http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/ posted:I'm sure each generation of musicians feels they've lived through a time of tremendous change, but the shifts I've witnessed in my relatively short music career-- from morphing formats to dissolving business models-- do seem extraordinary. The first album I made was originally released on LP only, in 1988-- and my next will likely only be pressed on LP again. But in between, the music industry seems to have done everything it could to screw up that simple model of exchange; today it is no longer possible for most of us to earn even a modest wage through our recordings.
Not that I am naively nostalgic for the old days-- we weren't paid for that first album, either. (The record label we were signed to at the time, Rough Trade, declared bankruptcy before cutting us even one royalty check.) But the ways in which musicians are screwed have changed qualitatively, from individualized swindles to systemic ones. And with those changes, a potential end-run around the industry's problems seems less and less possible, even for bands who have managed to hold on to 100% of their rights and royalties, as we have.
Consider Pandora and Spotify, the streaming music services that are becoming ever more integrated into our daily listening habits. My BMI royalty check arrived recently, reporting songwriting earnings from the first quarter of 2012, and I was glad to see that our music is being listened to via these services. Galaxie 500's "Tugboat", for example, was played 7,800 times on Pandora that quarter, for which its three songwriters were paid a collective total of 21 cents, or seven cents each. Spotify pays better: For the 5,960 times "Tugboat" was played there, Galaxie 500's songwriters went collectively into triple digits: $1.05 (35 cents each).
To put this into perspective: Since we own our own recordings, by my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one-- one-- LP sale. (On Spotify, one LP is equivalent to 47,680 plays.)
Or to put it in historical perspective: The "Tugboat" 7" single, Galaxie 500's very first release, cost us $980.22 for 1,000 copies-- including shipping! (Naomi kept the receipts)-- or 98 cents each. I no longer remember what we sold them for, but obviously it was easy to turn at least a couple bucks' profit on each. Which means we earned more from every one of those 7"s we sold than from the song's recent 13,760 plays on Pandora and Spotify. Here's yet another way to look at it: Pressing 1,000 singles in 1988 gave us the earning potential of more than 13 million streams in 2012. (And people say the internet is a bonanza for young bands...)
To be fair, because we are singer-songwriters, and because we own all of our rights, these streaming services end up paying us a second royalty, each for a different reason and each through a different channel. Pandora is considered "non-terrestrial radio," and consequently must pay the musicians who play on the recordings it streams, as well as the songwriters. These musicians' royalties are collected by SoundExchange, a non-profit created by the government when satellite radio came into existence. SoundExchange doesn't break our earnings down by service per song, but it does tell us that last quarter, Pandora paid a total of $64.17 for use of the entire Galaxie 500 catalogue. We have 64 Galaxie 500 recordings registered with them, so that averages neatly to one dollar per track, or another 33 cents for each member of the trio.
Pandora in fact considers this additional musicians' royalty an extraordinary financial burden, and they are aggressively lobbying for a new law-- it's now a bill before the U.S. Congress-- designed to relieve them of it. You can read all about it in a series of helpful blog posts by Ben Sisario of The New York Times, or if you prefer your propaganda unmediated, you can listen to Pandora founder Tim Westergren's own explanation of the Orwellian Internet Radio Fairness Act.
As for Spotify, since it is not considered radio, either of this world or any other, they have a different additional royalty to pay. Like any non-broadcast use of recordings, they require a license from the rightsholder. They negotiate this individually with each record label, at terms not made public. I'm happy to make ours public, however: It is the going "indie" rate of .005 cents per play. (Actually, when I do the math, that rate seems to truly pay out at .004611 cents-- I hope someone got a bonus for saving the company four ten-thousandths of a cent on each stream!) We didn't negotiate this, exactly; for a band-owned label like ours, it's take it or leave it. We took it, which means for 5,960 plays of "Tugboat", Spotify theoretically owes our record label $29.80.
I say theoretically, because in practice Spotify's .004611 cent rate turns out to have a lot of small, invisible print attached to it. It seems this rate is adjusted for each stream, according to an algorithm (not shared by Spotify, at least not with us) that factors in variables such as frequency of play, the outlet that channeled the play to Spotify, the type of subscription held by the user, and so on. What's more, try as I might through the documents available to us, I cannot get the number of plays Spotify reports to our record label to equal the number of plays reported by the BMI. Bottom line: The payments actually received by our label from Spotify for streams of "Tugboat" in that same quarter, as best I can figure: $9.18.
"Well, that's still not bad," you might say. (I'm not sure who would really say that, but let's presume someone might.) After all, these are immaterial goods-- it costs us nothing to have our music on these services: no pressing, no printing, no shipping, no file space to save a paper receipt for 25 years. All true. But immaterial goods turn out to generate equally immaterial income.
Which gets to the heart of the problem. When I started making records, the model of economic exchange was exceedingly simple: make something, price it for more than it costs to manufacture, and sell it if you can. It was industrial capitalism, on a 7" scale. The model now seems closer to financial speculation. Pandora and Spotify are not selling goods; they are selling access, a piece of the action. Sign on, and we'll all benefit. (I'm struck by the way that even crowd-sourcing mimics this "investment" model of contemporary capitalism: You buy in to what doesn't yet exist.)
But here's the rub: Pandora and Spotify are not earning any income from their services, either. In the first quarter of 2012, Pandora-- the same company that paid Galaxie 500 a total of $1.21 for their use of "Tugboat"-- reported a net loss of more than $20 million dollars. As for Spotify, their latest annual report revealed a loss in 2011 of $56 million.
Leaving aside why these companies are bothering to chisel 10,000ths of a cent from already ridiculously low "royalties," or paying lobbyists to work a bill through Congress that would lower those rates even further-- let's instead ask a question they themselves might consider relevant: Why are they in business at all?
The answer is capital, which is what Pandora and Spotify have and what they generate. These aren't record companies-- they don't make records, or anything else; apparently not even income. They exist to attract speculative capital. And for those who have a claim to ownership of that capital, they are earning millions-- in 2012, Pandora's executives sold $63 million of personal stock in the company. Or as Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek has put it, "The question of when we'll be profitable actually feels irrelevant. Our focus is all on growth. That is priority one, two, three, four and five."
Growth of the music business? I think not. Daniel Ek means growth of his company, i.e., its capitalization. Which is the closest I can come to understanding the fundamental change I've witnessed in the music industry, from my first LP in 1988 to the one I am working on now. In between, the sale of recorded music has become irrelevant to the dominant business models I have to contend with as a working musician. Indeed, music itself seems to be irrelevant to these businesses-- it is just another form of information, the same as any other that might entice us to click a link or a buy button on a stock exchange.
As businesses, Pandora and Spotify are divorced from music. To me, it's a short logical step to observe that they are doing nothing for the business of music-- except undermining the simple cottage industry of pressing ideas onto vinyl, and selling them for more than they cost to manufacture. I am no Luddite-- I am not smashing iPhones or sabotaging software. In fact, I subscribe to Spotify for $9.99 a month (the equivalent of 680,462 annual plays of "Tugboat") because I love music, and the access it gives me to music of all kinds is incredible.
But I have simply stopped looking to these business models to do anything for me financially as a musician. As for sharing our music without a business model of any kind, that's exactly how I got into this-- we called it punk rock. Which is why we are streaming all of our recordings, completely free, on the Bandcamp sites we set up for Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi. Enjoy.
galaxie 500 is pretty cool and good, i know i read when dean/damon/naomi got together they were all socialists/communists and i guess damon is still pretty intelligent about stuff. (dean wareham is a notorious dick too but luna is good also.) anyway i thought this take on streaming services was worth sharing with da rhizz.
Edited by ilmdge ()
Also he totally misses the point that pandora is basically advertising and marketing his music for him and paying him for the privelige of doing so. Yeah the royalties might not be much but there's no telling how many people buy his work from retailers after hearing it on Pandora, which they actively try to do by linking to retailers.
I mean this is really just a radio service and fuck how much money do musicians make from having their music played on traditional radio? Actually they get absolutely nothing from traditional radio plays. No royalties whatsoever, except whatever trickles down from the publishing contracts that go to their music label.. So this guy should probably shut up and enjoy his millions of dollars.
I am only going from memory and what I've heard because we don't have those things here but we do have jango and it does make it easy to not buy music of bands you aren't really, really into. Radio is different because you have zero control
but spotify does replace owning music, playing exactly what you want when you want, specific songs, entire albums, custom playlists, all for free on a computer or on mobile if you pay the $10 a month. if there were a future when everyone just used spotify then i guess artists would get like $2 a year lol.
Edited by ilmdge ()
he does say at one point spotify offers a rate and your choice is "take it or leave it," so obviously you could also choose to leave it, but if spotify were to eventually become the new standard for how to receive and listen to music, that woudl no longer be a viable option. and i do think that is spotify's goal, why they say they don't care about profitability right now or anytime in the near future, because what they really want is to occupy the entire sphere of music-listening, just lijke digital ownership of music through mp3s and itunes or whatever has overthrown the brick and mortar stores and physical records, they want to replace even digital ownership, and ownership in general, to supersede it with streaming music that is simply leased, with a monthly pay-to-play (possibly the direction movie and television collections coudl be going in as well, via streaming services like netflix et al). and once they do that they can figure out how to be the mega profitable landlords of music.
although the main thrust of damon's argument seems to be not that, so althoug hi find it very interesting, i actually disagree with it, as it seems to be rather that spotify et al aren't record companies, aren't trying to be profitable ever, etc, but only exist to attract speculative capital and make their owners millions in that respect.
Impper posted:this is a pretty cool article. i agree with RBC . i dont know why this post exists
mlyp
libelous_slander posted:Impper posted:this is a pretty cool article. i agree with RBC . i dont know why this post exists
mlyp
mlmp
Ironicwarcriminal posted:you can't "own" music
shut up, hippy
Ironicwarcriminal posted:you can't "own" music
What if everyone believes you can?
relevant: http://vimeo.com/53116763
Wareham plays his guitar while gazing down at his feet, which are shod in white patent-leather shoes, the kind that have only two prices—wildly expensive and 75 percent off. “We have some Galaxie 500 T-shirts,” he says, seeming hopeful for a moment, before his mood turns. “Not many of them.”
The set lasts for about an hour. Back- stage, Dean and his pretty wife, Britta Phillips, the band’s bassist, pack up their gear, and I watch him doing his own roadie work, putting his effects pedals in his case. “These are lovely crisps,” says one of the stagehands, ignoring Dean. I mention that the Galaxie 500 records were the sound track of my life for about a year and a half. He first nods in my direction and then looks straight at me. “We’re still alive,” he says, with a rueful smile. Two stagehands are talking about getting a new piece of equipment. “You’ll have to speak to Bonnie,” one says. “The mother-in-law,” the other replies. “A wasp in a box,” the first responds. Then they stand without speaking and admire a steel tripod for
a full minute and a half.
Dean hikes up his jeans, picks up two battered silver cases for his guitars, notices that I am looking at him, and considers the moment. “Still living the dream,” he says.
ATP denies having the all-access backstage pass they’ve just given me, which pretty much sums up the aesthetic of losers who become cool and then continue to leverage the loser aesthetic in order to explain why they are both cooler and more humane than other kids. I’m wise to you, assholes, Kurt explained in his suicide note, which was the final work of a genius unable to think his way out of a particularly thorny passage in the dialectic of cool. For dinner tonight in the cool kids’ lunchroom there is coq au vin, mashed potatoes, and salad. Edwyn Collins is eating with Carl Newman of the New Pornographers and Norman Blake from Teenage Fanclub. The Dirty Projectors are eating at their own table. The only per- son eating alone here is me.
I meet up with Wareham in a fake Irish pub frequented mostly by Scottish people. “I think it allowed people to be sensitive and play quiet,” he says, when I ask him to explain his music’s influence on younger rockers. He tells me how important it was to him not to be whiny, and I say that my favorite thing about Galaxie 500 was that the music was so whiny. “It’s a fine line you have to walk,” he admits. He explains that the idea of being someone’s tug- boat captain, which I liked for its sug- gestions of rugged usefulness in situations requiring great emotional delicacy, came from an article he had read that claimed Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground had been a tugboat captain. I realize that the meaning of the song is that Wareham thought the Velvets were cool. I ask him why he never wrote a proper second verse. “I was incredibly lazy or self-satisfied,” he explains. “I was living in Boston at the time.”
When I tell him that I particularly love the effect of his whining vocal on the song “When Will You Come Home,” he smiles and takes another sip of his beer, which he apologetically nurses in the manner of someone who doesn’t like to drink that much. “It’s about a night that I sat up late waiting for my girlfriend to come home, and I got angrier and angrier,” he remembers. “But I certainly tortured her enough later on.”
The song “Decomposing Trees” was about an acid trip, he says. So was “Strange.” The last time he dropped acid was in 1985. “I can’t,” he says when I ask him why he stopped. “I think, as I get older, I become more aware of how hard it was to stitch everything together. Also it lasts too long.” The last time he tripped, he remembers just staring at the mud and the leaves in the mud and how trees turn into mud and produce more trees. “I thought my toes were smiling at me,” he adds. I ask him if he still enjoys pleasurable experiences with other people. “With my wife, yeah,” he answers. “I don’t get together with groups of people much anymore.”
We talk for a while about whether there is something toxic about reprising his reluctance to assume the fullness of the male emotional estate in favor of a posture of whiny passive-aggressive deferral that once seemed new and exotic but has become commonplace among younger educated men, for whom he has become the Bo Diddley of quavery-voiced alt-rock. “All of a sudden there’s more interest,” he says, “’cause people want to hear me sing in that high voice.” His high, distant soprano is the result of not feeling comfortable, he says, and standing too far back from the microphone.
kinch posted:Back- stage, Dean and his pretty wife, Britta Phillips
trigger warning
discipline posted:ilmdge posted:But here's the rub: Pandora and Spotify are not earning any income from their services, either. In the first quarter of 2012, Pandora-- the same company that paid Galaxie 500 a total of $1.21 for their use of "Tugboat"-- reported a net loss of more than $20 million dollars. As for Spotify, their latest annual report revealed a loss in 2011 of $56 million.
they say this but I think they cooked the books
in case you're being serious, most tech companies never make any profit. facebook has never been profitable for instance. it's not book cooking, it's just incredibly difficult to make any money from purely providing an online service (rather than e.g. selling goods via the internet or something). ads are all you have and what was the last ad you clicked on or even really consciously noticed
there's "premium services" like spotify's thing but usually the uptake is real low. like the article says your entire goal is to get big enough that someone will buy you. this is how it's worked since 1996 or whatever, just an endless torrent of shit pump and dump ideas streaming out of terrible corporate brains
kinch posted:In a cloud of blue smoke issuing from a dry-ice machine on the left side of the stage stands Dean Wareham, a thin, dissatisfied-looking man in a standard-fit white oxford shirt. With shirttails out and his sleeves rolled up, he looks like a preppy version of Lou Reed. He sings in a high quavering voice and plays guitar to an audience of straight-haired girls in blue jeans and boys who are wearing woolen scarves and long coats indoors. His postadolescent whine is at once obnoxious, naked, and needy, a sound that has spanned a generation and a half, beginning in 1988, when Dean released his first single with Galaxie 500, “Tugboat,” the opening lines of which served as a kind of youthful dirge for the other three hundred people who also owned the record: “I don’t want to stay at your party/I don’t want to talk to your friends/I don’t want to vote for your president/I just want to be your tug- boat captain.”
Wareham plays his guitar while gazing down at his feet, which are shod in white patent-leather shoes, the kind that have only two prices—wildly expensive and 75 percent off. “We have some Galaxie 500 T-shirts,” he says, seeming hopeful for a moment, before his mood turns. “Not many of them.”
The set lasts for about an hour. Back- stage, Dean and his pretty wife, Britta Phillips, the band’s bassist, pack up their gear, and I watch him doing his own roadie work, putting his effects pedals in his case. “These are lovely crisps,” says one of the stagehands, ignoring Dean. I mention that the Galaxie 500 records were the sound track of my life for about a year and a half. He first nods in my direction and then looks straight at me. “We’re still alive,” he says, with a rueful smile. Two stagehands are talking about getting a new piece of equipment. “You’ll have to speak to Bonnie,” one says. “The mother-in-law,” the other replies. “A wasp in a box,” the first responds. Then they stand without speaking and admire a steel tripod for
a full minute and a half.
Dean hikes up his jeans, picks up two battered silver cases for his guitars, notices that I am looking at him, and considers the moment. “Still living the dream,” he says.
ATP denies having the all-access backstage pass they’ve just given me, which pretty much sums up the aesthetic of losers who become cool and then continue to leverage the loser aesthetic in order to explain why they are both cooler and more humane than other kids. I’m wise to you, assholes, Kurt explained in his suicide note, which was the final work of a genius unable to think his way out of a particularly thorny passage in the dialectic of cool. For dinner tonight in the cool kids’ lunchroom there is coq au vin, mashed potatoes, and salad. Edwyn Collins is eating with Carl Newman of the New Pornographers and Norman Blake from Teenage Fanclub. The Dirty Projectors are eating at their own table. The only per- son eating alone here is me.
I meet up with Wareham in a fake Irish pub frequented mostly by Scottish people. “I think it allowed people to be sensitive and play quiet,” he says, when I ask him to explain his music’s influence on younger rockers. He tells me how important it was to him not to be whiny, and I say that my favorite thing about Galaxie 500 was that the music was so whiny. “It’s a fine line you have to walk,” he admits. He explains that the idea of being someone’s tug- boat captain, which I liked for its sug- gestions of rugged usefulness in situations requiring great emotional delicacy, came from an article he had read that claimed Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground had been a tugboat captain. I realize that the meaning of the song is that Wareham thought the Velvets were cool. I ask him why he never wrote a proper second verse. “I was incredibly lazy or self-satisfied,” he explains. “I was living in Boston at the time.”
When I tell him that I particularly love the effect of his whining vocal on the song “When Will You Come Home,” he smiles and takes another sip of his beer, which he apologetically nurses in the manner of someone who doesn’t like to drink that much. “It’s about a night that I sat up late waiting for my girlfriend to come home, and I got angrier and angrier,” he remembers. “But I certainly tortured her enough later on.”
The song “Decomposing Trees” was about an acid trip, he says. So was “Strange.” The last time he dropped acid was in 1985. “I can’t,” he says when I ask him why he stopped. “I think, as I get older, I become more aware of how hard it was to stitch everything together. Also it lasts too long.” The last time he tripped, he remembers just staring at the mud and the leaves in the mud and how trees turn into mud and produce more trees. “I thought my toes were smiling at me,” he adds. I ask him if he still enjoys pleasurable experiences with other people. “With my wife, yeah,” he answers. “I don’t get together with groups of people much anymore.”
We talk for a while about whether there is something toxic about reprising his reluctance to assume the fullness of the male emotional estate in favor of a posture of whiny passive-aggressive deferral that once seemed new and exotic but has become commonplace among younger educated men, for whom he has become the Bo Diddley of quavery-voiced alt-rock. “All of a sudden there’s more interest,” he says, “’cause people want to hear me sing in that high voice.” His high, distant soprano is the result of not feeling comfortable, he says, and standing too far back from the microphone.
lol
Ironicwarcriminal posted:lol if music still moves you
