Spotify
Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2012 9:21 pm
Phil Gould wrote:I actually like the service provided by Spotify, and use it often. I feel that it would be churlish to complain about back catalogue, that has already generated significant sums over many years, being made available in this way. However, for new work, it just doesn't represent a sustainable business model for an industry that still needs to invest substantial sums in order to produce and promote quality work.
Commerce has always played a defining role in the actual nature of recorded music. Just like the printed music boom before it, the record business has only rarely been 'art for art's sake'! After the heady days of the 20's thru the 50's, Jazz has only ever been viable because a record could be made in a couple of days, often an afternoon. Sales volumes for most recordings are low but so are costs. This applies to other genres like 'world' music. Rock musicians, on the other hand, could spend 6 months on a record (ie Dark Side of the Moon/Pink Floyd) because of the monies generated on previous albums and anticipated sales in the millions. When Punk arrived in the mid-70's, record companies couldn't believe their luck because here was a music that could be recorded in a few days, like Jazz, and yet sales could be substantial (the first two Police albums cost about £1500 each). It was one of the reasons the music industry swung behind the genre, I believe; the business case was overwhelming. Same for House/early Hip-Hop, which was a largely home made affair, at least at the beginning. In the end, Punk, or New Wave would never match the sales figures of albums by Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, The Eagles, etc but it opened the door to a whole new generation of record company entrepreneurs who helped make popular bands that the older labels would probably never have signed. The same can be said of Hip-Hop.
But all these movements in the art of recorded music were dependent on the notion that significant sums, or enough money, would always be available to invest in new artists, many of whom would never be successful and would be written off after one or two releases. A label like Island would take the money generated by Cat Stevens and invest it in The Incredible String Band or John Martyn, artists who sold but not in large quantities. This is no longer the case.
With the advent of illegal downloads of perfect digital copies, or services like Spotify, which pay effectively nothing per stream, sufficient monies are not being generated to feed back into the system to support the whole array of talent required to sustain the level of quality people have come to expect from this medium. Young artists can no longer get tour support from their label so that they can develop their skills and craft playing live. Often a new artist will be dropped after the first record if it's not an immediate hit, depriving them and us of what might have been if they'd been given the chance to grow and learn. Great session musicians, technicians and engineers are now being offered, to record an album, what they once got to record a single track, sometimes not even that; simply not enough to sustain a career or, often, to even put food on the table. This whole support network of talent is at risk of evaporating. Young engineers sometimes don't know how to record drums, or strings, properly anymore, simply because they never get the chance to do it.
Radio stations are covered by PRS agreements requiring them to pay a license fee dependent on market share. Monies generated in this way are accurately recorded in the system and can be substantial for an artist with a successful track record with songs people continue to want to hear. This is not the case with Spotify. And iTunes takes a cut of more than £3 for the privilege of selling an album through the site. That's quite a large chunk of the £7.99 asking price!!
People can't have it both ways. They can't complain about a lack of quality and diversity in contemporary music when they are not even prepared to pay the asking price for music they do choose to listen to. The argument has been made before, but no-one will baulk, it seems, at paying £2 for a solo espresso in Starbucks, which lasts all of five minutes, but somehow take issue with paying 0.99p for a piece of music which could last a lifetime. This I simply don't understand!
