Four Things #33
Welcome to Four Things #33. Hope you are doing great. Here’s another longer piece for you to start off the weekend, inspired by some of James Blake’s social media posts recently about streaming and artist income. Adding some thoughts to the conversation, hope you enjoy it and would love to hear your takes!
Feel free to pass on the link to your friends, and check out my newsletter archive if you haven’t done so before. Wishing you love and health..
Martyn
March 22nd, 2024
JAMES SPEAKS OUT
That things are dire for artists trying to make a living in this economy is a known fact, but it’s still significant when a v big artist like James Blake speaks out about it. Over the past couple of weeks James has been using his IG account to address the fact that the current streaming-based music ecosystem doesn’t reward artists and their art enough to build sustainable careers and that the need to go ‘viral’ is changing music for the worse. As musicians it sometimes feels like we live in the upside-down, where we make virtually nothing for the music we produce but are told to capitalize on sponsorships, Boiler Room appearances or the accidental 15 second Tiktok clip that goes viral but is completely unrelated to your work. Besides this devaluation of music, the big streaming platforms also offer a pretty mediocre experience in terms of discovering new music.
Recommendations on DSPs often send listeners into wormholes of similarity rather than put on us on a path of active discovery (more on that later). In my opinion, just like in other corners of the tech world, inevitable enshittification of DSPs will set in and probably result in them offering a mix of major label backed pop music and nameless background music (through editorial ‘vibe’ playlists). For 98% of all other musicians these platforms can’t ever provide an income, they’re just not built for it. In other words, most musicians will have to look for an alternative way:
OPEN THE VAULT
To be honest, when James presented his alternative for streaming in a video message on Thursday it felt a little bit like a let down. The new platform Vault.fm on which Blake will be offering new and unreleased material based on a $5 subscription per month for his fans utilizes a more fair and profitable model than streaming, but fans also quickly pointed out that not many people can afford $5 per month for each of their favorite artists. Also, subscriptions are not a new idea, in music as well as other disciplines it is the bedrock of the creator economy. Patreon, OnlyFans, and Bandcamp Community all use subscription based models. The idea behind these platforms is great, personally I use Patreon extensively for my Mentoring Program and I offer a subscription to the releases on my label 3024 via Bandcamp. But I also fully acknowledge they are not a one-size-fits-all solution for the malaise in the music industry.
To offer a successful subscription service you’d need an audience from elsewhere which is dedicated enough to spend an amount per month. Secondly, musicians don’t just have ‘super fans’, they have a lot of casual listeners as well - in fact I feel a lot of the criticism for James’ move to Vault comes from more mainstream listeners who love his music but also love hundreds of other artists and they can’t see themselves dedicating a few dollars a month to each of them. The bigger the artist the more casual listeners they have. Third, a monthly model also means those subscribers have to actually be provided with something every month. Not all artists work that way. As a musician my output is far too sporadic, what do I do when the ‘vault’ is empty? Put out mediocre sketches? Unfinished or rejected music? Another sample pack? The model is great for a certain segment of artists with a specific consistent output and I’m excited to see James is on it, but let’s also immediately acknowledge this is only a step in the right direction, not a definitive solution.
THE HIGH SCHOOL CASSETTE ECOSYSTEM
A little while ago I was thinking about the concept of discovery and recommendation of music in the digital realm, and I noticed that most tech platforms seem to overlook a very important aspect of music consumption. Streamers treat the listener of music as a passive consumer, they feed ‘content’ through the front page, editorial playlists and via recommendations of music that has similar characteristics to the music they are already listening to. Of course you can make your own playlists, send the link to a friend, but that’s about as much activity a DSP allows its user on the platform. No wonder a casual listener doesn’t want to pay more than $10 per month to use Spotify, it’s basically the equivalent of a radio with a ‘favorites’ functionality. Maybe the way to get musicians paid more for their art is to enhance the listeners’ experience of it.
In the pre-internet, me and most of my friends in high school didn’t have a lot of money to spend on music, but we were still very eager to discover new stuff and share it. I would buy an album whenever I could afford it, but, and this is important, when a friend dropped in I’d record the album for him/her on a cassette. In fact, the vinyl albums all my friends bought were only the starting point of our engagement with the music. Once the albums went to cassette, we would copy those for other friends, make dedicated mix tapes for our crush, swap tapes for other tapes, borrow tapes, and sell tapes. (An older kid in my school carried around lists of punk bootleg live recordings and demo tapes, you could pick 90mins worth of stuff, pay him ten bucks and a week later you received your TDK tape with handwritten track list). All this to say that music is inherently a social engagement, you listen together, you talk about it, you find your identity through it, you hustle with it, and you love through it.
The subscription based models for music I mentioned earlier offer a social experience, primarily one of proximity to the artist and other ‘super fans’. But the ‘high school cassette ecosystem’, where more casual listeners interact and share discoveries in volume rather than in specificity is completely absent in today’s version of music consumption. Why? It sounds like a model that would be much better than the current one-way content barrage, and possibly entice users to pay more so it’s also better for the artists. If you look at the gaming industry, they have successfully baked in the social component of playing games together with friends, form little crews, meet new likeminded people, gifting each other tokens or items etc. etc. All based on the equivalent of ‘an album’ namely ‘the game’.
THE LISTENER IS THE KEY
I would love to see a music platform where the listeners are the key to its success. Artists release music and listeners can buy to own or pay per stream (both options would already be an improvement for musicians). You can build collections of sorts which are public (like on Bandcamp), maybe there is some sort of system where the music becomes a token so you can swap it, or 'borrow' music from friends, maybe you can gift your token to someone else? Maybe there are clubs of listeners for specific artists or genres where fans can interact. Most importantly, music becomes a social vehicle again, it will be less quantified in streaming numbers and there’s not an algorithm in sight!
This idea may feel out of reach, but even if you pull it back slightly, it’s obvious there’s a missing link between listener experience and the way the current platforms are designed. The future of music in the digital realm must include several platforms for several types of listeners, some more curious than others, some more dedicated than others, some more wealthy than others. But what applies to every type of listener is that they want to listen to music and share that experience with others. ‘To discover’ something as an activity, not a passive endeavor. Artists like James Blake are pushing in the right direction, but we’re not quite there yet.
Thanks for reading and have a good weekend,
Martyn