COVERS
Bill Murray, Dylan’s “Shelter From the Storm,” St. Vincent closing credits
SPOTIFY COVERAGE STILL WEAK
In The New Yorker, John Seabrook leaves the reader asking the single most pertinent, obvious yet invisible question coursing through this non-story: why would anybody rely on “record labels” to serve as fraudulent middle-men anymore? Does the next Rosanne Cash sign with Columbia or Spotify? Simple, right? Spotify’s next moves resemble Netflix: produce original content. Artist complaints aren’t with Spotify, they’re with managers and label execs who cut weak deals out of misperceived desperation.
CONSIDER THE LARGER FRAME
Steve Albini gave a cogent answer to Seabrook in at the Music-In-Full conference keynote, Melbourne… And Sharky Laguana proposes how to reconfigure the royalty structure of the “long tail wagging the dog.”
LOW EVEN FOR 2014
Networks don’t carry Obama’s immigration address, November
Networks don’t carry Obama’s immigration address, November
DEPT OF UNINTENTIONAL SEQUELS
Flaming Lips and guests cover Sgt. Pepper, in the tradition of the Bee Gees.
Hi Tim. Where do you think Spotify is going to get the money to pay artists advances to make their records? It’s really not as simple as you seem to think. Netflix can pay for original content because Netflix has forty million subscribers. Spotify has at best 12 million. Netflix doesn’t offer a free tier. That’s because people can watch previews of movies and then decide if they want to watch the whole thing. But Spotify has to offer a free tier because unless people can listen to the whole song for free it isn’t a compelling model. But the free tier doesn’t pay. So where’s the money going to come to pay advance artists to make albums? What do you suggest? Free doesn’t pay.
The other thing you’re not getting is that the labels own Spotify. They’re in business together. The money from Spotify goes to keeping the label solvent. So it doesn’t make sense to cut out the middleman — Spotify is the middleman.
Thanks for the comment, John. I never hinted that music should always be free, I pay for my Spotify account. Musicians always have and always probably will seem most of their remuneration from live concerts. Only the very top artists made big money on recording and publishing royalties, and even they had to sue for back payments.
Consumers are getting the very lucky end of the weak deals the labels did with the streaming service. My suggestion is simply that artists shouldn’t enter into those bad deals any more: circumvent labels and make deals directly with Spotify. Doesn’t it make sense that Spotify will begin producing original content just like Netflix? Doesn’t the history of fraudulent accounting in major labels disqualify them from capitalizing on somebody else’s technology?