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The Wrong Way of Finding Listeners

The excellent Linda Shaver-Gleason, writing at VAN on why classical music isn’t cool.

All of these are efforts to convince young people that classical music is cool—because, after all, nothing is cooler than something you have to be told is cool.

This was shared widely last week on classical music Twitter, and Shaver-Gleason makes an excellent case. I’d argue that VAN’s headline is wrong. The music is cool, in the same way that design or typography or film is cool. Like all cool, it’s cool to those who like it.

But the nut of her argument—that pretending musicians from a couple of hundred years ago would be considered cool today is a dumb way of attracting new listeners—is absolutely solid.

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Program Music | VAN

A new piece on VAN by yours truly:

Recently, I played a series of symphonic movements for a class. Some were by Mozart, and others by other composers. With a little practice and guidance, the class picked up a rough impression of Mozart’s style, as distinct from the other works. The last piece I played was by David Cope’s software Experiments in Musical Intelligence (better known as EMI or Emmy). Emmy was designed to emulate other composers’ styles as closely as possible, and I wanted to test its effect on a class that wasn’t aware any of the music they would be hearing was written by software.

Of course, my real purpose was to test their reactions to algorithmic composition in general. One student, who’s preparing for her final school exams, gave a comment that’s been fairly exemplary of those I’ve heard when I bring up the topic: “You want to know that there’s a person writing the music. Otherwise how can it be special?”

Cope mothballed Emmy in 2003, and has channelled much of his subsequent work into another algorithmic composition project, Emily Howell, which uses outputs from Emmy and Cope’s training with an association network to generate music in its own style. It was only when I played Emily Howell’s music for the class that that same student was taken aback. She knew the piece. It’s in her study playlist.

The idea of algorithms that create art, and that create music specifically, is fascinating, and the more research I did on it the more interesting I found it. I think this piece should be a good primer for anyone who’s interested in the topic.

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Zeitung Citing

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.

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Addendum: Three Analogies

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.

Oh.

  1. Specifically, I wrote:

    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.

    ↩

  2. Kirk McElhearn also wrote on the differences between these services while I was away. ↩
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One Night’s Chord | VAN

My latest piece for VAN magazine dives deep on the strange chord at the centre of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht:

At the heart of Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht stands a chord. In the midst of the work, an ambiguous, complex, chromatic tone poem, the chord stands out as uniquely ambiguous, complex, and chromatic. The work was controversial when it was written, its lush, shifting harmony having been too much for many early listeners, and that one chord was singled out as an eccentricity too far.

The reaction to Verklärte Nacht was acidic. Even Alexander von Zemlinsky, Schoenberg’s brother-in-law and nominal teacher, chastised the work for its dense harmony and its clear debt to Wagner. He told the composer, “it sounds as though you have taken a still-wet version of the Tristan score and smeared it.” When Schoenberg submitted it to the Vienna Music Society for performance, they rejected it on the basis of its unprecedented extension of traditional harmony, and singled out that pivotal chord as “uncategorizable.” Schoenberg later quipped on their wobbly logic that it couldn’t be performed “since one cannot perform that which does not exist.” And, when it finally received its 1902 premiere, three years after its completion, the audience reportedly met it with hisses and gasps.

But let’s set aside theoretical lunacy and look at the chord itself. It’s a beauty.

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Music for a New World

Me, writing in VAN magazine:

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.