Spotify Pays You What You Deserve
There’s been a lot of talk this week about Spotify and how they’re changing their royalty model. The biggest amount of discourse comes from how they are considering introducing a royalty threshold, not paying royalties on tracks until they hit a certain number of streams - on the face of it this seems a pretty controversial thing to do - it’s literally stopping artists getting paid - but as always the devil is in the details.
Research done last year showed that almost half the tracks on Spotify acheived less than 10 streams, and almost a quarter weren’t streamed even once. If your track has done more than 1,000 streams (a not unachievable number) you can count yourself as being in the top 14% of most streamed tracks on the platform.
A lot of the criticism levelled at Spotify is that it doesn’t pay artists very much, certainly not compared to the payback on a physical record, and that’s a valid point, but the audience that Spotify presents you with is virtually unlimited - yeah in 1992 you might have pressed up 10,000 records, but would they all have sold? Would they have been widely, globally distributed? How much of a cut would the shop, label and distributor have taken? What about packaging deductions? What about returns? Yes doing 10,000 streams might not give you the payback of even selling one physical copy of a record, but it’s given you an audience of thousands of people that is much harder to reach with physical music these days. The industry has changed, peoples buying habits have changed - the days of the £16 CD are behind us, but the days of the £30 LP are well and truly here, and people don’t have that much money to spend on music when a streaming subscription comes in at ten or twelve quid a month.
The fact is, even if Spotify was to pay one pound per stream (which it won’t) the vast majority of musicians still wouldn’t make much in the way of a liveable salary from music streaming alone, so it’s worth working with these platforms rather than fighting against them. The number of labels I’ve heard of making a big deal about taking their music off Spotify for whatever reason then quietly reinstating it when they realise their digital statements are 50% down on what they were the previous quarter you wouldn’t believe…
So what to do about it? I speak to people all the time about this - how best to promote a record with a budget of a hundred quid, a thousand pounds, ten thousand pounds or more - different records need different approaches and what works for one release might not work for the next. It’s not the case that throwing a grand at a release campaign will guarantee success - I’ve seen records with massive spends just not work as many times as I’ve seen tracks with little in the way of marketing succeed. Work with your distributor, use the tools they provide (like pre-saves), embrace the features of DSPs (Spotify Canvas is one example), use your network (it amazes me that almost a quarter of tracks on Spotify have zero streams, like the “artist” hasn’t even listened to it themselves!), use your socials, all that stuff. It’s a pain, it’s not always fun or easy, but if you want to make a success in the digital world then it’s what you need to do. Make sure your release is pitched, a good distributor will do it for you but you might have to do it yourself. Make sure your socials are interesting, or at the very least up-to-date. Make sure you’ve got a Bandcamp with a a ‘pay-what-you-want’ option set up for the download. You’ve got these 1,000 or so listeners now, you need to capture and captivate them. Encourage them to download/save/share the release. If you’ve made a fifteen minute long ambient track consider chopping it into three or four shorter parts, likewise if you’ve got a techno tune with an 8 bar intro - get rid of it, start the song with the catchiest part, at least on Spotify. Keep the original, longer version for download stores and Bandcamp.
Let’s be clear - getting 1,000 or even 10,000 streams on Spotify isn’t going to bring in any meaningful amount of income, but if you manage to capture some of that audience, convert them into ‘fans’ or people who’ll buy your music from Bandcamp or physical record shops, or come to shows and buy a t-shirt then that’s a start. The current economy is stacked massively against musicians and those in the arts, from Government funding cuts to the cost of touring increasing by the day and in an ideal world musicians would be paid better for their work, but the likes of Spotify etc are here to stay, and they’re dictating how the industry moves for now. Will they be around forever? Who knows, but at the moment we’ve got to dance to their tune if we want to earn even a small amount of money from streaming. It’s a harsh reality, but there’s so much music - most of it utterly, utterly terrible and of little worth - being pushed to these platforms that artists need to really work hard to make a success of it. The days of letting an RA review and handful of radio plays do the heavy lifting are gone I’m afraid.
If this sounds like I’m a Spotify apologist then so be it. I work closely with Spotify and the other DSPs and I use it as a consumer (along with Apple Music, which I prefer on a curatorial level) but I understand the frustrations. I have my own frustrations with the platform (when are we going to get label profile pages?) too. It’s not perfect but it’s by far the biggest audio-only platform for music listening these days. By introducing a payment threshold that should increase the royalty pool for those tracks that are streaming, which at the end of the day is what we all want. Sure, it’s not going to increase by a massive amount, and there’s still issues with not only Spotify’s royalty model, but also how streaming income is paid to artists by labels (and the less said about YouTube - which pays even less than Spotify does, but without anywhere near as much scrutiny - the better) but every little helps in the fight to earn more money from our music. Lots of the zero stream stuff will be AI-created shite, or white noise type tracks to game the system and it’s worth saying that Spotify are looking at increasing the royalty threshold on this kind of content from 30 seconds to maybe as much as four minutes, which will also increase the amount of money available for ‘proper’ music makers. A sad fact is the album below has probably earned its creator more money than all my favourite releases from this year combined.
You can create the best record in the world, and your distributor could agree, and the editors at Spotify or Apple could agree, but at the end of the day if the data doesn’t show people engaging with the record then it doesn’t matter how much people tell you they love it, it won’t be pushed on DSP’s for very long. They’re getting 100,000 new tracks delivered to them every day, and most of them won’t hit anywhere near 1,000 streams so do everything you can do to make yours stand out. And if you do that, then you’ll deserve to get paid.
You Know What An IKEA Is, Right?
I saw pictures of that new Drumsheds nightclub the other day, the one in Tottenham in the old IKEA store. I’m not going to lie, it looks like my idea of hell, but I respect the vision to take a space that big and turn it into a club. Maybe in my twenties I’d have gone, but I always preferred the smaller, dingier nightclubs than the big warehouse type places.
I think my biggest problem is that surely it’s been built with an end point in mind? Nightclubs disappear all the time, some of my favourites were Turnmills, Cable, and Crucifix Lane, now all gone, and the younger generation will be mourning the loss of Printworks too - which looked like London’s answer to Berghain in photos but with a much earlier closing time.
This new Drumsheds though - it can’t be around for long, even though it’s in a pretty miserable location it’s still a massive chunk of London real estate and someone must be eyeing it up for a load of flats at some point before too long. Will Drumsheds survive long enough for a new generation of clubbers to make the memories I hold dear from my own clubbing era?
Clonk
This weeks playlist features a couple more tracks from that new Rush Hour-affiliated compilation Music for Radical Xenomaniacs - there’s three of them in total, all on double LP’s so it’s going to take me a while to get through them. How much does that Marionette track sound like Smokebelch II by the way?
I’ve also put that new Olaf Dreijer 12” on Hessle Audio in there - some of the best stuff he’s done since OAR003-B (a tune I’d always pegged as a ‘modern’ Smokebelch) .
A couple of other bits to shout out - new music from Claire M Singer on Touch - her previous collections were incredible, and this one is no different. Shimmering, swirling, magical organ pieces, plus a new Lukid album, whether you know him for his work as Rezzett or Refresherers, or for his solo LPs dating back well over a decade now this new one sees him dive deep into the murk once again, producing an album that reveals something new on each listen.
Final thing to mention this week - the Sounds of North American Frogs compilation on Folkways. A bit of a wildcard, but it’s utterly hypnotic. I was halfway through writing this when I saw Boomkat tweet about it so I’m not going to give it any more of a write up as theres will no doubt describe it better then I ever could. Is it just me or is this kind of techno?
As always there’s a load of other stuff in the below playlist - old and new - that’s worth getting your ears around.