revenue from music streaming, as little as it may be per stream, start to matter, as every track streamed still nets the artist 20 sen, while no album sales will simply equate to no revenue.

In the end, the choice is up to the artists on how they want to release their music to the public. As we, the consumer public, will be affected by their choice, here’s hoping they make the right decisions and keep our options open. The root of all evil is, after all, what makes the world go round, and by keeping our options open, we are – in that metaphorical sense – given a choice on how we want to keep the world spinning.

And on that bombshell, adieu to y’all.

This originally showed up here.