Back in April, I posted a note that my favourite podcast had been nominated for a Peabody Award. It won.
I think we’re at the beginning of a major resurgence in the popularity of contemporary classical1 music, and that the Internet economics I’ve written about have a lot to do with that.
I wish there were a better word for this. “Serious” music and “art” music both have connotations I’d rather avoid. What I mean, essentially, is music that belongs to the same cycle of influences and training that leads, say, from Beethoven to Pierre Boulez in one direction, and to Philip Glass in another, and to Tōru Takemitsu in another. That we need a single umbrella term to describe such a huge array of music is absurd, but it’s also true that branches of this tradition are more closely connected to one another, generally, than to other types of music. ↩
I’m coming to this almost comically late; the prizes were announced on April 18th. Threadgill is only the fourth African-American artist to win the Pulitzer (eighth, as Will Robin points out, if you count the Special Prizes and similar awards given posthumously to Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk).
Interestingly, and very much exemplary of my last post, the album is on Bandcamp, where you can listen to two of the tracks for free and then, if you like them, buy the album. (I do, and I will.)
In for a Penny, In for a Pound is the latest installment in saxophonist/flutist/composer Henry Threadgill’s ongoing exploration of his singular system for integrating composition with group improvisation. The music for his band Zooid—Threadgill’s main music-making vehicle for the past fourteen years and the longest running band of his illustrious forty plus-year career—is no less than his attempt to completely deconstruct standard jazz form, steering the improvisatory language towards an entirely new system based on preconceived series of intervals. His compositions create a polyphonic platform that encourages each musician to improvise with an ear for counterpoint and, in the process, creating striking new harmonies.
I was delighted to learn last week that my article in VAN about streaming and piracy, in its German translation, was cited by the major German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung. I had a friend translate the relevant paragraph for me last night, and unfortunately the author seems to have spectacularly missed the point:
[The fact that most people use Spotify for free] affects classical musicians even worse than their colleagues in pop, as the specialist online magazine for classical music, VAN, has pointed out in the past few days: not only are classical “songs” more seldom listened to than non-classical; they are also often considerably longer. Because of this, VAN recommends that classical musicians and composers should publish their recordings and compositions for free online. Many are doing this, for example on the platform SoundCloud, which is delighted to receive the work of composers of contemporary and famous or popular “e-music”.
Just to be clear, in the original article (and in the translation), I said the opposite:
Professional musicians who know that their music has limited appeal should think very carefully about whether their music belongs on a streaming service at all. Small record labels should do the same. Few people are in music, least of all classical music, for wealth or power, but giving music away for next to nothing is a surefire way to never make a living from it. Instead, musicians can continue doing what they’ve been doing in one form or another for centuries: selling their music.
Publishing their music online for free is what musicians are already doing on streaming services, and it’s not working.
What I did say, and perhaps what the author of the article mistook as being the whole of the argument, is that putting music online for free in a limited or inconvenient way, such as a couple of songs from an album, or streaming only through video, can be a promotional tool to generate more sales. Barriers are powerful. Many people will pay out a little money to get something they want a little more conveniently. Video game makers know this, and and use it in a disappointingly gross way; but it doesn’t have to be as manipulative as that. Netflix and Audible—and hell, even Spotify—use free trials with limits (in the former two cases, limited time; in the latter, limited convenience) to encourage users to subscribe to their product. The point of giving something away when you’re trying to make a living on it—especially something as ephemeral as a digital copy of a piece of music—is to make people interested enough to pay you.
I don’t think anyone trying to make a living making any sort of specialist product should give it away.
Speaking of VAN, a few weeks ago I wrote an addendum to my previous piece on streaming and piracy, covering some things I had to trim at the time for the sake of space and pace.
Then I got married, and forgot to post it. For the sake of completion, it’s below:
1
I’ve written before1 that it’s in the interests of the big record labels to have their entire catalogues, or as much of them as possible, on the major streaming services. By sharing their vast libraries, the labels are more or less guaranteed to make their money back. All they need is a couple of hit artists, and they can afford to lose the bets they’ve made on everybody else (or at least break even). In that way, the big labels are like investment bankers: invest in as wide a variety of stocks as possible, and enough of them will provide a return.
It’d be nice if the labels instead saw their musicians as people, but that’s not likely to happen in a hurry.
This is why small labels are unlikely to receive the same benefits from streaming as big ones: not because they’ll never have a hit, but because the big labels they’re in competition with are almost guaranteed to have a constant stream of them.
2
Netflix is probably the business that seems closest to the streaming music model in many people’s eyes. In some ways it seems apt. Both services provide access to a large catalogue in exchange for a fee, and pay the majority of their revenue to content providers. But they’re different in a couple of important ways.2
Firstly, as I’ve covered before, Spotify (to take for example the most prominent streaming music service) pays a per-play fee for each item on its catalogue, so a song that gets ten times more plays than another makes ten times the revenue. Netflix, like traditional TV channels, pays for its content upfront. While the result is similar, with bigger earners getting bigger payouts, the fact that Netflix’s payments are made upfront means that all of the content creators get paid, and get to decide whether the payment is worthwhile. If you sell your movie to Netflix, and nobody watches it, Netflix lost the bet. They may not buy your movie again, but at least some of the effort that went into making it is recompensed.
On Spotify, if nobody listens to your music, you get nothing. And if one person listens to it instead of buying it, you’re out the sale of a CD.
Secondly, and as a consequence of this, Netflix’s catalogue relative to the number of films and TV shows released is quite small. Spotify is aiming to have every musician on Spotify, whereas Netflix can only afford a limited (admittedly high) number of shows and movies. This means that among shows and movies featured on Netflix, there is less competition for viewers. On Netflix, you’re up against everything Netflix can afford; on Spotify, you’re up against everything.
The main reason for the distinction, I think, is that Netflix is in direct competition with its providers. Streaming services work with the support of labels—especially the big labels for the reasons outlined above. But the big TV and movie companies have their own networks, and the more time people spend on Netflix, the less they spend on the Disney channel. How long this can last is an open question, since the more subscribers Netflix gets, the more content it can afford, and the more content it has, the more subscribers it can get. But I don’t think Netflix will ever have everything the way that Spotify has everything. There’s too much content being made.
Whatever the reason, the result is clear: Spotify’s business model is a worse deal for artists than Netflix’s, and makes it harder than Netflix does for artists to make a living.
3
News publishers today are facing a dilemma: give their work away for free, and support it through advertising, or hide it behind a paywall and risk piracy.
Sound familiar?
Only the biggest news sites in the world are able to demand advertising rates sufficient to cover their costs, and more and more those advertisements are going to Facebook instead. On Facebook, people care about the news they get, but they don’t care about who’s published it; they just click the link. But if publishers don’t publish to Facebook, they miss out on enormous potential readership. So big news sites are having to settle for Facebook’s terms or face a massive drop in readers. Elsewhere online, small sites are springing up that tend to fall into one of two revenue categories: paid memberships and sponsored posts. The sites have this in common: they are focussed on a narrow range of topics and interests, and attract people who share those interests.
Readers are willing to pay for the content, firstly because they have a passionate interest in the topic, and secondly because, in a lot of cases, they’re supporting a writer who they like. And piracy, while still a danger, is less of a risk because the audience tends to be both small and loyal. In the case of sponsorship-supported blogs, a similar system is at play: a site focussed on a specific interest will have an audience with particular tastes, and advertisers, particularly if they’re making niche products, are interested in that.
The big labels may do well to look at the publishing industry, as they have to compete harder and harder with all sorts of audio content. It may happen that big news sites that produce good work, but not enough of it to keep the lights on, are taken over by other big news sites until only two or three remain. Just imagine if that were to happen with music.
So who wins in the Spotify ecosystem? Well, Spotify do well for themselves, obviously. As do the big record labels, those who have a wide enough variety of popular artists that chances are something they’ve released is being streamed right now.
So if streaming is the future of music, and a musician-led streaming service is doomed to failure, then what’s the solution? Much as with technology companies, there are two ways for a musician to make a living on the Internet: musicians with mass-market appeal, who must appear on streaming services, as it’s in their interests to be easily accessible to as many listeners as possible; and musicians with a small, passionate audience who, to make a living, will have to have dedicated listeners who are prepared to pay for their music. Many artists complain that they are underpaid by Spotify, but Spotify already pays 70 percent of its revenue to musicians—well, to their labels at least—so a significant increase is impractical.
Professional musicians who know that their music has limited appeal should think very carefully about whether their music belongs on a streaming service at all. Small record labels should do the same. Few people are in music, least of all classical music, for wealth or power, but giving music away for next to nothing is a surefire way to never make a living from it. Instead, musicians can continue doing what they’ve been doing in one form or another for centuries: selling their music.
Themes may be familiar to regular readers of this blog—digital economics, streaming and piracy, and the need for musicians to know their audience. VAN is a very interesting new publication, and worth reading. I’ve bought a subscription. This week, I shall be rocking out to their JACK Quartet playlist.
One of his most popular (and best) is Humans Need Not Apply, a chilling look at the future of automation and industry, and the potential massive spike in unemployment that may come about in the next fifty years as computers become better at human jobs than humans are. It’s about fifteen minutes long, and worth watching.
While I can’t dispute many of the facts, I think the video gets it very wrong on some aspects of creative professionalism. Grey is a utilitarian. He openly admits on his podcast, Cortex, that, for him, music is a tool that helps him get work done. Elsewhere, he’s sardonically mocking of poets and artists (as he is in the video above). That’s all well and good. Not everyone can be an art lover, and not everyone should be. But a utilitarian view of the arts leads to a fairly simple notion of art as something trying to accomplish a job.
In the last two weeks, music has lost two titans of two genres: the austere, difficult, polarising composer (and undeniably brilliant conductor) Pierre Boulez, and the chameleonic, gloriously weird rock1 musician David Bowie. The two men had little in common, and as far as I knew never crossed paths except in passing. But their music mattered to people, and it mattered far less because of its qualities than because those qualities were the result of human work.
David Bowie’s early rise to fame came about because he revelled in his weirdness. He was, as Hilton Als noted in his New Yorker piece, “that outsider who made different kids feel like dancing in that difference”. No computer, no matter how good the music it made, could ever forge that connection with people. A glance at Twitter over the past week shows how keenly his loss is felt as a personal one by people around the world.
By contrast, Hatsune Miku, a fully computer-generated performer from Japan (if you haven’t heard of her, then yes, really), certainly has her core group of fans. And I have no doubt that her fans enjoy her performances, and listening to her singing. But were she to vanish tomorrow, through some freak accident of data loss, all her fans would really lose would be her songs. With Bowie, they lost an icon.
Pierre Boulez’s early music became famous (and notorious) for its high degree of mathematical precision—not only the notes, but the dynamics, tempi, articulations were all rigorously figured out beforehand. Regardless of the emotional content of the music (which some listeners passionately defend), that is a type of music that is surely highly suited to a computer’s labour. But again, part of the appeal of Boulez as a musician is the fact that a human could create and hold music of this scale and complexity in his mind. Who would be interested if it was automatic? If his music had been made by a computer—a machine which necessarily would have found it easier—it would have been less interesting.
Recently, the American composer Andrew Norman made exactly this point on performing. From a New York Times interview by Will Robin:
“By thinking of the orchestra as only a sound-making machine, we’ve actually eliminated a huge part of what makes a concert experience amazing,” Mr. Norman said. A laptop, he pointed out, easily supersedes what the symphony can offer in terms of sonic power and flexibility. “What makes an orchestra special, for me, is not actually the sounds that it makes but the fact that there are a hundred human beings doing that, right in front of me,” he added. “In a way, it’s performance art.”
There are already computers that can generate music; even ones that can do a job of imitating Mozart well enough to fool Mozart experts. But short-term existential crises aside, these works become curios—interesting for how they were composed, but passed over because there’s nothing to get your teeth into. No composer weeping over the streets at the beauty of the sound of a fire sergeant’s funeral. No artist in a fit of horror at war dedicating himself to representing that horror in black-and-white. No writer so full of self-loathing that he imagines himself transforming overnight into vermin.
That’s not to say there won’t be room (not to say a market) for computer-generated art, but only in its most functional sense. What if I told you your film could have music by John Williams? Would you say no? What if the other option was Beethoven? Or night clubs, whose music—beyond the compulsion to follow certain trends of fashion—is essentially background noise for socialising.
But a computer-generated Beethoven symphony? Would we really want that? Beethoven was great, and we have piles of his music to listen to now—but he’s been and gone. Music has changed since his time, and to go back is pointless. And any originality expressed by a computer is uninteresting, not in spite of its lack of imagination, but precisely because its imagination is theoretically limitless.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe next generation’s Hatsune Miku will be one with a personality and life programmed by her team (as authors program characters—no judgement here), able to inhabit independently a virtual world. People can definitely come to love fictional characters, and maybe they’ll love her as they love Katniss Everdeen. Maybe the following generation will see a wholly computer generated performer, with appearance, personality, life all created by computers with the last human interaction having occurred thirty years before.
But my suspicion is that for the people who find human connection in art, art made by humans will always be essential. At least until computers can imitate a full, creative human mind. And then we’ll have plenty of new philosophical issues to deal with.
Last week, on the podcast Exponent (and to a lesser extent, in this blog post), Ben Thompson detailed a political position I hadn’t been familiar with before, but one which I find interesting. In short, as technology has a greater and greater impact on society, and as its presence costs more and more people their jobs, it is in technology companies’ best interests to lobby not only for less regulation (the clarion call of so much business), but also for higher taxes and an assured “ground floor”, economically, so that those people whose jobs are lost through technological disruption are not left with nothing. This way, the people whom regulations are supposed to protect are protected by the safety net, and the corporations have the freedom to grow as they please.
The reasoning is this: a job done by a computer is not of net benefit to society until the person whose job was lost is contributing something new. Otherwise, nothing is gained overall. The technology companies benefit through having fewer restraints on the ways they can develop; those restraints are less necessary if people are assured a stable means of livelihood anyway; and that better quality of life can be achieved through revenue generated from higher taxes. In both the businesses’ and the governments’ cases, something is given and something is gained.
To be sure, it’s not a flawless plan. I’m sure that one of the common criticisms levelled at it will be that if you pay people for doing nothing, then people won’t do anything. I’m more optimistic than that. I think, left without the constant worry about meeting basic needs, most people will try to occupy their time in ways that fulfil them, whether that’s making art, or starting a business, or whatever.
In any case, we may know soon enough whether a basic wage for everyone can have positive effects on a society: the current government of Finland are in the early stages of carrying out the experiment.
Equally, those more skeptical of the corporate world would argue that no corporation would lobby for higher taxes—these are self-interested entities, after all. But they wouldn’t be doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, but as a trade-off for reduced regulation (which, far more than tax, is the bugbear of many large businesses, especially tech companies). If the total cost of a computer doing a job plus a higher general tax rate is still cheaper than an employee (and it could well be), then the company still makes a saving, and the sooner that change is made, the more money saved.
More concerning to me is the ability of small and of poor countries to fund a project like this. There’s a compelling argument to be made that the tech companies who gain the most customers now, firstly, will become far bigger than any company that’s existed so far in human history, and secondly, will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future. Services become verbs—Google, Skype, Uber—and these services, as U.S.-based entities, will pay the majority of their taxes to the U.S. government. Good for American citizens.
But these services have a much smaller stake in other markets they choose to enter, and both the incentive and leverage to push local taxes as low as they can. Rich citizens (or visitors) in these countries demand the same services they get elsewhere in the world, but the companies that make those services can choose whether to enter the markets on their terms. They may be amenable to high tax at home, but would they be so willing to pay it everywhere else too?
These smaller countries, and these poorer countries, would be thus less able to compete with the rest of the world, and so would slip further and further behind in economic stakes. As a result, their governments would become less and less able to support their citizens under any system. In the Internet’s winner-take-all economics, maybe somebody still has to lose.
As I said, though, I’m an optimist. I think that most national systems will tend towards this sort of arrangement sooner or later, as a consequence of Internet economics and the needs that will arise because of it, in the same way that most western countries now have some form of socialism. (Not enough for some; too much for others, I know, but such is politics.) If companies can be compelled to pay high taxes in all territories where they operate—if that becomes the norm—then the revenue generated from that can keep people fed when their jobs disappear. Growth shoots already exist; the only real question is when it happens—and I believe the longer it takes, the worse off everyone will be.
As for whether people will still have things to make and sell, no matter how good computers get at making things (art, design, music, yes, but also sofas, clocks, kitchenware), I think people will hold onto a romantic attachment to the human-made. The down-side of Internet economics is that it allows companies to become enormous to a degree previously unthinkable, but it also—assuming it remains open and free as it should be (vote wisely, folks)—allows anyone with a computer and an Internet connection access to the largest market in human history.
This is Grey’s biggest error in judging the creative professions: he assumes that it’s a popularity contest. It isn’t. In order to get by, a creative person needs only a few thousand fans. Amongst the billions of people connected to the Internet, that is a fraction of a fraction of a percentage. Moreover, there’s a tangible thrill for fans in discovering something that nobody else knows.
For an artist in the twenty-first century, finding fans is hard, no doubt. But it’s far easier than it ever has been before. And Grey ought to know this. He’s done it himself.
Speaking of streaming, Sharky Laguana has an excoriating indictment of streaming music economics, specifically where your money goes when you listen to a song:
If you subscribe to a subscription music service such as Spotify or Apple Music you probably pay $10 a month. And if you are like most people, you probably do so believing your money goes to the artists you listen to. Unfortunately, you are wrong.
[T]he pressure from the margin to the center is strong. Despite “Think Different” maxims redolent of the old Steve Jobs script—“It’s your music. Do what you like with it.”—you’re encouraged to gravitate toward the music that everyone else is listening to. This is what happens all across the corporatized Internet: to quote the old adage of Adorno and Horkheimer, you have the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” The musician, writer, and publisher Damon Krukowski, a longtime critic of the streaming business, calls it the return of the monoculture. “What Apple is doing to music retail,” Krukowski said on Twitter, “is exactly what I saw chains do to books in the nineties: kill indie competition, then eliminate the product.”
Criticism of the “monoculture” has never been less valid. The Internet is an incredibly large place, and within its 3.14 billion users, there’s room for an infinite variety of cultural pockets. While there may be a gravitational pull towards the popular, that pull isn’t strong—certainly not strong enough to change people’s existing tastes. If people can’t find what they want on streaming services, they’ll just go elsewhere. Because the Internet is so huge and so interconnected, it’s never been easier to find people who share your passions, no matter how obscure.
These cultural pockets will continue to exist alongside the titans. While it’s possible for companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google to become almost infinitely large, they grow at the expense of middle-sized businesses, not small ones. Because no company will ever be big enough to cater to everything everybody wants, there’s an infinite number of niches to be filled, and the best way to fill these niches is to be extremely small and focussed. Business analyst Ben Thompson has made the analogy to the rainforest: enormous trees taking most of the resources at the top, but incredibly fertile land at the bottom.
Streaming services are best suited to popular tastes, both from the listeners’ and the artists’ perspective. But it’s true that a lot of smaller artists and labels—the types who fit these cultural pockets—are having a rough time on streaming. Their rate of pay is pitiful, and it’s made worse by the loss of album sales.
To address the problems of streaming, though, we first need to think about who’s encouraging artists to be on the services. Through iTunes, Apple is the largest music seller in the world. If they wanted, they could use their clout to push indie artists into a catch–22: join Apple Music or leave the iTunes store—but they don’t. Spotify likewise requires no exclusives from artists. Tidal wants exclusives, but that business is a total disaster anyway. Only Google’s terms of service are onerous and repulsive.
The reason Apple don’t force artists to their streaming service is simple: it’s bad for them too. Think of it this way: if you’re an indie musician, you make a lot more money by selling an album on iTunes than by having a thousand streams of your songs. And so do Apple. Their thirty per-cent cut of an album’s sale is worth a lot more than their nearly-thirty per-cent cut of a couple of thousand streams. So why would they encourage musicians to be in their streaming catalogue? The problem with streaming services is not that they’re a bad model for musicians; it’s that they’re a bad model for some musicians, but at the moment nearly all musicians are on them.
Indie musicians’ complaints about streaming revenue are misdirected. It’s not streaming services that are to blame for the poor payouts to musicians. Even if streaming services could triple or quadruple what they charge listeners, the payouts to musicians per stream would still be vanishingly small. If anyone is to blame, it’s record labels—big ones in particular. It’s no good for smaller musicians to have all of their music on streaming services, but it’s of great benefit to those musicians’ labels. By having a large catalogue of music on a streaming service, big labels have a consistent source of income. A record label doesn’t care if one of their artists gets a thousand plays per month or a million, it’s all revenue to them. So they’ll upload their whole catalogue to Spotify, Apple Music, and all the rest, because they can. It doesn’t matter to the labels if any particular artist is a bad fit for streaming. As long as they have a lot of musicians making them a little money each, they’re sitting happy.
Rather than blame streaming services for not paying indie artists enough, musicians need to take matters into their own hands. They can only do this by knowing their audience. If a musician aspires to be the next Taylor Swift or Adele or Drake or whoever, then the goal is to get everyone listening, and that can only be accomplished by being available everywhere. In that case, being available on streaming services, and being pushed by a big record label, is almost certainly the right call. Those services are, after all, where most people are listening to music these days.
But if a musician wants to be a smaller success, a professional rather than a superstar, then they don’t need to be everywhere. Instead, they need to connect directly with existing and potential fans. That means being online, and it means building a relationship with their listeners. It also means selling, not streaming, their music, and convincing fans that it’s worth buying. I’ve argued before that piracy is a better option than streaming for musicians who want to build a passionate, loyal fanbase, and I stand by the argument I made then. Listeners who pirate music know the artist isn’t getting paid, and those who fall in love with it will often buy it in future.1 People like supporting independent creators, regardless of their field, because they can see that their contribution makes a difference. That’s the stuff on which Kickstarter is made.
Musicians who want to achieve this type of professional success can’t market themselves the same way as pop musicians: that way lies ruin. Instead, they need to develop loyal fans who are willing to pay to support them because they’re unique. The Internet, and social networks in particular, allow that kind of connection. Success as a musician separate from the peloton is still hard, but it’s within reach of more people than it has ever been before. And that’s not monoculture.
It’s a long-established fact that people who pirate music more also spend more on music. It’s also interesting to note that when piracy was more prevalent, it received little of the type of backlash from independent musicians that streaming has. ↩