Pay Musicians Footballers Wages
How much music is too much? Does everyone have the right to make a living from music? Who decides what's good and what isn't? Maybe there isn't a right answer?
Way back in the second edition of this newsletter I said that Spotify Pays You What You Deserve - as in, if you put the effort in building a fanbase on digital platforms then you’ll start to reap some rewards. It’s an opinion that has some critics, and many of those criticisms are absolutely valid, but nethertheless: regardless of how poorly it pays artists Spotify is the most popular audio-only platform that people consume music content on these days (YouTube is actually far more popular, but that’s it’s own thing separately, and doesn’t attract anywhere near the same level of ire despite paying even worse).
Anyway, earlier this week Spotify put out their latest missive on the state of the music economy from viewpoint. Titled Loud & Clear, it’s essentially a ‘look how much we’re paying musicians’ report, and I had a look into it to see if it stacked up. Some key bits I noticed:
The number of artists generating at least $10,000 on Spotify alone (and likely $40,000+ across all recorded music revenue sources) has nearly tripled since 2017. And of these 66,000 artists, more than half are from countries where English isn’t the first language.
Sounds okay to start - there’s 66,000 artists making $10k from Spotify (I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is $10k a year, rather than lifetime earnings, although I’m not sure it is.) $10,000 a year isn’t exactly a life-changing sum of money and is well below minimum wage in many European countries but it’s a nice little bonus on top of physical sales, publishing, touring income, sync etc and the other streams that make up the income for musicians these days.
Careers don’t just start on Spotify, they grow year after year. Nearly half of the artists who generated more than $10,000 on Spotify in 2017 are now generating more than $50,000
So the number of artists who’re making $10k has almost tripled since 2017, so let’s assume back in 2017 around 25,000 artists were making that figure. Half of those (12,500) are making more than $50,000 (£39,500) or slightly higher than the average UK of £35,000. Suddenly that doesn’t look so great - of all the millions of artists releasing on Spotify only 12,000 are making the UK average wage.
Of the 1,250+ artists who generated $1M+ from Spotify alone, more than 80% of them didn’t have a song reach our Global Top 50 all year
This is the interesting bit for me - 1,250 artists are making $1m a year, a decent amount for sure, but 1,000 of them haven’t had a massive Spotify hit - so what are these artists? I’d dare say some will be artists relying on legacy catalogue that’s just doing it’s thing in good number without troubling the charts, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume this number includes artists who create music made specifically for playlists such as focus and concentration ones. The Guardian recently reported on the case of Johan Rohr, a Swedish musician with over 650 aliases on Spotify who has been responsible for 15 billion streams on the platform.
Spotify’s answer to this is to compare musicians with footballers:
FIFA estimated there are hundreds of millions of people who self-identify as “footballers,” but 128,694 people are actually getting paid any amount of money from it. While music and sports are quite different, this demonstrates how widespread the aspiration is to participate in creative and athletic pursuits and make a living from them.
It’s a fair point. Being a musician is an artistic choice, and some people are lucky to make a living from it. Sometimes that is a very comfortable living, but more often than not it’s a much harder living than many other non-creative, non-sporting pursuits. A lot of people working in music have second jobs either in music or outside. But, being able to create ‘good’ music doesn’t entitle anyone to $1,000,000 from Spotify any more than being able to do a few keep-ups entitles me to £150,000 a week from Man City. It’s a fairly harsh reality, but the barrier to making ‘good’ music is lower than it ever has been, and the ease of distributing that music is easier than ever before - pay £15 to a DIY distro and they’ll put it on Spotify (along with hundreds of thousands of others each week). This week’s First Floor newsletter goes into this in a bit more detail.
Who Gatekeeps The Gatekeepers?
In his recent Patreon post the musician and Hotflush label founder Scuba claimed that what music distribution needs is more gatekeepers, not less. His post was in response to James Blake getting involved with a new DSP called Vault. Vault looks to be a streaming service where you can subscribe to musicians for a monthly fee and get unreleased music - now my first question is, why is this music unreleased? Has it been turned down by labels? Why aren’t you releasing it yourself? Bandcamp already exists for this reason. If you truly back your new platform then release your new album on it…
My second question is why would I pay £5 a month just for James Blake’s music, when for a tenner I can get almost every song ever recorded (let’s ignore the ethics for a minute). I can’t see many people subscribing to more than one or two artists on Vault. If I want to support an artist directly, I’ll go to their Bandcamp, I’ll buy an album - it’s going to get incredibly expensive subscribing to more than a handful of artists on Vault. I get what James is trying to do with this, and it’s a noble effort, but I’ve been pitched a million new music startups that are going to change the industry before, and without the (expensive) catalogue they never really do. Rdio was much nicer to use than Spotify, Bloom.fm was on the side of every London bus and promised a decent solution, 7digital ended up powering niche platforms rather than being consumer-facing. Every staff member I received a pitch from was passionate about music, and believed what they were doing was going to solve a problem, but it’s not always that easy. Ironically, the prohibitive cost of obtaining the rights to catalogue from major and indie labels would have ended up in artists pockets eventually, but we can’t have our cake and eat it - if the industry wants to back innovation it has to be prepared to risk allowing access to catalogue for a low initial price to do so. You can’t charge millions for something then expect someone to give it away for next to nothing.
This is why record labels exist - we put out good music, that’s been A&R’d and promoted and delivered with a host of additional assets (music videos, animated artwork, hi-def audio etc). We don’t always get it right, but it’s released because it’s believed in. Labels gatekeep and always have done. By opening up distribution to everyone you lose that quality control - of course, some great songs will always break through via DIY channels, but not without the artist building a fanbase in their scene first, and that’s where the work comes in - a lot of the time DIY distro platforms sell the dream - “release music, get rich” - but we all know the reality is much different.
A lot of the music I listen to isn’t hugely popular, and some of the artists that make it have no desire to become popular, but by appearing on DSPs this music is exposed to a much wider audience then it perhaps may have been. Local scenes from cities all over the world are now promoted globally, and while it may only have had an audience of a few thousand people worldwide that’s got to be better than just the hundred or so in each town that would have supported it previously. Remember that a lot of the general public don’t give a shit about music, really. I do (and you do too), I’m a music nerd and proud. I want to know who designed the sleeve, who mastered it, where it was recorded and what synths they used. Most people just want to turn on Spotify and let it play songs they know, and that’s what it’s good at.
It’s a hard one to square if I’m honest, and I sit on the fence - I guess the nature of my job means I’m more pro-Spotify than a lot of artists and musicians. I’m not forcing anyone to release on Spotify, and I can totally understand why you wouldn’t want to. The music I release achieves millions or tens (and sometimes hundreds) of millions of streams, but my personal taste leans towards the leftfield, more experimental and DIY music. Those musicians who make it deserve to be paid for it - in an ideal world they’d make as much money as Calvin Harris or Ed Sheeran, but then in my ideal world Cambridge United’s Jack Lankester would earn as much as Inter Miami’s Lionel Messi. So what do we do? I try and support artists I like as best I can, I try and convince friends and peers to check them out, I share them in this newsletter, I buy their merch, their vinyl records, CDs or tapes, and occasionally go to their shows, but like everyone there’s only so much I’m able to spend on music each month.
The horse has already bolted, and we’re not going to get back to the days of people paying lots of money for music. The days of the £16 CD is gone (but the front-priced special edition on Bandcamp is still here, and that’s a good thing!), but the £40 vinyl LP is very much here to stay. You can point the finger at any number of things: Aphex Twin releasing a load of stuff for free on Soundcloud, Radiohead releasing In Rainbows as “Pay What You Want”, U2 pre-loading their album on to iPods or Prince giving away an album with the Daily Mail, but there’s no one thing that’s lead us to where we are. Music piracy is basically dead now - when was the last time you heard of an album leaking? The music industry has always been in flux. Sheet music, wax cylinders, MiniDisc - no-one releases music on these formats any more, but for a while they were the big thing. Even a year or so ago everyone was rushing to sell NFT’s but when was the last time you even thought about them? One day Spotify won’t be here, and there will be some different way of consuming music. I can’t tell you what it’s going to be, but I can tell you it’s not going to give musicians any more money than Spotify does. All this is before the news of yet another AI Music Startup called Suno that wants to enable 1 BILLION musicians to create music on the platform. 1 Billion! One seventh of the entire world’s population… What planet is this guy on? A billion people releasing shit music? There’s enough already. (Whilst writing this I wondered that if 40% of music on Spotify, a platform with some barriers to releasing music on it, hasn’t had a single stream, what percentage of music on Bandcamp won’t have had a single download? I bet it’s much higher…)
So let’s celebrate the gatekeepers, those labels, journalists, Substack writers and playlist editors who separate the good from the bad. There’s so much music out there and not enough time to listen to it all, so to have someone stopping you wasting your time on the stuff that might not be to your taste is necessary. That doesn’t need to be just one single entity, and shouldn’t be - there’s room for a decent handful of gatekeepers as long as you trust them. They don’t even need to have a platform - some of the people whose music opinions I trust the most have little to no online presence. Let’s celebrate the musicians who are creating this music, whether they’re making any coin from it or not - especially those who are making their own lane, releasing music that goes against the grain, and whilst might not be especially popular, is some of the most interesting and entertaining music out there.
Billions Club
Okay, onto this weeks new music - I’m gonna start off with a personal project that I’ve been working on recently - an new version of Put Your Hands Up For Detroit. Humour me on this - the Fedde Le Grand version that came out back in 2006 was the first Number 1 record for Cr2, but loads of people don’t know the vocal was a sample from a Matthew Dear record released on Ghostly back in 1999 (their first release, I believe). Anyway, Matthew kindly allowed us to re-use his original sample and has worked on a new version of the track with French techno producer Matt Sassari which we released today. I’m pretty pleased with the end result, and it’s been great working with Sam (who writes the excellent Herb Sundays Substack) and the team at Ghostly on this. It also answers the eternal question: is it ‘I love this city’ or ‘our lovely city’? (It’s the latter).
Other good stuff this week - the Die Orakel label has always put out excellent music (it’s vinyl-only ORKL-0114 series is a fantastic homage to Sheffield and it’s bleep heritage) and this week they’ve released a new compilation called Braindance with tunes from the likes of upsammy and Edward amongst others on it. Well worth checking out.
Valentina Magaletti is one of the hardest working people in music - it seems every week there’s a new release from her or someone she’s affiliated with, and that’s no bad thing. She’s worked with Moin a lot lately and it’s no coincidence that they’ve been putting out some of their best work since. Anyway, she’s got a new EP this week that’s brilliant, it’s got a real edge to it this, with the rolling percussion you’d come to expect from her. Highest possible recommendation.
Speedy J & Surgeon have teamed up as Multiples and have put out a 11 minute long single - I thought I could have predicted how this sounded before I heard it, but actually it’s a bit different to what I was expecting. It pulses and grows over it’s run-time and is actually pretty perfect. Surgeon’s been collaborating with a few different people lately - can we have some new British Murder Boys material next?
Warp announced a couple of new archival releases of Broadcast material. It’s mainly demos and sketches, but either way it’s entirely welcome. Trish Keenan’s untimely passing was so sad for many reasons, but the thought that we’d never hear her voice again was one of them. The first ‘singles’ from this collection are on streaming services now so it’s as good a time as any to reacquaint yourself with them.
Finally this week, Lolina aka Inga Copeland aka one half of Hype Williams has a new album out - it’s a concept album of sorts, and whilst it’s musically sparse, the vocals take on their own life here. It reminds me a little of that live Miss Kittin album, but with elements of R&B and grime and stuff - either way, it’s the kind of thing that rewards the adventurous listener.
That’s it from me - as always I’m keen to hear any feedback and thanks again for suscribing, reading & listening.