71. RETHINKING HOW WE LISTEN TO MUSIC - Towards A Meaningful Ethics of Streaming
Back in 2019 I wrote about some personal experiences I’d had with how poorly artists get paid on streaming services like Spotify, but in recent weeks, with the growing publicity of new alternative “ethical” streaming platforms such as Sonstream and Resonate, I began to notice what I believe to be some deeply problematic thinking behind these new streaming models - and our entire funding of the arts.
For those who don’t know, the current narrative goes like this:
(1) Spotify (and Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube, etc.) generates massive amounts of profit for themselves with their subscription models and advertising revenues but pays artists very little per play on their service (an average of around £0.004 per stream). This means an artist may release a very successful song, listened to by thousands of people, but still not earn a living from their music.
Contained within (1) are some important sub-clauses - let’s call them (1a, b, c, etc…):
(1a) Music streaming is now the dominant form of music consumption as fewer and fewer people buy physical, or even digital, music. So each free or cheap stream takes the place of a potential purchase of music in the previous model of the music industry where artists limited free play to promotional singles and the purchase of a record, cassette or CD was the only way to hear the rest. Nowadays, under the current model, all music is made available for free or for cheap, making purchase unnecessary. However,
(1b) Music still costs money to be produced. In the former system money spent recording and releasing music would be recouped through sales. If sales of the recorded music dry up or stop, then artists will not be able to afford to continue producing music. And this has been made even worse recently because,
(1c) As the new business model came to prominence, artists were at least able to translate free or cheap streams into other income revenues such as live shows and merchandise. COVID-19 has, however, taken the main source of income away from artists - touring and live performance. The benefit of giving away free or cheap streams of your music used to be that it might encourage someone who hadn’t heard you before to come and see a show, or maybe buy a t-shirt? A fan who buys one £8 download once is less valuable to an artist than a fan who pays nothing for the music but pays £25 to see you live each and every time you play in their town, as well as spending £10 here and there on the occasional t-shirt. The closure of music venues and the fact that, with so many people furloughed or unemployed because of the pandemic, means that there are no live shows to earn additional income from and there is far less disposable income in the pocket of fans to buy other merch. The lack of money from streaming on top of the closure of these other revenue streams means many artists are struggling to make ends meet.
And, of course, the most important sub-clause, underlying everything said so far:
(1d) Musicians have the right to earn a living from the art they produce. It is not right to get no compensation if people are enjoying your music and it is wrong for consumers of music to believe they can listen to whatever they want without paying for it.
So all of (1) has led people to the conclusion that:
(2) A more ethical streaming service would therefore be one which pays artists fairly. Hence Sonstream has produced an alternative model where users do not get the whole library of released music at their disposal for a flat monthly fee, but where users “pay as they go” (around 3.3p per play of a track), and Resonate has produced another alternative model where users “stream to own” music, charging listeners for the first nine plays of a song (a fee which amounts to the average price of a bought download) and only give unlimited access to a song after those first nine streams of it have been paid for.
Now that these so-called “ethical” alternatives exist, the job now is believed to be a matter of:
(3) The need to educate the consumer about how poorly the big streaming services pay artists and encourage them to use these other models which put more money in the pockets of musicians and less in the pockets of the streaming services.
And the conclusion:
(4) This makes streaming music on the bigger services such as Spotify/Apple Music/Deezer/YouTube “unethical” compared with the more “ethical” models. To stream on the bigger services now is to knowingly exploit and underpay artists.
I have been trying to sort out my own thinking around this issue because I instinctively sympathise with the exploited musicians and have personally seen my own music reduced to pitiful micro-pennies from these streaming robber-barons. However, I also think Spotify is probably the most used app on my computer and emphatically know that I have discovered more new music in the years since I have been a Spotify subscriber than I discovered in all the years before that combined. As a result of those discoveries of bands and artists I would never have heard of without Spotify, I have directly funded them far more than the pitiful Spotify royalty rate by buying their music elsewhere (Bandcamp, for example), seeing their shows (pre-COVID), buying their merch, and recommending them to friends who have also gone on to buy their music or otherwise support those artists.
And for all the undeniable exploitation of each stream the service provides me, I think back to how I discovered music when I first fell in love with it as a child - first from my parents’ music collections, played on long car journeys or from the stereo in my dad’s study as he sat working until I taped myself a copy or stole the record for my own turntable; then, later, from friends, traded cassette tapes illegally sharing their latest finds with me and, in return, making my own illegal mix-tape of favourite new songs for them. Without those completely stolen copies of music for which the artists not only received no royalties at all, but didn’t even know were happening (so they couldn’t even market new things to the network of new fans discovering their music beneath the sales radar) I would not be the music fan I am today, and would not have spent anywhere near the amount of money on musical artists that I have over the three decades since I bought my first album (the soundtrack to the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie) in an already fading Woolworths store. An album because I didn’t yet know the difference between a single (what I wanted to buy) and a full length album (what I didn’t want but what I ended up with).
So I believe the thinking around Spotify, Resonate, Sonstream, etc. makes some rather significant mistakes.
(A) While there is, perhaps, a reasonable expectation for compensation for one’s labour - especially labour that has been appreciated by someone as a job well done - we have to remember that this expectation comes only within the context of an economic system where one needs money to survive and selling one’s labour is the agreed, or enforced, route to earning such a living. Under different economic arrangements there would be no need for, or expectation of, such arrangements. And even within these current arrangements there is much work - including hard labour - for which there is no expectation of compensation (gardening springs to mind, but also those musicians and other artists who produce their works of painstakingly perfected art merely as a hobby with no concern for the income it might eventually generate, even when there are significant costs associated with doing so). There is also, even within the questionable economic system which forces us to earn a living, no guarantee that one’s labour will be properly compensated for - people are underpaid and exploited in all walks of this corrupt system as matter of course (that is why I call it corrupt) - but, more relevantly, many remain unemployed, despite a willingness to sell their labour, and many fail to earn a living despite using their labour to the best of their abilities. Consider the restaurant that is forced to close because no-one is eating there; the business that folds because their services are no longer required; and the many starving artists who produce work after work which no-one likes enough to buy. The idea that if I have made something and you enjoy it, I should be paid for it, is not a necessary entailment of one’s labour, only an ideal one within a specific and contingent economic system. That listening to an artist’s song means I ought to pay them for their efforts would mean no one could walk past a busker without throwing an agreed market-price value of coins into their hat. And the idea that the number of people listening to any one song should be reflected in the income generated from it would mean that when my neighbours loudly play their radio during a summer barbecue I, and all the other people on my street who can hear it, would be forced to cough up our share to the artists we hear unsolicited (the flat fee paid by the radio stations cannot be reflective of the true numbers of people listening at any given time to a song, so are equally exploitative, if this definition of exploitation holds).
I question, therefore, the starting assumption that a musician having their music listened to without financial compensation is sufficient evidence of the musician being exploited. And that assumption is challenged further when one considers the following:
(B) We do not tend to have to pay for a job we do not think satisfies the criteria on which we had agreed to pay for it. Many jobs are paid for only after the job is finished precisely because if it does not meet satisfaction there is no requirement of compensation. And here’s the rub when it comes to music - I can only know for sure that I like the song I am streaming, that is is a good song, worthy of purchase, after I have first listened to it. Before I have heard the song, there is no contract between myself and the artist that requires me to pay them, but after I have heard it - as has happened many, many times when being as experimental in my tastes as I am - I may not actually like the song or wish to buy it. Surely I have no obligation to buy something I think has no value? So if I have no obligation to compensate for the music before listening, and the decision to compensate after will only be determined by how much satisfaction the music brings me, it becomes far less clear how to translate that entirely subjective obligation into something systematised and predictable. For example - what do I mean by “satisfaction”? I might like the song I hear once, but not enough to want to hear it again. Or I might like it enough to hear a few times, but not really want to own it forever.
All of which brings us to a hidden truism which must be addressed:
(C) There is only so much money to go around. Let’s imagine that, on average, I have about £30 of disposable income I can afford to spend on music each month. That £30 figure is entirely dependent on my current income, subject to change, and doesn’t shift just because this month I heard more good music than I did last month - there is always only a finite amount that I can afford to spend. The question each month is not how much I will spend on music, but who will get my £30? What free or cheap streaming of music does is allow me to listen to as much music as possible before determining where my £30 is best spent and ensuring that I am truly happy with where my money is going and what it is supporting. Yes, I may listen to hundreds of artists who get only their useless micro-pennies and see none of my £30, but without the free/cheap streaming I wouldn’t have listened to them in the first place and so they were never going to get any of my £30 anyway but at least now there is far more chance that whoever does get my £30 is someone I really like and want to support. Furthermore, all the artists who see none of my £30 this month, because I am aware of them now, may get some of my £30 in future months. Perhaps this song, or that album, wasn’t one which bowled me over - but they are now on my radar and the next one might be (or, in non-COVID times, because they are on my radar I might go and see them play live if they visit my city and give them another source of income even without buying their music with this month’s £30 budget). The point is - streaming services like Spotify/Apple/Deezer/YouTube allow us to experiment, explore and engage with far more artists than we could ever afford to support financially but without that access it is likely many of them would remain unheard of by us. With that access, it becomes more likely that at least some of that monthly music budget will go to them where otherwise there would have been no chance at all.
Without that free/cheap access to all that is out there it is most likely we are limited only to hearing the same old familiar mainstream bands with television and radio exposure. Less bands get to compete for our limited disposable income. Which brings us to:
(D) Importantly, (C) shows that the Sonstream/Resonate models might have missed the point. If I have to pay to play each track I stream, I will be far more cautious and less likely to explore too far from my comfort zone. If I am aware that each stream takes me closer to ownership of songs I may not want to own, I will be less likely to experiment and give songs second and third chances. Yes, in the short-term, artists may get actual pennies per stream instead of useless micro-pennies - but in the long-term they don’t get to worm their way into your heart and become part of your life. They don’t necessarily get access to the £30 a month, the live shows, the merchandise, etc. because with caution comes more conservative listening. The pay-as-you-go and stream-to-own models arguably put up more barriers than they put down. I can’t count the number of times artists I haven’t even realised I love have snuck their way into my affections through repeated plays, or being given second, third, or fourth chances when I’m in a different mood than the one I was in before. So much of that monthly music budget I can afford has gone to bands who would have been forgotten without repeated plays, or the ability to stream whole albums and back catalogues without worrying about the price. Exploitative - yes. But the exploitation has resulted in the band eventually receiving compensation and a new lifelong fan, and without the exploitative streaming service there to allow me to get to know them in the first place, I wouldn’t have even known they existed to exploit, and then compensate.
In short - what is actually missing from the current business model of the music industry is not more pennies per stream, but a meaningful ethics instead of mere talk of ethics with very little substance. So here is my first attempt at drafting some:
First we have to recognise that artists only make a living off their music if people pay them for it.
However, we also have to recognise that no artist has a guarantee that their art will sell, and admit that the commodification of art into a “product” is a contingent byproduct of this particular economic system. Making art to earn a living would be a great way to pay the bills, but is inherently a gamble within such a system, and no musician who releases a song into the world is owed an income from it despite this being the ideal. It remains merely their hope that their art will generate sufficient income.
We also have to recognise that the music consumer only ever has a finite budget of disposable income to spend on music each month and that this money is not owed to anyone; it is up to the music consumer’s own discretion who gets whatever money they can afford to give.
It is also worth noting that the digitisation of music means there is no longer the need for people to own expensively produced physical recordings of music (although some may want to) and that there are many legitimate environmental reasons why the purchase of a physical product may not be desirable to even the most committed music fan. With this being the case there is little difference besides ownership in streaming music digitally and owning the digital files. In practical terms to own song, or be able to stream a song, amounts to the same thing.
Still, a streaming service is not a personal and curated music collection and streaming subscriptions will therefore never equate to the same amount of income as actual music sales, nor should they, because streaming services should not be seen a means to pay artists but a method of discovery and promotion for artists, allowing potential consumers to “try before they buy” and explore music they didn’t know existed without limit beyond the subscription price to ensure that their finite monthly music budget goes to the most deserving and satisfying artist(s): those they feel they most want to support.
This model does not mean streaming services such as Spotify/Apple Music/Deezer/YouTube shouldn’t give a larger percentage of their subscription fees to artists and make less money themselves. They definitely should. Without the music on which their existence is completely parasitic they have nothing for us to subscribe to. But it does not mean the money artists get from the subscription should equate to sales of their music as sales and streams are not comparable. A fairer share should be negotiated between artists and streaming services - but the overall model of subscription streaming is not inherently unethical.
What is missing from the current model, therefore, and what is necessary to make it ethical, is the recognition that artists only make a living off their music if people pay them for it. Therefore streaming services, to be ethical, must recognise their distinction from purchasing platforms, and the role they play in promotion, and must link to purchasing platforms, such as Bandcamp, or the artist’s own stores, where fans not only can spend their monthly music budget, but are actively encouraged to do so by the streaming service as an integral part of the arrangement with the artist in allowing them to promote their music.
What I envision, therefore, is a streaming service - whether already existing or developed in the future - which alongside providing unlimited streams of as much music as possible for an affordable monthly subscription (and paying artists a fair share of that subscription), but which requires the user to put a monthly nominal budget on their account of how much they can afford to spend on music beyond the monthly subscription fee and which then sends monthly reminders of songs/albums/artists the user have been enjoying, links to where the direct downloads and payments can be made, and a reminder of what the user says they can afford.
I am not saying the service forces the consumer to pay for things they don’t want or can’t afford, but that rather than pretend their app is a magical free river of endlessly flowing free music an ethical streaming service reminds users that music costs money to make and that musicians need money to live on and to continue making more music. An app which reminds users explicitly that the subscription price they’re paying is not enough for artists to live off and makes it not only easy to purchase from bands directly (and I mean directly - no percentage off the top for providing the links, no “pay to promote” commercialisation, just listening stats and links that give users the information of how they can properly compensate the artists they like and how much they can afford to) but also makes the idea of paying artists part of the everyday conversation around consuming music. The link doesn’t even need to be a link to buy anything specific - maybe I’m happy streaming everything and don’t need to clog up my house with physical product; maybe there’s no more point having a bunch of MP3 files I’ll never listen to stored in the Cloud than there is in having a wall full of CDs gathering dust - it could literally be a donation direct to the band, like a patron of old (or Patreon of new). A recognition that I like what you do, have enjoyed your work and want to support you. But what is must be is a means to say this model is only half of the story and without additional payments - a morally developed obligation of financial support for the music you love - you, the user, are knowingly not properly compensating the artists you love.
COVID 19 has devastated all arts, not just music, and one of the cool things we have seen come out of the carnage are the various ways people have tried to help out without there needing to be a specific artistic output for them to consume for the price. Donation funds have been commonplace for casts, crews, musicians, comedians, etc. throughout the pandemic. A recognition of how important these things are in our lives that we don’t want them disappearing just because for a year or two they could not perform in public. Sometimes there has been a symbolic product - a fundraising t-shirt; a live-stream event; a sell-off of memorabilia - but we have reached the point now where such things are unnecessary and the conversation has somewhat matured: please pay us some money if you love what we do because, without an income, we will not be able to afford to do this anymore. And, recognising how much value these amazing artists bring to our lives (now more than ever as we sit at home with more time than ever before to lose ourselves in their music, their movies, their books, their comedy, their plays, their television shows), we do what we can.
That said - it is clear that random donations from patrons is not always enough. And it certainly isn’t enough for new artists without pre-existing fanbases to ask. Even a meaningfully ethical streaming service like the one I suggest will only do so much to bring in an income for starving musicians. People still only have a finite budget with which to compensate their favourite artists. Some will have no budget at all. Even with a streaming revolution there will still be artists each month with no money coming in, unable to afford to continue making music and having to choose between paying the bills and making new art.
This is why the conversation my imagined service embeds in its users - that artists only make a living off their art if people pay them for it - would hopefully become part of a bigger conversation through monthly repetition. A conversation which asks how our governments have allowed the lifeblood of our culture - the arts - to stagnate and suffer so much since COVID-19 locked most creative industries down? One which asks how it is one raised in poverty is meant to express themselves creatively when, increasingly, one needs more and more money to create and distribute their art? One which asks how, if only those with disposable income can be patrons of the arts, we can ever expect art to fairly represent all cultures and walks of life? One which asks how an artist is meant to take risks and be brave when there is no guarantee of an income from their art or obligation for those who enjoy it to pay them a fair compensation for their labour? A conversation which perhaps comes to the conclusion that art needs to be more formally divorced from commerce. That while we have this arbitrary and entirely changeable economic system that requires us to earn a living, we need to do far more to fund the arts - art of all stripes - through grants and publicly funded support programmes that mean artists are not dependent on exploitative streaming services to pay their bills but are free to create art for art’s sake; art we can all enjoy whether we have £30 to spend on it each month or not.
There will only be a meaningfully ethical method of streaming music when we have a meaningfully ethical economic system and culture. In the meantime, working within the flawed neoliberal system we have, the only meaningful ethics of streaming we can have is one which at least starts the conversation about properly funding the arts beyond the restrictive and essentially exploitative confines of for-profit commercial enterprises and considers the possibility that neither these valued contributors to culture, nor anyone else, should ever have to go to bed worried about where their next meal is coming from, or if they have to give up something that they love just to pay the bills.
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE and from all good booksellers.