Monthly Archives: January 2023

The Spotify issue

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There was recently a lot of discussion around Spotify and how little they pay for streaming royalties. And while I do agree that Spotify and other streaming services should be paying more then they currently are, I also thing the argument here is flawed. At the end of the day, I don’t think Spotify is the issue, I think we are.

A thought experiment. This is meant to be illustrative so the numbers have no relationship with reality, I’m just making a point.

Let’s say there’s a band that releases a song on a platform (any platform, doesn’t need to be Spotify) and that song gets a million streams. Here are the payouts for a million streams broken out by platform (I just googled the rates). This doesn’t take into account fees and cuts and all the other stuff that would come out of this, just a basic number of streams X rate.

  • Tidal ($0.013 per stream): $13K
  • Spotify ($0.003 per stream): $3K
  • Amazon ($0.004 per stream): $4K
  • YouTube ($0.008 per stream): $8K

Now here’s the thought experiment. Lets say of the people that are listening to that track the average is four streams per person. That means 1M streams is about 250K people. Let’s say half of those people really enjoy that track, that’s 125K people. If the people that really enjoy that track went out and paid a dollar to buy that track, that’s $125K. Now the artists are not going to get that full $125K, there are fees and cuts associated with selling the track through different platforms, but every professional musician I’ve ever heard talk about this stuff has stated that buying your music from them is the best way to support them.

The issue here is that we expect art to be funded within a capitalistic framework, but that has literally never happened. Capitalism only sees value in relation to the market, i.e. only in relation to monetizable product. Capitalism does not see art, it sees products that can be bought and sold. Replacing your music collection with a streaming service is convenient, but it reduces the value of the music to the above rates because those are the rates that the market has set. If you believe that the music is worth more then that yelling at the market is not going to change anything because you have no direct control over the market forces. Even if you can collectively shame platforms into paying more, that pressure campaign must be a constant long term thing, because the minute you stop pressuring the platforms they’ll revert back to the rates that the market sets.

There is some good news here though. There is a simple way to fix this problem. Give artists money. That’s it. Don’t expect that corporations will fund art (and we’ve moved beyond music here to include all art in the broadest sense possible) you need to do it directly. Check to see if artists have a Patreon or if they use some other platform for fundraising. If you’re not sure, ask them. I’ve never seen an artist get annoyed at someone offering to give them money. A lot of them will be very touched and appreciative that you were willing to put in the effort to figuring out the best way to support them.

And this funding doesn’t need to be some huge gesture either. If all you can afford is to throw an artist a couple bucks now and then, then that’s valid. We do not individually support artists, we do it collectively. You do what you can in that moment. And as your moment changes, may be you can give more or less. You do what you can though and the person next to you does what they can and so and so forth and collectively we accomplish the things that capitalism can not comprehend.

So, to reiterate, I fully support movements to get the platforms to increase the amount of money that they are paying artists. At the end of the day though, artists should not be beholden to corporate overlords to tell them what they’re art is worth. We should be doing what we can, big and small, to support the people who are creating the art that touches our lives and gives it all meaning. We owe them that.

The Mechanic’s Guide

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In many ways, stories are more important then truth. The stories that we tell ourselves, whether they are “true” or not, shape the world we live in and control when and where we will see opportunities or obstacles. Here’s a story that I was told when I was around 18. A lot of this story ended up being true, though bits and pieces were exaggerated either by the person who told me the story or in how I’ve remembered it.

The story concerns the above two women, Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson. Jenny and Kristin had a band called Tsunami out of DC in the 90s. They also ran a record label called Simple Machines Records. One of the more famous releases on Simple Machines wasn’t music though, it was a pamphlet called the Mechanics Guide.

The story as I was told/remember was that after being in Tsunami and a couple of other bands and running Simple Machines for a little while, Jenny and Kristin got together with some of their friends and decided to put everything they had learned down on paper so they could share it with other people. How to book a show, how to book a tour, how to record your band, how to turn that recording into an actual release, how to start a label, how to promote a label, etc. And the instructions were pretty low level. Not just ‘send your record to a record pressing plant’, but ‘here’s the plant that we use and what they charge us, and here’s another plant that our friends use and their rates’.

The idea was that it was everything you needed to know to start taking part in your culture in whatever way that meant for you. If you were the kind of person to form a band, here’s what you need to know. If you were the kind of person who’d rather form a label or a zine or book shows, here’s what you need to know. It was rooted in the idea that the reason most people were passive in their culture was because they didn’t know how to be anything else. So, teach them how to be active in the culture and some of them will go and do that.

I’ve been thinking about this story a lot recently and what it means. Not just in its promotion of DIY culture, but in what it says about helping the people that came after you. At the end of the day Tsunami were a great band and Simple Machines was a great label, but neither of them was revolutionary. People had done these things before and they’d do them afterwards. The revolution came in Jenny and Kristin’s decision to help the people who came after them. To make it a little easier and to share the knowledge they’d learn. An act that I still see as the punkest thing anyone has ever done.

Like I said, when I finally got around to looking into this story I found that a good chunk of it was actually true, though may be exaggerated. If you’re curious about the official story, you can find that here on the Simple Machines website.

Epilogue

Jenny and Kristin closed up Simple Machines in the late 90s after Kristin moved to Philly and they got got burned out on the business side of running a label. As an encore though they joined forces with several friends and founded the Future Of Music Coalition which helped independent musicians make sense of the new digital landscape and lobbied governments to ensure that independent musicians had a seat at the table as the new rules were being drawn up.

Jenny currently works at the Ford Foundation.

Kristin currently works at the Media Democracy Fund.

Creating truth from nothing

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I was recently reading the book Queercore: How To Punk A Revolution, an oral history of the Queercore punk scene, and I came across an interesting story.

One of the pivotal moments in the creation of queercore was the zine JDs, created by G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce. The zine documented a thriving gay punk scene happening in Toronto at a time when punk was still fairly homophobic and many gay punks struggled to find a way to reconcile their identification as both punk and gay. JDs presented a scene where these two things were able to exist side by side with no apparent contradiction. And, most importantly, here was a place where punks could be openly gay and feel accepted.

There was one issue though, it didn’t exist. The Toronto gay punk scene was in fact a handful of friends who all hung out at the same bar and a couple of whom had formed a band that occasionally played said bar. No one outside Toronto knew this though and so everyone just took them at their word and they went off and founded their own gay punk scenes all over the US and Canada because they thought that bridge had already been crossed and it was a natural normal thing.

In the book Kathleen Hanna sites JDs as a big inspiration in how she talked about riot grrl in the early days. Back when she still talked to the press about it, she would tell them that riot grrl was a national movement with groups all over the country. In truth, it was a couple dozen folks at the time, mostly in DC and Olympia, WA. Again though, people didn’t know that and so they thought they were walking down well trodden trails when in fact they were blazing brand new ones.

When I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that this wasn’t the first time I’d come across this tactic. R.U. Sirius, the original editor in chief at the infamous cyber punk magazine Mondo 2000, admitted, years after the magazine folded, that they regularly invented stories for the magazine if they couldn’t find actual people that were living the story that they wanted to tell. Again, the expectation was that people would read the article and be inspired to do their own thing, because they thought someone else had already done it.

The whole thing gives new meaning to “be the change you want to see in the world”.