If you really like a band, and you appreciate the music - the art - you should consider purchasing a digital download of the music on Bandcamp, rather than endlessly streaming it for free on Spotify. Bandcamp supports artists and enables them to earn money from the appreciation of their creativity, as opposed to Spotify and other streaming services which simply exploit the artists and the system, earning billions in fees while paying next-to-nothing for the product.
Earlier this year, Swedish musician Bjork called out Spotify and streaming services, calling them "probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians." And as a music fan, an artist, a writer, and a consumer, I couldn't agree more. Snoop Dogg made a similar claim two summers ago during a panel at the Milken Institute. The music and culture icon who changed the game of hip-hop in the 90s went off script, and said "Can someone explain to me how you can have a billion streams and not get a million dollars? Cause that shit don't make sense to me."
Snoop and Bjork are, of course, speaking from a time when all musicians could sell an actual product like an album, a cassette, or a CD, and earn a nice living from the deal, even when record companies and producers took a significant cut. The creation of MP3 files and streaming -- beginning with Napster -- changed everything, and not for the better as far as the artist is concerned. However, Napster and streaming didn't ruin the possibility of earning a decent living as a musician at that point, and the visionary artist and businessman Steve Jobs had much to do with that.
iTunes was a brilliant innovation and a real game-changer, enabling music fans to purchase single songs as digital downloads for $.99. That was actually a win-win for the artist and the consumer. For, as anyone over the age of thirty recalls, there were times you liked a song or two from a new release, but didn't want the entire album/CD/cassette for $10-$15. And, a perk of the iTunes was that those of us who had significant CD collections could upload all our albums to the iTunes account and carry our music everywhere on our iPods and later iPhones.
However, the predatory Swedish businessman and "technologist" Daniel Ek basically went and ruined everything, enriching himself to the tune of billions in the process. It's a bit of a complicated story to understand how Ek moved Spotify into such a dominant position, manipulating record companies and the biggest artists into signing lopsided deals for music acquisition in exchange for "access and exposure." And that deal is absurdly slanted to enable the company to earn billions in membership fees while paying microscopic "revenue sharing" with artists of basically $0.0032 per stream. If it were an iTunes model, a billion "streams" or downloads would make nice profits for the band, too.
And, of course, as a Gen Xer, I won't claim that in the 70s and 80s I didn't make bootleg copies of cassettes or record songs off the radio. But for all that "theft," we still purchased a helluva lot of music, and honestly the 80s and 90s were the absolute heyday for bands making money on their music, even moderately successful ones. Granted, on the current streaming platforms, the biggest artists are still making huge cash. But, as a music writer and researcher, I know of far too many excellent musicians who stream a ton of music, but still work and struggle to pay the bills, which wouldn't have been a problem with comparable sales in the pre-streaming era.
So, that is why I don't have a Spotify or AppleMusic account, and that's why I do have a Bandcamp account. While I haven't fully committed to the return to vinyl, I definitely plan to. And I have started purchasing digital downloads of some new favorites on Bandcamp. I will also acknowledge that I do "stream music," having had a Pandora account for years (I am, after all, in my 50s). But I see Pandora more like listening to the radio, which I also do extensively, and unlike radio, Pandora actually pays fees to the artists. Also, I have often pulled up music on YouTube, but I make an effort to listen to the ads so the artists still earn a little something from my appreciation of their art.
Now, I am sure that this post has plenty of inconsistences and even potential hypocrisies which I haven't fully thought through. But I stand by my position that Spotify and its streaming model has not been good for musicians. And, honestly, I think that the heavyweight artists could make a significant impact on the industry if they collectively moved to demand at least the option of buying digital downloads that would be shared with the artist.
By the way, this situation and point of view came on my radar just recently, when Westword, Denver's alt-weekly published a piece about Alternative Streaming Platforms for Denver Artists. And here are a couple other links to aspects of this issue.
Pandora's New Deal: Different Pay, Different Play : NPR
AM and FM Radio Do Not Pay Royalties to Artists -- That's Un-American
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