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Thom Yorke or Spotify
Written by oliviawallwork
I must say, I am a fan of Spotify. As a consumer, it’s hard not to be; you can listen to (nearly) any song you want, make playlists, ‘queue’ music and share with friends, all for nothing. I don’t subscribe – the Premium subscription, which includes offline mode, music on your mobile and is ad free, is £9.99 a month – but I did very much enjoy the 30 day free trial. However, as a teenager with limited funds, a Premium subscription wasn’t that much better than the free version to warrant a £120 a year spend.
There are a lot of statistics out there on the web both advocating and condemning Spotify, but from what I have gathered, it’s some multiple of a tenth of a penny that labels are paid per stream of a song (and from there, the labels distribute a proportion to the artist). However, due to the fact that Spotify pays royalties to artists as the proportion their work is streamed out of the total number of streams (which totals 70% of their profits), the amount per play an artist receives varies. When discussing the Thom Yorke V Spotify debate, it’s difficult to not be consumed by the numbers/Spotify’s business model/comparisons between Spotify and radio/etc and to be able to distinguish between what is relevant and what is actually a just comparison.
From the plethora of conflicting information online, I think the starting point is to consider that Spotify is a relatively small company: it has 24million active users, 6million of which have a paid subscription. Hence, comparisons with income for artists from iTunes become seemingly redundant when one considers that as of June 2013 there were 575million Apple store accounts. iTunes has a vastly wider audience and is more mature as a company, so naturally artists will see a considerably higher proportion of their income coming from iTunes as opposed to Spotify. Thom Yorke states “new artists you discover on #Spotify will no[sic] get paid”, and maybe this is true as their songs are just not played enough yet on this infant streamer.
But then the fear is that new artists are diluting their ability to make money from their songs by making it “freely” available on Spotify and that this will detract from download or physical sales. Firstly, there is no data to show this. Secondly, from my experience and that of friends, Spotify is not a replacement of iTunes, but rather is a replacement of YouTube and, in some instances, piracy. Spotify published a report, Adventures in the Netherlands, which tries to give transparency to an investigation they did and demonstrated that Spotify actually curbed piracy in the Netherlands, where Spotify is very popular. I thought the following summed up the impact clearly (BitTorrent is an illegal music download site):
“At one end of the spectrum, take two releases that appeared on Spotify at the same time as iTunes and other sales channels: One Direction’s album Take Me Home and Robbie Williams’ single Candy. Both were successful on Spotify and sold 4 copies per BitTorrent download.
At the other end of the spectrum, Spotify holdouts suered higher levels of piracy: Rihanna’s Unapologetic and Taylor Swift’s Red sold only 1 copy per BitTorrent download. “
So it appears that rather than detract from other possible sales, Spotify creates income from a market where there previously would’ve been none.
But back to Yorke’s point, that he’s doing it for new artists and tweeted “we’re standing up for our fellow musicians”. As a millionaire himself, he seems a man full of contradictions – did any indie artist ask for him to stand up for them? Though, it can be seen that he is getting support on Twitter from small record labels and artists, indie artists don’t have to put their own music on Spotify if they don’t want to, surely? – who gave away one of his albums for free, contributing to the ‘devaluing of music’ that he tries to battle against and who has only declined to put his latest album on Spotify, rather than removing all his Radiohead content (which I’m sure gets streamed a lot).
All of this said, there does seem to be quite a lot of support for Yorke from the people that he is trying to assist, but I can’t really seem to discern why. At the root of the problem seems to be that relatively unknown artists don’t get paid enough for their music: a problem not confined to Spotify in the music industry. However, there also appears to be a problem far less tangible which can be picked up from reviews and statements by bands who don’t put their music on Spotify… Spotify isn’t glamorous enough, isn’t rock’n’roll enough for these indie or rock bands. Pop music is popular music so yes does make a lot of money compared to the up-and-coming indie band, which is perhaps why you don’t see One Direction declining to stream their music on Spotify. But I also think it’s because these top 40 bands are more commercially minded and are prepared to see their music streamed on “a lame, sexless interface”, so-called by Pictish Trail, who runs an indie record label. Spotify is just not the way Radiohead, AC/DC and the like want to see the music industry going, so become extra riled when they see new talent being, what they determine as, undersold on “a grey, government-approved spreadsheet of song titles”.
Yorke, rather, has opted to support a new start-up company called soundhalo, which streams live video footage straight after the concert for a fee. This live, realistic experience of music is perhaps closer to their ideals of the music industry and as soundhalo’s response to the amount of royalties artists will be paid was “This has not been decided yet”, it shows that perhaps this debate is less about the money and the fairness of Spotify, and more about a rejection of the modern way of consuming music. I think Yorke should put his contrived image aside and embrace what Spotify is delivering: legal and wider accessibility of music.
https://www.spotify.com/uk/about-us/artists/get-paid-from-spotify/
http://press.spotify.com/uk/information/
http://press.spotify.com/uk/2013/07/17/adventures-in-netherlands/
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/06/15/apple-algebra-itunes-asymco/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/21/spotify-bad-for-music-debate
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/hypocritical-outrage-at-spotify-has-man-of-the-people-seeing-red-1.1473562
http://digitalaudioinsider.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/updated-spotify-artistlabel-per-stream.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/15/thom-yorke-spotify-twitter