I've always believed that artists deserve to be paid for their art. My simple ape brain just understood the correlation between "artist have no money, artist make no art. Steve not get art to enjoy." So when I ran out of room for CD's I started buying albums on iTunes.
Then 15 years ago I began a relationship with my now wife, who is a lifelong professional musician. I saw the size of her royalty payments and it became intensely personal to me. So now I buy first directly from the artist, if possible. Second, from Bandcamp and finally, from ITunes.
I've never streamed and I am only one of two people, professional musicians included, who I know that don't. But before I demand a merit badge, let me say that I'm still a horrible human because I buy from Amazon. I'm ashamed, but I do it.
Thanks for writing this, Gabriel! It's a good reminder and the restaurant analogy is excellent. I TRY to only listen to music that I've bought, but these goddamn streaming services make it so, so easy to fall off the wagon. The arbitrary rules I set up for myself are: I pay monthly for Apple Music but only stream artists that are either filthy rich or dead, or albums that I've bought on vinyl. I also budget around $100 to drop every Bandcamp Friday. Wish I could spend more, but alas, freelance photographers don't make much money either.
Hi Gabriel! Thank you as always for the songs and the words, but I do want to tussle a little over this one (and sorry for the length). You say elsewhere here in the comments:
> Where I will lean into the disagreement is in your suggestion that the solution is to "raise the floor on streaming rates to a level that fairly compensates the labor production costs of record making." If my math is anywhere near accurate, you'd be looking at subscription fees well north of $200/month in order to make that a reality.
Isn't the corollary of this statement: "we will not, as a society, choose to afford to pay all the people who want to make music, to do that"?
The restaurant analogy fails for the same reason every anti-piracy analogy has ever failed ("you wouldn't download a car!"): the essentially nonexistent marginal cost of sharing information. The problem is rather in (to restate your thesis, I think) the pseudo-moral hazard of buying access to information at a unit price too low to offset the cost of production, essentially defecting in the iterated game between consumers and producers. But to claim this defection is happening assumes that the true total cost of production could be offset on the market at a unit price consumers are willing and able to pay, otherwise there is no (still pseudo-)moral hazard.
If the problem is that the fair price of producing all the music on streaming services is more than the public is willing to pay, listening to less music doesn't solve the problem! It only redistributes the same too-small pie, concentrating it away from the Spotify-algorithmically successful to the word-of-mouth-algorithmically successful, or whatever other discovery mechanisms take over in the alternate ecosystem. If the problem is too little money for too much music, we need to stimulate (cash-backed) demand.
(Or, as an aside, reduce supply: we could always try to have *fewer people make music.* If I'm being honest, this is the implication I read into how you discuss this problem sometimes, which I'm sure is erroneous. I think it's better for more people to make music than not, even if that means that, keeping the willingness of the public to pay constant, many of them won't be paid fairly. I grew up online--many of my favorite musicians are amateur!)
Personally, I've been trying to spend freely every Bandcamp Friday and steadily build my personal library--never trust a streaming service to not take something away from you--while still greatly enjoying listening to lots of new and new-to-me music on Spotify. I've found well over a dozen artists in the last year and change, including my current favorite working artist, because I listen to so much music. If anything listening on Spotify makes me spend more money overall--by exposing me to more music that I like!
I have people making arguments like yours in part to thank for causing me to think more in the direction of wanting to support the artists who make the art I love. But an austerity politics of the enjoyment of art will not win the minds, nor more importantly the wallets, of the people whose money artists need to live and make art. My polemic: listen to as much music as you want, pay for as much music as you can afford to. If you like things, vote with your dollar. Enjoying things rules, so help make sure they exist to be enjoyed!
I so appreciate the pushback here! I should acknowledge that when I called this a polemic, I meant it. I'm not sure that what I've written is in any way airtight, and in retrospect, it slips from restating Anastasia Berg's argument—"a certain kind of crying enables rather than curbs moral disaster"— into a garden-variety anti-streaming diatribe.
That said, I want to clarify/push back on a few things:
1) I think everyone should make music! Especially amateurs! Truly! I have zero (fewer than zero, even!) gatekeeping impulses around who should be making music.
2a) In your supply-demand analysis, you suggest that "listening to less music doesn't solve the problem." On the economic merits, I would say it does and it doesn't: sample size of one, but since I stopped streaming, I spend *more* money on music, not less, and it goes to artists who arguably (subjectively?) need it more.
2b) Where I'm more inclined to quibble though, is in the suggestion that this is simply an economic problem to solve. I guess I'm trying to point out, via McLuhan (again), that beyond matters of economics, the (digital) medium (of dissemination) has fundamentally changed, well, the (creative) medium—which is to say, music— transforming it into a commodity to be consumed passively, often in the background. There's a nasty feedback loop between Spotify's PFC (perfect fit content) strategy and artists who are attempting to make inoffensive music that will make it onto the kinds of PFC playlists that result in substantial payouts; the irony of course is that many of these artists remain anonymous to scads of listeners who hear their songs without every taking note of who made them.
3) As to your experience of streaming vs. purchasing: totally applaud your approach, and I wish that I still had faith in Spotify's algorithms as a tool for discovery. Sometime between 2019 and 2021, I began to notice both through data and anecdotally through conversations at the merch table that the algorithm(s) had ceased to recommend anything but the most basic parts of my catalog to new listeners. To wit, my simplest song ("Little Love") has seven times more streams than all the songs on 'Magnificent Bird' combined. In other words, the algorithm has determined that it's better to keep playing a song that's eight years old rather than introduce listeners to newer (and possibly more challenging) work. I'm genuinely happy to hear that the algorithm is still working for you, though!! And I also love that you're able to navigate a vast library and not get overwhelmed. For my brain, it just doesn't work. And that may be a totally personal thing.
5) I wouldn't describe what I've laid out here as "austerity politics." I think that advocating for depth over breadth is a politics (or an aesthetics?) for sure, but I wouldn't necessarily call it austere. In fact it might be the opposite. That said, I really like your polemic, every word of it.
6) the tl;dr version of my essay would read something like this:
At some point, I came to the conclusion that I could not ask people to buy my records if I didn't buy theirs.
Thanks again for writing, really really appreciate all your thoughts! (Not sure if I responded to all of your points, but did my best in my underslept state...)
As an avid consumer, a record's guy, not an artist, going back to the 1970s-
'80s I'm going to quibble with "sheer entitlement" and "the belief that frictionless access to all music at all times is a right." More like the "dream" than an "entitlement" and "frictionless access to all music at all times" the "goal," rather than a "right." And I assure you that before streaming there was plenty of "friction" in attaining anything like this dream or goal; and nothing before streaming, short of a job in the music industry, has come closer to achieving the record listener's frictionless access to music goal. Your polemic resembles a lot the old industry attacks on home taping or file-sharing downloads. Or, in other words, it pits the artists/industry against the recording industry's biggest consumers, and strikes me as a losing cause. Better to raise the floor on streaming rates to a level that fairly compensates the labor production costs of record making.
I appreciate everything you've said here, and we can cordially agree to disagree! Where I will lean into the disagreement is in your suggestion that the solution is to "raise the floor on streaming rates to a level that fairly compensates the labor production costs of record making." If my math is anywhere near accurate, you'd be looking at subscription fees well north of $200/month in order to make that a reality. That said, a user-centric approach in which royalties for a single song were capped (on a per-user basis) above a certain number of streams could drive that number down.
It's simply not possible to have both affordable subscription fees, on the one hand, and an infinite library, on the other, without artists getting squeezed. Therein lies the problem!
I buy downloads of music from Bandcamp, and then I often end up streaming them, anyway. Partly because I rarely get around to downloading them, and syncing them to all my devices before my ADHD brain has moved on to something else. But also because it effectively allows me to support labels, performers, and composers twice.
Only downside I can see with this approach is that it rewards a bad system.
At the same time, I think people forget just how awful the pre-internet music industry was to artists. I came of age in the 90s, and I would bet that a FAR greater percentage of the money I spend on music today makes it into the hands of recording artists versus back then when I was buying CDs in Tower Records. $7 per album is wonderful, but back then, you were lucky if you made $.70 per album sale.
And to be clear, I was referring to profit on DTC - bandcamp or merch table. Royalties on retail remain quite low, probably around $2 per CD, a bit more for LPs…
Absolutely love and appreciate the points made here; amazing writing as always! I have a question, though: what happens when buying the music is itself supporting anti-labor causes? There is a specific album from this year that I love, and would love to buy a digital version of instead of streaming, but the only digital version is sold on Amazon, a company I've already tried to reduce my support for. What would you suggest?
Thank you, Chinyere! Have you tried iTunes? My sense is that pretty much everything you can get on Amazon is still available on the old cobwebbed iTunes store!
Fantastic Gabe. The "streaming and crying" gloss hits the nail on the head, in terms of the moral malaise I face as a consumer, and, well, as a taxpayer, and...the list goes on.
Everything you've written about streaming here, and also in your earlier posts, has been spot on, and it's great to keep the conversation in the forefront.
What I would add to your breakdown of the paltry revenues is that there's a generational aspect to this: A musician of my age or older was grandfathered in by a royalty system and a revenue stream that does not exist anymore. We get our .002 cents royalties along with everyone else, but we still had the opportunity to make records and hope, if not to recoup our costs, then at least to break even. The way you explain the cost of making a record and the streaming royalty revenue shows how that's almost impossible to achieve. For me it's yet another uphill that a younger musician has to face, that could be understandably discouraging.
Thank you, Brad!! Yeah, I also feel like I got the tiniest taste of the "old world" with my one record w/ Sony, and, to a lesser extent, the first one I did w/ Nonesuch... I feel so deeply for younger folks who are starting from scratch now. Another complication is that the culture of philanthropy is dying off among younger generations of means, which makes fundraising for art music records ever more difficult. The last two I've done were funded completely by private philanthropy, no advance from a label. I wonder how long we'll be able to keep doing this!!
(And so sorry to have traumatized you with Mr. Creosote... I should have included a trigger warning. 🤪)
While I share many of these sentiments, I am possibly in a minority of musicians who think that streaming isn't inherently bad - in fact it's quite incredible to have access to so much music and I don't think it innately cheapens it (I say this as a collector of vinyl). Early Spotify was actually quite good, as it hand-picked new album releases - it's terrible now, but I think the fish rotted from the head. In terms of the economics, while I realise it's more complicated than this, I would like a feature where fans (I refuse to call them users) can sponsor artists, perhaps to the tune of $1 a month extra. So you could top up your monthly cost with say $5-10 extra going the way of artists whose careers you want to boost (e.g., I'd love to give Andy Akiho $2 a month to keep doing his thing). Perhaps some access to paywalled stuff, perhaps purely a gift. In general, I sense that rather than trying to tweak the consumer economy to work for music, we should gently encourage a crowdsourced gift/patronage economy that align more with what it actually means to be a human. I think the internet suits a gift economy of sentiment but was born into a consumer economy of things.
Really important post. I would quibble with your restaurant analogy. You would need to visit those restaurants more than 200 times before you were actually leaving a full penny on the table.
"What prevents consumers from paying musicians for their labor is not the capture of the industry by dirty money, but rather, sheer entitlement: that is, the belief that frictionless access to all music at all times is a right"
Nailed it. People who are not artists just don't get it or care enough to "get it"... I did have a breakthrough however recently, when I explained to my friends and family, that even though the record I put out was cumulatively streamed thousands of times - I had only accrued enough money in streaming royalties to afford 5-6 Chipotle burritos.
Great article, thanks! I shifted to Tidal (want to shift to Qobuz) and I buy all new music with fewer than around a 100 supporters on BC….. I listen to a LOT of new and not very popular new music, so that’s what my economy can (barely) handle at the moment. Besides buying vinyl and tapes. From a philosophy that it might be ok to stream older (and esprcially major label) catalog music on streaming. Something like: buy new music from smaller artists and be labels, stream old (especially major label) stuff. It’s not perfect but it’s something…..
The TLDR: Bruenig's point is that scarcity-enforced listening culture was real, but it was still just scarcity. The intensity of your relationship to an album was partly about not being able to afford anything else that week.
I don't like Spotify either. I love Bandcamp and I go to shows and put my money towards artists. But, in the end, personal boycotts won't move the needle. The payment infrastructure was designed, with active label participation, to under-compensate artists at scale. It's a political problem and it needs a political solution.
And there really is a solution! The Nordic countries spent the 20th century slowly building public ownership of capital and redistributing the returns (ironically that included creating Spotify.. think about how much better it is being a musician in Sweden than the US!). Pointing this out bugs people because it sounds pie-in-the-sky -- but we need clarity on the deepest problems if we're going move in the right direction to fix them.
Thanks so much for sharing this! I'm generally a big fan of Matt's (his wife, Liz, is an acquaintance), but I find his argument here a bit facile. As I see it, scarcity means something very different when we're talking about basic human needs — food, shelter, health care, education — rather than art. My sense is that Matt is operating here through the lens of economics, treating art as just another commodity to be nationalized.
Where I think things get complicated is that art, following Lewis Hyde, exists in two markets: a gift economy, and a market economy. It's one thing to advocate for socializing the commodity side of art — and of course I think access to the arts should be democratized: concert and theater tickets should be affordable (or free!), libraries should be robust, museums free, etc. But on the "gift" side of the equation, things get more complicated.
As Hyde argues, the exchange of art between maker and receiver creates a circuit of reciprocity that is at once irreducible and unscalable. In some ways this works against both Matt's argument and mine; obviously recorded music is eminently scaleable! But I think Matt's argument collapses in that the kind of scarcity attendant to art, generally, is, as I suggested above, fundamentally unlike scarcity in basic human needs: if we lack adequate sustenance, we starve; if we lack shelter, we may freeze; if we lack health care, we may succumb to treatable illnesses. By contrast, a rarified encounter with a work of art deepens the experience not because of scarcity, but because it cannot—in the Benjaminian aura-of-the-work sense—be replicated. I think there's a crucial difference between assigning economic value due to scarcity, on the one hand, and aesthetic/spiritual value due to uniqueness, on the other.
But perhaps more importantly, it has been largely proven that excessive choice is paralyzing for humans. (I wrote about this last year in my essay on choice paralysis.) The notion that having infinite access to infinite information (or any non-material resource) at all times is a socialist ideal seems, to me, at once dogmatic and a bit leaden. It also speaks, perhaps, to the complexity of defining freedom. Mr. Creosote had the freedom to eat until he exploded. In my view, this is evidence that there *can* be too much of a good thing.
I agree with you, of course, that "building public ownership of capital and redistributing the returns" is a worthy goal here in the U.S. I suspect we also share a desire to see a much larger social safety net, one that would obviate the need for nickel-and-diming around record receipts, not to mention a state of affairs in which millions of Americans are routinely forced to make inhumane choices between paying rent or securing prescription drugs, keeping the lights on or buying groceries, etc...
But I think I may differ with Matt (and possibly you, if you subscribe to his argument) when it comes to the suggestion that a more equitable society is necessarily destructive to culture. Finland is a great example of a nation in which the social safety net is robust, and yet its musical culture remains strong. Same with Denmark and Sweden...
(apologies if this is incoherent, I'm a tad underslept! and thank you again for reading & commenting!!)
Not incoherent at all! Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
The Hyde/Benjamin distinction is genuinely interesting and I don't want to dismiss it. But let's imagine... if Spotify were structured like a public library, state-supported, with artists compensated through something like a public arts fund, would we be reaching for Benjamin's aura to explain why streaming is spiritually impoverished? I suspect not. The "gift economy" feels like it's describing something real about art, but it's getting pulled in to explain a problem that is actually about ownership and revenue distribution.
On the Finland point -- I think we actually agree more than we disagree! A sovereign wealth fund, sector unions and a robust social safety net allowing for a strong musical culture is more or less exactly what I was pointing to. The question is just whether we get there through individual consumer choices (which have inescapable classist overtones) or structural change. My bet is on the latter, though I take your point that the two aren't mutually exclusive.
I am extremely pro-public library model! This is part of what Liz Pelly advocates for in the coda to Mood Machine. But think about the model of public libraries: even with e-books, you can only take out a certain number at a time, and there are only a certain number of copies. I would be totally in favor of an expansive/infinite public music library whose lending practices reflected the approach taken with literature: that each copy is purchased, has value, and cannot be in multiple places at once… still, I think I will die on the hill that suggests that we do better when we can engage with only a few art objects at a time. (Not sure if you would consider this classist?) But obviously I would like to live in a society in which there is no economic barrier to accessing those objects.
Completely agree on the politics then, which is most of what I wanted to establish! The library lending limits are worth questioning, though; they aren’t a principled design decision about how humans should consume literature. They’re an artifact of publisher licensing and copyright law.
On the aesthetic question: I think you might well be right that focused listening is better listening. But I think the goal should be a world where people can engage deeply, not one where scarcity compels them to. What people do with that freedom is up to them.
"I think the goal should be a world where people can engage deeply, not one where scarcity compels them to."
Have you read Borges' "The Library of Babel"? I think he makes a pretty compelling, pre-digital case for why infinite access is as much a prison as it is an expression of freedom.
I take your point about publisher licensing and copyright law — and/but so long as we live in some version of a market-based society, I don't know that this is a bad thing... (I also meant to bring this up in re: the Bruenig piece. There's an inherent tension between the ideal world we imagine and the one we live in; the prescriptions we come up with for societal improvement can either be incremental or revolutionary — I'm totally up for the revolutionary approach, but it needs to be applied consistently if so. In other words, if we're going to suggest that all music be publicly owned / available to all, then we need to have in place UBI, cradle-to-grave social safety net + education, etc... the Bruenig argument feels like it's living in a bit of a nether region between our lived reality and utopia...)
The Library of Babel is hell because it’s random and unsearchable. A gigantic organized library is something else entirely. LibriVox, for example, has over 20,000 free audiobooks recorded by volunteers from all over the world, an it’s enriched my life considerably. People’s relationship to abundance varies too much for blanket assertions.
On the nether region point: everything seems impossible until it’s done. The NHS wasn’t incremental. Neither were sovereign wealth funds. They took real coordinated political action – but they got there. And Bruenig isn’t just theorizing: his People’s Policy Project produces detailed proposals, some of which have made it directly into the Sanders and Mamdani platforms.
One clarification: I read Bruenig as saying that material progress *transforms* culture. And that may feel like destruction for those who don't want it to change!
I've always believed that artists deserve to be paid for their art. My simple ape brain just understood the correlation between "artist have no money, artist make no art. Steve not get art to enjoy." So when I ran out of room for CD's I started buying albums on iTunes.
Then 15 years ago I began a relationship with my now wife, who is a lifelong professional musician. I saw the size of her royalty payments and it became intensely personal to me. So now I buy first directly from the artist, if possible. Second, from Bandcamp and finally, from ITunes.
I've never streamed and I am only one of two people, professional musicians included, who I know that don't. But before I demand a merit badge, let me say that I'm still a horrible human because I buy from Amazon. I'm ashamed, but I do it.
Thanks for writing this, Gabriel! It's a good reminder and the restaurant analogy is excellent. I TRY to only listen to music that I've bought, but these goddamn streaming services make it so, so easy to fall off the wagon. The arbitrary rules I set up for myself are: I pay monthly for Apple Music but only stream artists that are either filthy rich or dead, or albums that I've bought on vinyl. I also budget around $100 to drop every Bandcamp Friday. Wish I could spend more, but alas, freelance photographers don't make much money either.
I love this approach, Jason! Thank you for reading, writing, and taking such great photos!!
Hi Gabriel! Thank you as always for the songs and the words, but I do want to tussle a little over this one (and sorry for the length). You say elsewhere here in the comments:
> Where I will lean into the disagreement is in your suggestion that the solution is to "raise the floor on streaming rates to a level that fairly compensates the labor production costs of record making." If my math is anywhere near accurate, you'd be looking at subscription fees well north of $200/month in order to make that a reality.
Isn't the corollary of this statement: "we will not, as a society, choose to afford to pay all the people who want to make music, to do that"?
The restaurant analogy fails for the same reason every anti-piracy analogy has ever failed ("you wouldn't download a car!"): the essentially nonexistent marginal cost of sharing information. The problem is rather in (to restate your thesis, I think) the pseudo-moral hazard of buying access to information at a unit price too low to offset the cost of production, essentially defecting in the iterated game between consumers and producers. But to claim this defection is happening assumes that the true total cost of production could be offset on the market at a unit price consumers are willing and able to pay, otherwise there is no (still pseudo-)moral hazard.
If the problem is that the fair price of producing all the music on streaming services is more than the public is willing to pay, listening to less music doesn't solve the problem! It only redistributes the same too-small pie, concentrating it away from the Spotify-algorithmically successful to the word-of-mouth-algorithmically successful, or whatever other discovery mechanisms take over in the alternate ecosystem. If the problem is too little money for too much music, we need to stimulate (cash-backed) demand.
(Or, as an aside, reduce supply: we could always try to have *fewer people make music.* If I'm being honest, this is the implication I read into how you discuss this problem sometimes, which I'm sure is erroneous. I think it's better for more people to make music than not, even if that means that, keeping the willingness of the public to pay constant, many of them won't be paid fairly. I grew up online--many of my favorite musicians are amateur!)
Personally, I've been trying to spend freely every Bandcamp Friday and steadily build my personal library--never trust a streaming service to not take something away from you--while still greatly enjoying listening to lots of new and new-to-me music on Spotify. I've found well over a dozen artists in the last year and change, including my current favorite working artist, because I listen to so much music. If anything listening on Spotify makes me spend more money overall--by exposing me to more music that I like!
I have people making arguments like yours in part to thank for causing me to think more in the direction of wanting to support the artists who make the art I love. But an austerity politics of the enjoyment of art will not win the minds, nor more importantly the wallets, of the people whose money artists need to live and make art. My polemic: listen to as much music as you want, pay for as much music as you can afford to. If you like things, vote with your dollar. Enjoying things rules, so help make sure they exist to be enjoyed!
I so appreciate the pushback here! I should acknowledge that when I called this a polemic, I meant it. I'm not sure that what I've written is in any way airtight, and in retrospect, it slips from restating Anastasia Berg's argument—"a certain kind of crying enables rather than curbs moral disaster"— into a garden-variety anti-streaming diatribe.
That said, I want to clarify/push back on a few things:
1) I think everyone should make music! Especially amateurs! Truly! I have zero (fewer than zero, even!) gatekeeping impulses around who should be making music.
2a) In your supply-demand analysis, you suggest that "listening to less music doesn't solve the problem." On the economic merits, I would say it does and it doesn't: sample size of one, but since I stopped streaming, I spend *more* money on music, not less, and it goes to artists who arguably (subjectively?) need it more.
2b) Where I'm more inclined to quibble though, is in the suggestion that this is simply an economic problem to solve. I guess I'm trying to point out, via McLuhan (again), that beyond matters of economics, the (digital) medium (of dissemination) has fundamentally changed, well, the (creative) medium—which is to say, music— transforming it into a commodity to be consumed passively, often in the background. There's a nasty feedback loop between Spotify's PFC (perfect fit content) strategy and artists who are attempting to make inoffensive music that will make it onto the kinds of PFC playlists that result in substantial payouts; the irony of course is that many of these artists remain anonymous to scads of listeners who hear their songs without every taking note of who made them.
3) As to your experience of streaming vs. purchasing: totally applaud your approach, and I wish that I still had faith in Spotify's algorithms as a tool for discovery. Sometime between 2019 and 2021, I began to notice both through data and anecdotally through conversations at the merch table that the algorithm(s) had ceased to recommend anything but the most basic parts of my catalog to new listeners. To wit, my simplest song ("Little Love") has seven times more streams than all the songs on 'Magnificent Bird' combined. In other words, the algorithm has determined that it's better to keep playing a song that's eight years old rather than introduce listeners to newer (and possibly more challenging) work. I'm genuinely happy to hear that the algorithm is still working for you, though!! And I also love that you're able to navigate a vast library and not get overwhelmed. For my brain, it just doesn't work. And that may be a totally personal thing.
5) I wouldn't describe what I've laid out here as "austerity politics." I think that advocating for depth over breadth is a politics (or an aesthetics?) for sure, but I wouldn't necessarily call it austere. In fact it might be the opposite. That said, I really like your polemic, every word of it.
6) the tl;dr version of my essay would read something like this:
At some point, I came to the conclusion that I could not ask people to buy my records if I didn't buy theirs.
Thanks again for writing, really really appreciate all your thoughts! (Not sure if I responded to all of your points, but did my best in my underslept state...)
As an avid consumer, a record's guy, not an artist, going back to the 1970s-
'80s I'm going to quibble with "sheer entitlement" and "the belief that frictionless access to all music at all times is a right." More like the "dream" than an "entitlement" and "frictionless access to all music at all times" the "goal," rather than a "right." And I assure you that before streaming there was plenty of "friction" in attaining anything like this dream or goal; and nothing before streaming, short of a job in the music industry, has come closer to achieving the record listener's frictionless access to music goal. Your polemic resembles a lot the old industry attacks on home taping or file-sharing downloads. Or, in other words, it pits the artists/industry against the recording industry's biggest consumers, and strikes me as a losing cause. Better to raise the floor on streaming rates to a level that fairly compensates the labor production costs of record making.
I appreciate everything you've said here, and we can cordially agree to disagree! Where I will lean into the disagreement is in your suggestion that the solution is to "raise the floor on streaming rates to a level that fairly compensates the labor production costs of record making." If my math is anywhere near accurate, you'd be looking at subscription fees well north of $200/month in order to make that a reality. That said, a user-centric approach in which royalties for a single song were capped (on a per-user basis) above a certain number of streams could drive that number down.
It's simply not possible to have both affordable subscription fees, on the one hand, and an infinite library, on the other, without artists getting squeezed. Therein lies the problem!
I buy downloads of music from Bandcamp, and then I often end up streaming them, anyway. Partly because I rarely get around to downloading them, and syncing them to all my devices before my ADHD brain has moved on to something else. But also because it effectively allows me to support labels, performers, and composers twice.
Only downside I can see with this approach is that it rewards a bad system.
At the same time, I think people forget just how awful the pre-internet music industry was to artists. I came of age in the 90s, and I would bet that a FAR greater percentage of the money I spend on music today makes it into the hands of recording artists versus back then when I was buying CDs in Tower Records. $7 per album is wonderful, but back then, you were lucky if you made $.70 per album sale.
I agree with you about rewarding a bad system!
And to be clear, I was referring to profit on DTC - bandcamp or merch table. Royalties on retail remain quite low, probably around $2 per CD, a bit more for LPs…
Absolutely love and appreciate the points made here; amazing writing as always! I have a question, though: what happens when buying the music is itself supporting anti-labor causes? There is a specific album from this year that I love, and would love to buy a digital version of instead of streaming, but the only digital version is sold on Amazon, a company I've already tried to reduce my support for. What would you suggest?
Thank you, Chinyere! Have you tried iTunes? My sense is that pretty much everything you can get on Amazon is still available on the old cobwebbed iTunes store!
And I had never seen that Monty Python skit before and I'm traumatized lol!
Fantastic Gabe. The "streaming and crying" gloss hits the nail on the head, in terms of the moral malaise I face as a consumer, and, well, as a taxpayer, and...the list goes on.
Everything you've written about streaming here, and also in your earlier posts, has been spot on, and it's great to keep the conversation in the forefront.
What I would add to your breakdown of the paltry revenues is that there's a generational aspect to this: A musician of my age or older was grandfathered in by a royalty system and a revenue stream that does not exist anymore. We get our .002 cents royalties along with everyone else, but we still had the opportunity to make records and hope, if not to recoup our costs, then at least to break even. The way you explain the cost of making a record and the streaming royalty revenue shows how that's almost impossible to achieve. For me it's yet another uphill that a younger musician has to face, that could be understandably discouraging.
Thank you, Brad!! Yeah, I also feel like I got the tiniest taste of the "old world" with my one record w/ Sony, and, to a lesser extent, the first one I did w/ Nonesuch... I feel so deeply for younger folks who are starting from scratch now. Another complication is that the culture of philanthropy is dying off among younger generations of means, which makes fundraising for art music records ever more difficult. The last two I've done were funded completely by private philanthropy, no advance from a label. I wonder how long we'll be able to keep doing this!!
(And so sorry to have traumatized you with Mr. Creosote... I should have included a trigger warning. 🤪)
While I share many of these sentiments, I am possibly in a minority of musicians who think that streaming isn't inherently bad - in fact it's quite incredible to have access to so much music and I don't think it innately cheapens it (I say this as a collector of vinyl). Early Spotify was actually quite good, as it hand-picked new album releases - it's terrible now, but I think the fish rotted from the head. In terms of the economics, while I realise it's more complicated than this, I would like a feature where fans (I refuse to call them users) can sponsor artists, perhaps to the tune of $1 a month extra. So you could top up your monthly cost with say $5-10 extra going the way of artists whose careers you want to boost (e.g., I'd love to give Andy Akiho $2 a month to keep doing his thing). Perhaps some access to paywalled stuff, perhaps purely a gift. In general, I sense that rather than trying to tweak the consumer economy to work for music, we should gently encourage a crowdsourced gift/patronage economy that align more with what it actually means to be a human. I think the internet suits a gift economy of sentiment but was born into a consumer economy of things.
Really important post. I would quibble with your restaurant analogy. You would need to visit those restaurants more than 200 times before you were actually leaving a full penny on the table.
lololol
"What prevents consumers from paying musicians for their labor is not the capture of the industry by dirty money, but rather, sheer entitlement: that is, the belief that frictionless access to all music at all times is a right"
Nailed it. People who are not artists just don't get it or care enough to "get it"... I did have a breakthrough however recently, when I explained to my friends and family, that even though the record I put out was cumulatively streamed thousands of times - I had only accrued enough money in streaming royalties to afford 5-6 Chipotle burritos.
🌯🌯🌯🌯🌯😢😢😢😢😢
Great article, thanks! I shifted to Tidal (want to shift to Qobuz) and I buy all new music with fewer than around a 100 supporters on BC….. I listen to a LOT of new and not very popular new music, so that’s what my economy can (barely) handle at the moment. Besides buying vinyl and tapes. From a philosophy that it might be ok to stream older (and esprcially major label) catalog music on streaming. Something like: buy new music from smaller artists and be labels, stream old (especially major label) stuff. It’s not perfect but it’s something…..
Here's a Matt Bruenig piece from 2021 that pushes back on this from the left: https://www.mattbruenig.com/2021/05/12/what-is-lost-in-post-scarcity/
The TLDR: Bruenig's point is that scarcity-enforced listening culture was real, but it was still just scarcity. The intensity of your relationship to an album was partly about not being able to afford anything else that week.
I don't like Spotify either. I love Bandcamp and I go to shows and put my money towards artists. But, in the end, personal boycotts won't move the needle. The payment infrastructure was designed, with active label participation, to under-compensate artists at scale. It's a political problem and it needs a political solution.
And there really is a solution! The Nordic countries spent the 20th century slowly building public ownership of capital and redistributing the returns (ironically that included creating Spotify.. think about how much better it is being a musician in Sweden than the US!). Pointing this out bugs people because it sounds pie-in-the-sky -- but we need clarity on the deepest problems if we're going move in the right direction to fix them.
Thanks so much for sharing this! I'm generally a big fan of Matt's (his wife, Liz, is an acquaintance), but I find his argument here a bit facile. As I see it, scarcity means something very different when we're talking about basic human needs — food, shelter, health care, education — rather than art. My sense is that Matt is operating here through the lens of economics, treating art as just another commodity to be nationalized.
Where I think things get complicated is that art, following Lewis Hyde, exists in two markets: a gift economy, and a market economy. It's one thing to advocate for socializing the commodity side of art — and of course I think access to the arts should be democratized: concert and theater tickets should be affordable (or free!), libraries should be robust, museums free, etc. But on the "gift" side of the equation, things get more complicated.
As Hyde argues, the exchange of art between maker and receiver creates a circuit of reciprocity that is at once irreducible and unscalable. In some ways this works against both Matt's argument and mine; obviously recorded music is eminently scaleable! But I think Matt's argument collapses in that the kind of scarcity attendant to art, generally, is, as I suggested above, fundamentally unlike scarcity in basic human needs: if we lack adequate sustenance, we starve; if we lack shelter, we may freeze; if we lack health care, we may succumb to treatable illnesses. By contrast, a rarified encounter with a work of art deepens the experience not because of scarcity, but because it cannot—in the Benjaminian aura-of-the-work sense—be replicated. I think there's a crucial difference between assigning economic value due to scarcity, on the one hand, and aesthetic/spiritual value due to uniqueness, on the other.
But perhaps more importantly, it has been largely proven that excessive choice is paralyzing for humans. (I wrote about this last year in my essay on choice paralysis.) The notion that having infinite access to infinite information (or any non-material resource) at all times is a socialist ideal seems, to me, at once dogmatic and a bit leaden. It also speaks, perhaps, to the complexity of defining freedom. Mr. Creosote had the freedom to eat until he exploded. In my view, this is evidence that there *can* be too much of a good thing.
I agree with you, of course, that "building public ownership of capital and redistributing the returns" is a worthy goal here in the U.S. I suspect we also share a desire to see a much larger social safety net, one that would obviate the need for nickel-and-diming around record receipts, not to mention a state of affairs in which millions of Americans are routinely forced to make inhumane choices between paying rent or securing prescription drugs, keeping the lights on or buying groceries, etc...
But I think I may differ with Matt (and possibly you, if you subscribe to his argument) when it comes to the suggestion that a more equitable society is necessarily destructive to culture. Finland is a great example of a nation in which the social safety net is robust, and yet its musical culture remains strong. Same with Denmark and Sweden...
(apologies if this is incoherent, I'm a tad underslept! and thank you again for reading & commenting!!)
Not incoherent at all! Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
The Hyde/Benjamin distinction is genuinely interesting and I don't want to dismiss it. But let's imagine... if Spotify were structured like a public library, state-supported, with artists compensated through something like a public arts fund, would we be reaching for Benjamin's aura to explain why streaming is spiritually impoverished? I suspect not. The "gift economy" feels like it's describing something real about art, but it's getting pulled in to explain a problem that is actually about ownership and revenue distribution.
On the Finland point -- I think we actually agree more than we disagree! A sovereign wealth fund, sector unions and a robust social safety net allowing for a strong musical culture is more or less exactly what I was pointing to. The question is just whether we get there through individual consumer choices (which have inescapable classist overtones) or structural change. My bet is on the latter, though I take your point that the two aren't mutually exclusive.
I think my response to your response in re: Benjamin is contained within my suggestion about this hypothetical library’s lending practices!
I am extremely pro-public library model! This is part of what Liz Pelly advocates for in the coda to Mood Machine. But think about the model of public libraries: even with e-books, you can only take out a certain number at a time, and there are only a certain number of copies. I would be totally in favor of an expansive/infinite public music library whose lending practices reflected the approach taken with literature: that each copy is purchased, has value, and cannot be in multiple places at once… still, I think I will die on the hill that suggests that we do better when we can engage with only a few art objects at a time. (Not sure if you would consider this classist?) But obviously I would like to live in a society in which there is no economic barrier to accessing those objects.
Completely agree on the politics then, which is most of what I wanted to establish! The library lending limits are worth questioning, though; they aren’t a principled design decision about how humans should consume literature. They’re an artifact of publisher licensing and copyright law.
On the aesthetic question: I think you might well be right that focused listening is better listening. But I think the goal should be a world where people can engage deeply, not one where scarcity compels them to. What people do with that freedom is up to them.
"I think the goal should be a world where people can engage deeply, not one where scarcity compels them to."
Have you read Borges' "The Library of Babel"? I think he makes a pretty compelling, pre-digital case for why infinite access is as much a prison as it is an expression of freedom.
I take your point about publisher licensing and copyright law — and/but so long as we live in some version of a market-based society, I don't know that this is a bad thing... (I also meant to bring this up in re: the Bruenig piece. There's an inherent tension between the ideal world we imagine and the one we live in; the prescriptions we come up with for societal improvement can either be incremental or revolutionary — I'm totally up for the revolutionary approach, but it needs to be applied consistently if so. In other words, if we're going to suggest that all music be publicly owned / available to all, then we need to have in place UBI, cradle-to-grave social safety net + education, etc... the Bruenig argument feels like it's living in a bit of a nether region between our lived reality and utopia...)
The Library of Babel is hell because it’s random and unsearchable. A gigantic organized library is something else entirely. LibriVox, for example, has over 20,000 free audiobooks recorded by volunteers from all over the world, an it’s enriched my life considerably. People’s relationship to abundance varies too much for blanket assertions.
On the nether region point: everything seems impossible until it’s done. The NHS wasn’t incremental. Neither were sovereign wealth funds. They took real coordinated political action – but they got there. And Bruenig isn’t just theorizing: his People’s Policy Project produces detailed proposals, some of which have made it directly into the Sanders and Mamdani platforms.
One clarification: I read Bruenig as saying that material progress *transforms* culture. And that may feel like destruction for those who don't want it to change!