I was on the bus coming back from a track meet last weekend absolutely jamming out to “Backstreet Freestyle” by Kendrick Lamar. I did not really have any reason to celebrate; I had run a reasonable time while trying out a new event (the 800 meter run) merely hours earlier, so this sense of joy could only be attributed to Kendrick’s sonic infectiousness.
My euphoric trance did not last long, nor was it the lasting image of that bus ride. After “Backstreet Freestyle,” Apple Music — the streaming service I use to access millions of songs and artists — shuffled to “Futura Free” by Frank Ocean and my mood immediately turned introspective. The lyric “I ain’t on your schedule / I ain’t on no schedule” brought to my mind Ocean’s well documented extraction from his label in favor of unilateral control over his music. Now, his preferred method of releasing music is through streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. For whatever reason, this particular lyric resonated heavily with me and spawned an investigation: are streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music satisfying consumers at the expense of the artists they promote?
I cannot attribute this question solely to Mr. Ocean’s lyrics. I remember scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed and seeing a Pitchfork article about how to be a responsible music consumer in the age of streaming — an idea which, perhaps unconsciously, served as the lens through which I imagined that particular Ocean lyric. After consulting said article, I found an alarmingly abundant amount of evidence showing that streaming platforms are undoubtedly benefiting only top tier musicians.
Last March,
Billboard
reported that streaming overtook sales as the primary source of revenue in the U.S music industry for the first time ever. On the whole, “the U.S. industry has experienced a double digit increase in overall revenue” and streaming is leading the way with a revenue growth of “68.5 percent to $3.93 billion,” according to
Billboard
. The music industry’s embarrassment of riches at the hands of streaming services is an encouraging sign for consumers as it is almost guaranteed that Spotify, Apple, and all their competitors, will continue to pump money into easily accessible platforms with seemingly limitless amounts of music.
Though Spotify and Apple Music play host to a wide range of musicians and genres of music, the division of profits across this spectrum is hardly democratic. According to Damon Krukowski, a contributing writer for
Pitchfork
, “data trackers at BuzzAngle Music [found that more] than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top ten percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than one percent of streams account for all other music.” As far as compensation goes, ten percent of artists featured on Spotify or Apple Music divide 99 percent of streaming revenue between themselves, while the other one percent of profit is divided between the other 90 percent of artists. This is a wildly unequal system that appears to create a self-fulfilling industry where an artist needs a hit to make it big but needs to be a big name already to get that song played. This dearth in upward mobility appears symptomatic of the inequality that pervades the entertainment industry — even America at large.
To elucidate the paths we as consumers can take to ensure artists receive more equitable compensation for their work it may prove most fruitful to listen to the opinions and experiences of up-and-coming artists who are putting themselves through the rigors of the streaming industry. To that end, I reached out to two of my high school friends who are aspiring musicians look- ing to make a living off their art. I asked them about their experiences with streaming platforms and how it impacted their music. Their names are Danny Fisher, and Warner Meadows, and they are both deeply talented individuals who conceive and execute vibrantly original pieces of music. I highly recommend you check out their SoundClouds:
soundcloud. com/danny-fisher-29
,
soundcloud.com/warnermeadows
.
Their quotes below have been lightly edited.
I spoke with Fisher first since, for now, his music appears exclusively on Sound-Cloud — a space where, up until recently, users streamed and downloaded music for free with no subscription option. When asked why he uses SoundCloud to disseminate his singles, Danny confided, “I think Sound- Cloud initially appealed because it’s free and it seemed like the spot where ordinary people could put music and get some exposure. If enough people like it, you get caught up in the algorithm and you get spread around more. I love SoundCloud. It feels very of the people. It’s probably mad corporate, but it feels closer to the ground than streaming services. Not that I’m against those, but SoundCloud feels warmer.”
Fisher himself has a student discount subscription to Spotify and acknowledges that “more people have it” which appeals to him as a space to share his music. We continued speaking about the virtues of a streaming platform grounded in free and equal exposure to all varieties of music. Both of us struggled to reconcile reaching as many people as possible with one’s music while maintaining financial stability. Fisher notes that he, “cares about money not being an issue for people with my art. I obviously wanna get paid, but I wanna have as much free and affordable content as possible.”
The problem with streaming services for Fisher is not so much that everyone should be making as much as the privileged ten percent of artist whose tracks routinely cycle through Spotify and Apple’s algorithms, it’s that “no one deserves the amount that the people at the top get and no one deserves as little as the people at the bottom get. I’m just talking about income inequality non specific to music a little. But it applies, I think.” Fisher’s comparison between burgeoning income inequality in music and the American class system is an apt one, and finding a solution to such disparities is equally difficult.
My conversation with Warner Meadows proved to offer some insight into how artists and industry members combat stratospheric differences in streaming service profits and artist income. Meadows’ song “Yuca” is available on both Spotify andApple Music with over 700,000 streams on the former. Yet, Meadows himself has made less than two thousand dollars from a song that has been released for over a year and streamed by more than half a million people. When discussing his impetus for releasing “Yuca” on Spotify andApple Music, Meadows agreed with Fisher about the importance of accessibility, stating, “I still want my music to be available in the places that most people consume music.”
How Meadows’ music gets to streaming services shows the small but crucial safety valves in place to ensure that corporations like Spotify and Apple don not make off with an even larger share of the pie. To release his music, Meadows uses a website called “tunecore”, which promises to distribute an artist’s songs across all streaming platforms exactly as they want it to appear (type fonts, songwriting credits, etc.) for a small fee. What is notable about tunecore? “It has no commission so you keep 100 percent of your royalties,” Meadows explains. An artist can make only 70–75 percent of their royalties, depending which platform they use, but a middle man willing to abdicate their sense of entitlement to an artist’s royalties is a step towards a more democratic streaming landscape. Meadows also points out that tunecore has “an admin publishing company which will help track down your songwriter royalties (Tunecore Publishing)” a huge asset for songwriters who are regularly, thought not always intentionally, left out of liner notes by Spotify and Apple Music — robbing them of potential earnings.
Perhaps most crucial is tunecore’s ability to build trust in their customers through their corporate structure. “They tend to be run by music industry people or former musicians who feel like the system is fucked up and want to advocate for the artists more,” Meadows observes. This means that artists know they have a legal team willing to battle corporate conglomerates for proper attribution and compensation.Artist representation in the upper echelons of the music industry is something both Fisher and Meadows support, with Fisher wryly pointing out that, under the current system, “it’s up to the generosity of the people at Spotify, and I don’t know how bountiful that is,” and Meadows echoing, “it’s definitely not in [streaming services’] best interest to give the artists their money.”
What all of this information means for the consumer’s chances of equitably supporting their favorite artists can be difficult to discern in the face of such thoroughly systematized inequality. While higher-ups at Spotify andApple backstroke in a sea of streaming riches, how can people like you and I ensure that large swaths of musicians are profiting off our consumption?
The answer, for me at least, seems to be conscientiously diversifying my taste. I love Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar, and other members of the top ten percent of artists, but in the future, I’m going to make an effort to recognize that they are disproportionately benefitting from streaming services. If streaming really is the way of the future, and its indomitable growth suggests that it is, musicians like Danny Fisher and Warner Meadows need to be included — otherwise the promise of democracy and equal opportunity that we are so fond of touting in this country is nothing more than a shallow hook to a mindless pop single.
So the next time you hit shuffle, consider the artist.
