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The Music Industry's Latest Shortsighted Plan: Killing Freemium Services
An anonymous reader notes that there have been rumblings in the music industry of trying to shut down freemium services like Spotify's free tier and YouTube's swath of free music. The record labels have realized that music downloads are gradually giving way to streaming, and they're angling for as a big a slice of that revenue as they can manage. The article argues that they're making the same mistake they always make: that converting freemium site listeners (in the past, music pirates) to subscription services will be a 1:1 transfer, and no listeners will be lost in the process. Of course, that's no more true now than it was a decade ago. But in doing trying to do so, the labels will do harm to the artists they represent, and shoot themselves in the foot for acquiring future customers by getting rid of several major sources of music discovery.
You mean more than they already do ?
From what I have seen the sites pay next to nothing and most of what they do pay goes to the labels, because the artists are still in debt to them.
The last two records I purchased I paid for and downloaded from the artist pretty directly. I assume they were paying the hosting service a fee.
This is the way of the future. I'm sure the artist in question got > 50% of the revenue direct into their pockets, compared to the tiny slice a record company would pay them, this is huge.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
"Lose" money? I don't think so. They get money from being on Spotify.
The question is, do they get as much as they could/should?
Their model for distributing music has only been around a little over 1/2 a century. New technology invalidated their business model. Guess what? That's how it's always worked. They can either adapt, or they can die.
So a few bands will make less because they won't have the album sales. Most musicians have traditionally made their money by playing live, and that's what'll happen. The difference now is, streaming services will help introduce people to new music, and some of those will go to their live shows. Some of those will buy the $30 t-shirt to further support the band. You might not have as many multi-millionaire musicians, but the internet should benefit the ones who never sold enough to make a profit on an album anyway.
Going to play Devil's Advocate here for a minute:
Arguably, they *are* getting paid what they should, because market forces have shown this is the amount that listeners are willing to pay for a streaming service, and they don't seem too worried about the lack of restitution their artists are receiving from it.
Spotify did a great deal to slow down piracy rates of music, simply because of the ease of access. (Think Valve's "piracy is a customer service problem.") The service is finally at a price point (free, with ads) that can compete with piracy (just plain free).
Does that mean the artists don't deserve more for their art? Of course they deserve to be able to live off their work. The question is whether we, as a society, agree.
This is part of why I personally advocate more government grants for the arts, not less. When an artist lives or dies by sales alone, you're going to have the brilliant minds of our generation ignored while the most bullshit, easy-to-digest-pop becoming the only viable way to make a reasonable living in music. When an artist isn't focusing on sales, they can achieve true artistic expression without the restriction of needing to appeal to the widest audience possible (lowest common denominator).
>Of course they deserve to be able to live off their work.
Do they? Any time prior to a few centuries ago, a musician only made money via patronage and live performances, and maybe selling some sheet music or other products on the side. And sure, I've got no beef with anyone claiming a (decent) musician should be able to make a living off their work in that fashion. Today though we've created the strange idea that an musician should be able to record their music once, and get paid for it repeatedly over the course of the next century. This is very much a historical anomaly. Even authors and other creators of much more involved and substantial works were historically only granted a decade or two of profits from their one-time labor. This is an aspect of our economic system that's still very much evolving.
There is much to be said for patronage or government grants, done well. Grants especially though have the issue of who decides which artists receive them? It's easy to abuse the position of spending other people's money to support something as nebulous and subjective as art. Especially considering the elitist "echo chamber" effect that often surrounds such things. Personally I'd consider the world to be better off without much of modern art, by what right are my taxes spent on such things?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Of course they deserve to be able to live off their work.
A few years ago I went to an Elton John concert. In Costa Rica, where I was living at the time. Now Sir Elton is no young puppy. Neither am I. Still I was impressed that this rather elderly entertainer was banging out these tunes, visibly sweating and working his ass off. The tickets weren't that expensive either, so he can't have been raking in a lot of money from that concert. But he worked and worked. And of course we applauded and cheered as he played exactly what we wanted to hear. Later on, I logged on and I found out that this little central america tour was just a break from his real job which was playing Vegas every weekend that year. So here is Elton John at 60 plus years old working his fucking ass off weekdays AND weekends. Yeah, Sir Elton has his own jet, and no doubt several sets of equipment and all the people he could need to keep his show on the road in many places at once. But he is working, working, working, and I don't care how many millions he makes he has earned every single penny.
Now the stupid arsehole who thinks the world owes him a zillion dollars for that one crappy song he wrote though, no, I think THAT guy doesn't "deserve" to be able to live off his "work" at all. Writing a tune is not WORK. You wrote a song. Congrats! You think you're special? I wrote a song. My daughter painted a painting. My wife wrote a poem. Big fucking deal. Now get to fucking WORK if you actually want to live off your song! Then maybe the regular people, those of us who actually DO work every day, will respect this "artist". Copyright should never be entitlement.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If more people pirate music, they can blame bad sales (where bad is defined as "We sold X and we think we should have sold 10,000*X") on piracy. Then, they can use the piracy claim to get some music industry-friendly, consumer-unfriendly laws passed. (E.g. "You need to pay a $5 a month piracy tax whether or not you pirate." or "Three copyright infringement accusations and your ISP must disconnect you.") Best case: An executive blames piracy on a bad album sale instead of on the fact that he signed a band with no talent.
Even if piracy went away tomorrow, I'm convinced that the music industry would still claim that piracy was increasing more and more.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Yep, real smart. "Oh no, people are discovering new music for free, let's stop them."
Users: "Oh, my free streaming service went away. You suck! How do I get music now?" Googles for 'free music download', or asks friends, eventually ends up at the Pirate Bay or something. "Cool, all this stuff is free and I can even keep it without some service disappearing from underneath me!"
When will these people realise that they cannot support their old business model because technology has made it redundant. The longer they try and abuse their customer base, the more of their customer base they are going to lose. Eventually technology will steamroll them into obsolescence, but it's mainly because they never thought to give people want they want soon enough (if, back in the Napster days, they had provided an easy way to purchase any MP3 online, DRM-free, for a low price, everyone would have done that instead of finding more and more ways to avoid paying at all. Now, it's too late and the market has left them behind).
It's the horse-feed sellers complaining that everyone is using jet aircraft - and then trying to force them not to by suing? I have for quite some time been saying that they need to wake up and adapt to the technology, but I honestly think it's too late for that. The recording agencies have dug their own grave by being so backward. P2P tech and other options have left them irrelevant, and their trying to beat people up with legislation changes just makes the rational people who don't mind paying a fair price angry.
Sorry, but if I'm looking for new music, I'm still going to look at places like YouTube. If the big businesses are too stupid to put their stuff there, then it won't be their content I'm seeing - it'll be indy artists, and I'm more than happy to pay an artist directly if I think their stuff is good enough, and if I can get it without DRM (or other vendor lock-in like iTunes).
Of course, most of the big-label stuff is rubbish anyway, so I guess I'm not losing much. Perhaps YouTube will stop suggesting crap pop songs now - yay!
The problem with Grooveshark is that it wasn't sending the ad revenue to the copyright owners. You were already pirating. As you explained though, it's kind of hard not to if you want reliability. The best thing to do is make sure to see the artists you like in concert whenever possible. Songkick is great at facilitating that.