As the year winds to a close, I’ve seen three different trends on Instagram in regard to Spotify Wrapped posts. One is of folks sharing their Wrapped stats from the user side of Spotify, maybe with a comment about how they were surprised a particular song or artist made it into their top five. The second is artists showing their side of their Wrapped, perhaps with a comment in the vein of “streaming is problematic in so many ways, but it’s always cool to see data on how many new fans we gained this year, and where we should tour next.” Then there’s a third group of musicians, both large and small, who have made some sort of alternate post, boycotting the trend, and ranting about why streaming is evil. Perhaps this is my toned-down, yet lengthy version of the third option.
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I joined Spotify Premium as a consumer this past June. My partner had moved 6 hours away for the summer, and I knew I wanted to be able to easily listen to new music with all of that driving. I wasn’t sure at the time if I would keep the subscription once she was back in the area, but I got hooked pretty quickly. In college, I used the free version fairly frequently on my computer, but not that often on my phone. Both had ads, but the mobile app also shuffled any artist’s songs you wanted to hear. After college, my aging 2013 MacBook Pro (which I still have, and am currently typing this essay on) couldn’t handle running Spotify consistently, so I took to using YouTube and (yes, get ready for this one) downloading albums from the iTunes store.
So having any and pretty much every song I could ever want to hear at my finger tips was frankly somewhat of a novel concept to me. I’d always been resistant to paying for the app out of principle, due to the company’s low artist payouts. But once I’d had it for a few weeks, there was no going back. I thought I was selective before with which albums I’d buy on vinyl, but now it’s even more dramatic. A physical record now needs to meet the criteria of: something I would listen to around the house, is by an artist I really want to support, and is something that has either beautiful artwork and packaging or is something I really want to hear at high fidelity.
An interesting aspect of my user Wrapped data was how it didn’t really compare logically with the rest of what Spotify’s algorithm had been showing me throughout those six months. My Daily Mix or Discover Weekly playlists would feature indie folk or rock. Yet my Wrapped made it seem as though the albums I listened to on those early summer road trips were all I’d been listening to consistently throughout the year. While this is likely due to me streaming everything I was listening to during those first few months more often in general, with so many hours in the car, it still surprised me a bit that they didn’t curate it to be more in line with the genres that they had been suggesting to me regularly. Algorithm versus a real person, though, I suppose.
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What’s the significance, then, of so many people returning to physical media? As I mentioned above, I can understand the vinyl resurgence for the sake of audio fidelity and larger-scale album artwork, but what’s with Gen Z getting into cassette tapes? I get the nostalgia for a vintage find from a time before your own, but you can’t tell me there isn’t something deeper also happening there. (Let’s be real though – if I found an 8-track copy of Destroyer at a yard sale, I would jump on it.)
Why do our reptile brains still need to hold the thing in our hands for it to feel real? Why do we print out 4x6 photos and put them on the fridge? Why did e-books and Kindles never take off the way music streaming did? If having vinyl on display in your living room or having a band’s CD from their merch table in your glove box makes you feel more connected to their art, or provides conversation starters with the people in your life, what does it mean for musicians that their formerly reliable form of passive income has now moved from being a staple for consumers into being a novelty piece? Dinner is free, so what will the restaurant do now that the apps and dessert aren’t bringing in enough revenue for them to break even?
The discussion of venues taking cuts of artists’ merch has gained volume and traction in the last year or two. That being said, as somebody who feels pretty strongly about the issue and sees it as a long over-due conversation, I also can’t help but think that if streaming services were giving artists higher payouts, that the issue may not have been coming to light this soon, or even at all. Would artists be as vocal as they have been recently about t-shirt money if they had higher amounts of passive income? Would bands even make t-shirts if they didn’t need gas money to get to the next gig?
Because here’s the rub: if streaming payouts were equal (with inflation adjustment) to what label’s net profits from physical sales were in the 90’s or earlier, then the net profit for musicians today could actually be higher, because streaming has taken away the need for a record label in the first place. I’m sure there are plenty of indie label execs who would have counter-arguments to that, and could wax poetic about how their label has a holistic approach to nurturing artists’ careers, or how the artists they sign are part of some curated collective of bohemian brain-farts, but the reality is that Spotify is your record label now, even if you yourself run a record label. You can do it yourself, but you will be in the red for a very long time from what you spent to record. And, as I mentioned earlier with the Kindle comparison, that’s the whole reason that book publishers can still get away with being gate-keeping snobs – their system hasn’t been colossally disrupted the way that the record industry has been over the last fifteen years.
It’s been very interesting to me since shows came back in the fall of 2021, to see several small to medium sized artists cancelling tours due to “personal reasons.” I can tell you right now that if an artist isn’t citing a personal illness or a family emergency as their rationale, they are very likely canceling that tour due to low ticket sales. The two most common examples of these cancellations that I’ve seen have been an artist’s first headline run, which inherently poses a high risk for ticket sales (how do you know how many fans you really made on those support slots until you ask people to show up to see just you this time?), and overseas support slots, which require way more overhead costs from international airfare, renting a vehicle, renting a backline of instruments and gear, etc. (which begs the question, how much money are you willing to lose for the sake of exposure in a new market?).
How does streaming factor into this, you ask? Well, what if a few weeks out, the ticket sales for your upcoming headlining tour were right on the cusp of having it make financial sense to go through with it? Let’s say you sold 30 advance tickets for each night at 100-person capacity clubs. And because these small clubs are less likely to use Ticketmaster, let’s say the price point is $15 tickets with a $3 service fee. Maybe most of those clubs are letting you keep 100% of your merch sales. Maybe instead of getting a hotel room each night, you’ve found a few cost-effective Airbnbs to stay in and are even playing in towns where you have friends who’ve offered you their couch. Barring any droves of unexpected fans showing up and buying tickets at the door the day of at any of those shows, you’ll be just shy of breaking even with the guaranteed payment you’ve got from each night, compared with the overhead for the whole tour. If you knew you were going to make several hundred dollars in passive income that month, no matter what, from streaming revenue for music you already recorded and released, would you say fuck it and just do the tour?
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So what would it look like if artists actually did start getting those levels of passive income now that the paradigm has shifted so dramatically to be in their favor artistically. What sort of decisions would artists start making if they knew there was no label exec telling them how to do things, and they got significant streaming profits? Perhaps I’m asking so many questions because this is ultimately a conversation about the future, and a conversation about money. Experiencing recorded music will inevitably look different in another fifteen years, but what value will the average listener put on making both the artist’s and the distributor’s incentives and lifestyles ethically balanced?
Anyhow, here’s my Wrapped photos: