algorithm & blues
Like many people of my age I have a half-decent record collection. Vinyl as it’s now referred to by the recently-smitten hipster types. I play a record once in a blue-moon. During the nineties and noughties I went hell-for-leather for CDs and pretty much duplicated everything and more. I dodged the bullet of minidiscs and drew the line at MP3s and downloads but I’m now the proud owner of a Spotify streaming account and everything else is gathering dust. Why wouldn’t it be?
Spotify’s favoured rags to riches story centres on a similarly styled music-geek, Daniel Ek, who elected to save musicians from the scourge of online piracy (anyone else remember Metallica vs Napster?) by benevolently providing a paying, rights-rewarding platform together with an all-you-can-listen-buffet of on-demand music for a small monthly fee. Genius. Needless to say, that’s a bit of a fairy-tale as it transpires Mr Ek was a mere online advertising salesman who saw the opportunity of selling more ads in between the natural breaks of streamed content. Spotify wasn’t even a music provider as the concept was to stream movies and shows. The fledgling business took a nose dive when they realised, in the nick of time, that the size of digital files involved with movies was technically prohibitive. Doh. No sh*t, Sherlock. Thankfully, small digital music files came to the board’s rescue.
The ‘genius’ move, if there was one, was realising the major record labels controlled the artists that we would all want to listen to, and to pay for. And, in order to license back-catalogues, it’s here that the advances were paid. Somewhat surprisingly/shockingly these labels are under no obligation whatsoever to share any of this with the people who actually made the music. And guess what, they don’t.
Spotify’s system of royalty payments is both massively complicated and more than a little anachronistic. Artists aren’t paid simply by the number of streams their songs achieve but by the percentage of total streams they account for in each separate country. In practice, this means how well you do wrt Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift. In reality, this means not a lot of brass in pocket for the vast majority. Not to worry though as financial help is hand for those artists willing to sign-up for the reduced-percentage earnings of SpotifyDiscovery, which adjusts the app’s algorithm to promote these reduced-rate artists’ music. Nice. Not.
Meanwhile, the company cunningly shifted its focus from music die-hards who wanted to listen to their fave group’s ‘difficult’ second album start-to-finish to what they described as ‘lean-back consumers’, effectively people who switched the radio on in the morning and off when they went to bed. Er, me. And so the predetermined playlist listener was born, an individual happy to go about his merry daily way to an accompaniment of unobtrusive background muzak. The more beige your sound, perhaps a bit folky, rocky, ambient, indie, the more likely you are to find your way onto the all-important playlists. Actively encouraged by Spotify4Artists, musicians can now examine the data and tailor their music to the ubiquitous repetition of coffee-shop and elevator.
The next seemingly natural step was both AI generated music and PFC or ‘perfect fit content’ – blandly nondescript content, the artistic equivalent of battery-farmed music, and this is where we are ultimately headed. Spotify’s dream appears to be a world of passive playlist consumers who don’t choose what they listen to but simply press and play. Again, guilty as charged your honour. Sorry.
So, do I blame Spotify for the supposed demise of high quality, inventive and moving music? No, not really. Streaming now accounts for 85% of the music market in the UK and, as the leader by a country-music-mile, Spotify identified a business opportunity and took advantage that’s all. Yes, they need to tone down the too-sharp practices, should pay more to all musicians and creators, and pay far more transparently and in direct relation to the number of streams (currently approximately $0.0035 per play), but their convenience appears to trump whatever damage its rise has so far inflicted. And it’s this convenience that means the company is only going to get bigger and more powerful within the music industry. You pays your money and you takes your playlist.
