Spotify Changed the Game. The Game is Here to Stay.
Thank you so much for coming by the blog today!
The artist of the day: Little Rituals
So with that, let's get to this whole Spotify foot-in-mouth nonsense.
Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek released some really interesting comments recently, he said Musicians releasing music every three to four years no longer will be a viable way of staying constant and in front of fans in the marketplace. This was immediately met with a whole lot of blowback from artists talking about the value of art. From the musician perspective, it's a little bit of a slap in the face because you're basically diluting what musicians and artists would call art, and basically understanding that there's a new word for this and it's called content, and content should be put out in Daniel's terms, all the time, he also said that he talked to many artists and all of those artists basically said that they were very happy with the way Spotify pays artists currently, which we as artists can recogonize as BS. I'm sorry, but any world that I live in that requires 229 streams to be played for me to make a single dollar off of something that I spent thousands and thousands of dollars making, and not to mention the amount of man hours it takes... That's completely ridiculous. We all work really, really hard at what we do, and we spend countless hours, some would say 10,000 hours in some respects of just mastering our craft and becoming the best at what we can be for someone to dilute that down to just, hey, you gotta do more and you gotta do better. I can understand why musicians kinda got pissed off about that one.
Ek did say something that I really wanna focus on in this video though, he talks about the continuous engagement aspect of the modern day artist and sort of how that’s become the expectation because essentially his company and others have created this expectation. I get sit here and voice my concerns about the fact that Spotify is worth 50 billion and they're paying people less than pennies on the dollar for their hard work. The real finger to point here is that the pros, meaning performing rights organizations like BMI, ASCAP and CASA, they basically were presented this opportunity to partner with Spotify in the very beginning, and they did, and they all bought in to Spotify at a percentage. So Spotify comes to them, offers them a great deal, sees the future of what music business is likely to be, and the pros all bought in on it, what I don't currently know is if they still own their stake and Spotify or after a certain amount of time, they relinquish their stake, but the truth of the matter is, is that they didn't really have any other answers when Spotify came along and they took the path of least resistance as it pertains to this problem of making music in the music business, when CDs were basically becoming extinct.
So first things first, if you wanna point the finger at anybody, point the finger at your pro.
Secondly, let's talk about this whole idea about releasing music.
Musicians are historically traditionalist, it's sort of the way we've always done business, we as artists continually think of art as being our soul energy in the universe, and literally what makes us go as people. So whenever you have this conversation about how to release music and how things are changing really fast, and how some business man came in and scooped up and took a whole bunch of the market share and left you with pennies, it gets really personal really fast, but ultimately, we're all... And I think we all need to just take a step back and realize that the game has changed every time somebody comes along and changes the game, it requires a whole lot of industry shift and... This is no different. I love albums, I can sit down and listen to albums the entire day, every day of my life, albums have influenced my life so deeply that it's literally about all I wanna talk about, but the truth is, albums are nearly extinct to the public at large today, when you release a body of work because the internet is so large and so vast and so open for everyone to be a part of your release is likely forgotten about after about two weeks, unless you have really deep pockets to push it... I mean, think about it, think about your friends who release music, whenever you see that, you're like, Oh wow, they released the song or they released an album this week... I'm gonna check that out. So you check it out, maybe it's good, maybe you listen to it one or two times, and then there's a fall off, and most people don't go back and listen to that until it's maybe brought up in conversation with somebody else because you're constantly being inundated with music, the internet has 100% leveled the playing field and everybody can get their information out there, so what do you do? There's plenty of marketing videos out there to help you with that, but I don't wanna get too far off a topic here, the point is the game has changed, if you are going to release a ten song album, wouldn't it be more advantageous for you to release each and every single one of those songs as a single and then communicable, add them together at the end of the process to present a full album, the days of just releasing 10 songs at once, or even five songs at once is over, and if you're creative, trying to get people to listen to that is even harder than ever, the traditional publicity sources, like critics or blogs, reviews are getting hammered every single day with thousands of inquiries asking people to review their music, and we kinda wonder sometimes why they get crabby and why they say things that they do.
I think it's time for us to think about using our music as only one particular funnel of many funnels that we can create to find people that are interested in what we do.
Ultimately, people support us because they have a connection with us, the things that we say, things that we write, the things that we play, and it's really important that we all find a way to connect with those people and think about other ways of doing that and also other ways to monetize, because we know this evolution of getting paid per stream, what we're currently getting paid right now is gonna take forever to evolve, and there's already been settlements with this currently that required a certain level that were passed by Congress, but we all know that it's not enough. So it's time we get creative and we start thinking about some other ways to make money, that does not mean abandon your music career. I know we're in a pandemic right now, eventually live music will come back, eventually, people will have more money to spend again, and they'll wanna go to a live concert, but it's time for us to start thinking more creatively about monetization of our music. Doesn't have to come just from actually consuming the product alone, it can come from merch sales, if you come from instructional courses or personalized groups that you create, maybe like a fee, like say like a Patreon or something where people can experience you on a more personal level, it's gonna require us to move, because if we just dig our heels in the ground and just continue to insist that the 1970s are here and they're gone now, but we want them back... It's the genie out of the bottle. Spotify is here to stay. What are you gonna do? How are you going to evolve to keep your music career profitable and one that you enjoy.