“[Y]ou can’t devalue music. It’s impossible. Songs are not worth exactly 99 cents and albums are not worth precisely $9.99,” then went on to defend streaming services with the claim that “Music is priceless… The same song will always be worth different things to different people at different times. The online music revolution hasn’t changed that. It’s simply made the fact glaringly obvious.”
Tim is absolutely right about the pricelessness of music and art in terms of cultural value, and utterly wrong about the monetary value of music. People in the business of music as “content,” even former professional musicians, far too often forget that recorded, popular music doesn’t just spring up out of the ground to be harvested. Music costs money to make. Even an independent solo singer-songwriter with a beat-up acoustic guitar had to pay for the guitar, the strings, the clothes on their back, the hardware they used to record on, a car to tour in, fuel for the car, hosting fees for their website and audio files and more. They have to make that money somehow if they want to keep producing music, and the very real fact is that streaming services don’t provide the same amount of money as other distribution models. Tim knows this, but doesn’t see it as a problem.
“What’s new is that the casual fans no longer have to buy if they don’t want to. And while there is a lot of very real and quite justified angst that there’s not enough money coming in from everyone else to make up for that loss, those casual listeners are also exhibiting an unprecedented hunger for more and more music. That is not automatically a good thing, but it is a massive opportunity.”
In other words, you’re not making as much (or any) money on Spotify or Google Play, but you can make it up in volume. It’s the promise of future returns: more concert tickets, t-shirts, and possibly little plastic discs sold somewhere further down the line. It’s like when a startup company offers you equity in lieu of real money up front. The difference is that a startup is legally bound to pay you at least minimum wage if you’re actually an employee.
A musician is either independent, or signed to a label that fronted them expenses for producing and touring. If it’s the latter, they’re already starting out in the red, and every cent from your digital music streaming service of choice is going to the label until that advance is paid back. So, the artist probably isn’t seeing any of it. This is nothing new, but it is a problem exacerbated by the pitifully small royalty rates that streaming services pay compared even to terrestrial radio. And who listens to terrestrial radio these days?
Unable to escape the elephant in the room, Tim tries to spin streaming services as a discovery mechanism, likening his role to that of a Park Ranger. “[O]ur job isn’t to tell visitors what’s great and why. Our job is to get them from any given thing they like to a variety of other things they might.” Upon reading this, I immediately thought of what David Byrne said about Spotify and other streaming services:
“I also don’t understand the claim of discovery that Spotify makes; the actual moment of discovery in most cases happens at the moment when someone else tells you about an artist or you read about them – not when you’re on the streaming service listening to what you have read about… I’d be curious to know whether a significant number of people find new music in this way. I’d be even more curious if the folks who ”discover“ music on these services then go on to purchase it. Why would you click and go elsewhere and pay when the free version is sitting right in front of you? Am I crazy?”
I couldn’t find statistics on how many people buy music through streaming discovery mechanisms, either. David is right that in the music world, word of mouth is still the best way to discover what’s new to you. [1] It would go a long way to calming down people like David Byrne and Thom Yorke if Spotify, Google, or Apple could reveal how much music they’ve sold through their various “discovery” mechanisms, or even just how many people bother to use them. I am sure, however, that when given the choice between free and paid, most people will take the free option. Tim Quirk says that “…free in this context doesn’t have to mean copyright owners aren’t making money, it just means the listeners themselves aren’t paying.”
Wait. Who’s making money? Artists or “copyright owners”?
This is where things in Tim’s speech get sinister. Many record contracts, especially with major labels, force an artist to give up the copyright to their works to the label. A performer and a songwriter gets, in trade, a royalty, but the majority of the money goes to the label. If you still think the major record labels are struggling to make money in the face of online distribution, think again. Major labels and even large independent labels love streaming services. It costs them almost nothing, and they make a mint, sharing pocket change with the artists (if, again, they’ve paid back the advance).
The people who are winning from the online distribution revolution for music are independent artists like Jonathan Coulton, who maintain almost complete ownership of their work. Jonathan Coulton also had the good fortune to be making the right kind of music, at the right time, and found people willing to throw money at him. Some artists are better off joining labels, big or small. Whatever way they get their work out, financial success for an artist is predicated on being able to bring in enough money to both pay the bills, and the label, and support producing more music.
Which is why I worry that losing the “casual listener” to the “free tier” is making it that much harder for super talented artists who deserve better. This goes doubly so for emerging artists who need to get on a solid financial footing now, so they can devote more time to their craft. No flowery, pro-artist terms a former indie rock star turned technology executive chooses to couch streaming in, it’s looking like streaming will prove to be a shit sandwich for anyone who isn’t a record label.
This is one of the many reasons why I started Crush On Radio, so I could share the music I love with more people, and hear about music my friends love. ↩
Napster hit right as my adolescent self was finally developing an identity defined by music. The idea, then, that I could just pull down any song I imagined from the Internet as easy as searching Altavista [1] was a dream that instantaneously became an accepted fact of reality. That music was free was as obvious as needing to eat or sleep to live. When Napster collapsed under the weight of the RIAA, I moved to AudioGalaxy, then to SoulSeek, then to BitTorrent, and suddenly a whole decade—if not longer—had passed, and I’d accumulated more MP3s than could fit on even the largest of iPod classics. When I started, if you wanted to listen to MP3s on the go, you had to burn them to CD. [2]
Though I’d bought digital music from legit services—Amazon MP3 and iTunes, though my first “legit” digital music was the 10 free MP3s from eMusic—illegal downloading was just… easier. Either that, or the workflow was ingrained in my head, like a clueless user searching for Facebook on Google. I bought music when someone gave me an iTunes gift card (pre-App Store), or in those rare cases when something was so new and obscure as to not show up on the torrent sites for a few days. Sure, it was easy now, but illegal downloads had just become my personal default. Until I decided it wasn’t.
Earlier this year, I decided to stop pirating music. Mostly. Partly because I’d accumulated a gigantic backlog of music I’d downloaded and not listened to, and partly because I had friends who were in the music business and figured if I was going to support them, I should support the musicians who weren’t my friends, too. I would also try, when money allowed, to buy legit versions of the albums I’d acquired illegally—because I have too many illegal MP3s to use iTunes Match.
I said that I had mostly decided to stop, however. There are exceptions in my quest to legitimately purchase all my music. I have two qualifications for something that’s okay to pirate:
The album is not in print, digitally or otherwise.
Acquiring the album legitimately would be prohibitively expensive (i.e. import CDs).
This is a fair set of exceptions. If a record label wants to get upset that I’ve downloaded an MP3 of the B-side of an out of print single from 1987, they should provide a way for me to give them—and the artist—money for it. For artists with large swaths of their discography out of print, tracking down MP3s is often easier than finding a legitimate copy. The cost to a label to digitize and distribute this back catalog stuff borders on nil, but they still sit on vaults of recordings they won’t make money on, for reasons.
I created the second exception, however, because import CDs are often painfully expensive, and I’m not in a place where I have a lot of room for piles of physical media. If I’m just going to rip the darn thing to a bunch of MP3s, why should I have the piece of plastic? Let’s skip a step. The distribution deals that lock albums and artists to specific parts of the world are frustrating to me as a music fan in the global age. I never would have discovered the incredible Japanese rock band Polysics had it not been for illegal downloads. I’d happily give them more money, if I could. [4]
That’s an argument some people don’t buy. Fair enough, but unlike with TV piracy, there’s often no legitimate way to get ahold of some of these recordings, short of squatting on eBay and GEMM, or pouring desperately through the stacks at used record stores—all of which I’ve done in my desire to get ahold of something particularly important to have a physical copy of. I don’t feel as though I’m taking money away from an artist when I download an out of print album. I feel like the label is taking money away from that artist. Odds are, they never even recouped the advance before that album was taken out of print anyway. I am a completionist, and someone who doesn’t have room in his life right now for stacks of old CDs and records—or, for that matter, time to spend crawling every used record store for this or that obscure record that may not have even been released in the United States. Not everyone is going to have my mindset.
This only makes it more important that I pay for the new music out there. I’m buying these albums and supporting these artists now so I will have more music of theirs to hear in the future. It’s an investment in my own enjoyment, and an investment in making sure that artists I’ve fallen in love will stay in my heart and others, and won’t have to face the fate of the bands I’m illegally downloading. Conveniently, this also gives me a good moral excuse to justify the one new album this year I did illegally download, Kanye West’s Yeezus. He’s not really going to miss that couple bucks from me.
I kid. I really should go and pay for a legitimate version of that album on principle. I think I’ll do that now.
Let us pour one out for the long obsoleted MP3 CD Player, that transitional step between the CD player and iPods becoming affordable and ubiquitous. ↩
Another exception occurs for albums we talk about on Crush On Radio. The rationale is that one of us likely bought the album, and we’re listening to it for critical review purposes, and so forth. Also, some of the stuff we discuss is out of print, so it falls under exception 1. ↩
Polysics had a handful of albums released in the states, and recently had a few albums released on iTunes. Most of their material, however, is only for sale in Japan, and it seems unlikely that they’ll try to make it in the States again after two attempts to gain a following. ↩
My name is Richard J. Anderson, and I have a problem. I have a huge music collection, and I’ve barely listened to any of it. I have a Smart Playlist in iTunes for all music with a play count of zero. It contains 90 gigabytes of music. 90 gigabytes. That is a lot of music. This happened because I am, by nature, a completionist. I want complete discographies of my favorite artists, including singles, B-sides, and live albums. I gravitate towards extended versions of albums, special editions, bonus tracks and bonus discs—even for artists and bands I’m just starting to get into. Now, I’m in a crippling music debt, and Crush On Radio isn’t helping.
I’ve decided to whittle away at this backlog, slowly but surely. It’s starting with an official moratorium on new downloads—excluding picks for Crush On Radio. It’s a little thing, but it keeps the problem from becoming increasingly, exponentially, worse.
The second part is to sit down and actually listen to the music. I’m accomplishing this with a pretty simple setup: a Smart Playlist of unplayed tracks, and LaunchBar. Since iTunes handles playcounts on a track-by-track basis, it’s impossible without scripting to pull a list of complete albums with unplayed tracks. Instead, the Smart Playlist gives me a visual overview of what is sitting in my library, and I summon the complete album using LaunchBar.
If there’s a missing element to this, it’s music on the go. I’m willing to think in depth about solving this problem, as I have a short commute and mostly spend it listening to podcasts over music. However, the basic framework for a solution is in place here, starting with another Smart Playlist, this one of music that I’ve added to my library in the last two weeks. This gets synced with my iPhone and iPad—whenever I think to sync—and gives me the freshest music in my library.
Handling the archives of unplayed material is going to be trickier. I’ve found some scripts that can help pull and generate playlists of albums, but I’ll still have to winnow those playlists down to fit on a 32GB device, and nestle alongside apps, books, and my evergreen portable music collection.
Remember, that’s 90 gigs of music. If they ever put out a 256GB iPhone and iPad, this would be less of a problem.
Finally, there’s the hardest thing to do for any music fan: culling. Typically, I cull music from my library only when I’m upgrading an album to a superior version. I don’t need two versions, for example, of Frank Zappa’s Hot Ratswhen the 2012 remaster is so much better than the previous version. I have music in my collection that I’ve picked up with the full intention of listening to so I can see if I will like an artist or band, only to put it aside. I need to isolate those albums, play them, and decide if they should stay or go.
I’m probably never going to have a music collection small enough to use iTunes Match, or not need an external hard drive, or cause iTunes to take several minutes to launch. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t know what’s in there, listen to it, and have only things in it that I enjoy.
Saturday night, I got the chance to see one of my favorite musicians try something new, in an intimate setting. Thomas Dolby, better known as that guy who did “She Blinded Me With Science,” debuted his work-in-progress documentary film The Invisible Lighthouse. The film is about the area where he grew up, on the coast of Suffolk in East Anglia, which is slowly sinking into the ocean. The titular lighthouse is the Orford Ness Lighthouse, which is being shut down, taking with it a bit of Dolby’s childhood memories.
Thomas describes it thusly:
There’s a mysterious island across the water..e. On the tip of the island is a beautiful lighthouse. Since I was a small child I have fallen asleep at night to the soothing periodic flash of the light on my bedroom wall. But now it’s about to be closed down. Like many lighthouses around the world, it’s becoming obsolete as ships adopt satellite navigation. With global warming and beach erosion threatening its very foundations, it’s soon going to be a pile of rubble left to fall into the North Sea.
I’ve been lucky enough to see Thomas Dolby perform four times, now. The first and second times were him performing solo, a boffin surrounded by synthesizers, MIDI equipment, and some shiny Apple hardware. The third time, touring for his first album in nearly twenty years, featured a full band. Saturday’s show was something else. Thomas performed a live narration and soundtrack to the work-in-progress film, combining pieces of music spanning his career with new music. The final product will feature a full band performing the soundtrack to the completed film, and after what I saw, I can’t wait.
Storytelling has long been part of Thomas’s shows, at least since his return to performing. Film is a natural extension of that medium. The Invisible Lighthouse, even in its unfinished state, is haunting, and informative—not just from a historical/geographic perspective of a part of the world I never knew, but also explains references in his music I never got. It felt as though a part of the curtain were being pulled back, and I got to see not how the machine of Dolby’s music works, but the machine of his mind that created it. It was one of the most intimate half-hours I’ve spent with a musician, even separated by three rows of dining tables at Joe’s Pub.
When Thomas comes back around with the final product, I’ll be there. If you’re not familiar with his work, start with The Golden Age of Wireless, which is his first album. There’s a lot to discover in his work—far more than I thought there was. That is what separates true art from anything else.
The stage name Crocus Behemoth suggests a figure larger than life, a being of strength, power and size, but David Thomas is no longer Crocus Behemoth in many ways. He ditched the moniker not long after the band he took it for split in twain. Now, he looks more like a grizzled prospector from the late 19th Century, greatly slimmed with a bald pate, salty stubble on his face, and wearing a long, well worn black duster coat. Yet, once the music started, and Thomas began to sing, Crocus Behemoth returned, a unique voice unchanged by the ravages of time. In a way, he is a metaphor for Rocket From the Tombs itself, these days—deceptive looks hiding a power and energy that defy all expectation.
One could be rather snide about age and Rocket From the Tombs. They formed in 1974, and were defunct inside of a year with only demo tapes and two concert recordings to their name. This name was then spoken of in hushed and reverent tones by smart-asses who probably were never there in the first place, author included. They reunited in 2003, released a debut album in 2004, and only added a second disc to their name in 2011. It would be shamelessly easy to dismiss the endeavor as old men trying to recapture their rock and roll youth. Never mind Thomas’s career with Pere Ubu and his status as an elder statesman of outsider rock music. His legacy is written. Cheetah Chrome, partner in crime, also has his legacy established, as guitarist for the Dead Boys, and his own solo career.
When I saw Rocket From the Tombs perform on a warm December night in 2011, it was clear DavidThomas wasn’t trying to recapture anything. The way he performs with RFTT eschews all rock and roll glamour, Thomas checks lyrics on a music stand, sits down on a folding chair and sucks cans of Carling Black Label during songs where he passes vocal duties to Cheetah Chrome or Craig Bell, and sarcastically tosses aside the whole “encore” ritual—not that he could have left the stage with the crowd packed so tight around it. Meanwhile, the band plays protopunk riffs and rhythms with a practiced deftness that bands have tried to emulate for decades.
Not many bands with a nearly 40 year history can create new works that stand on par with the old. To anyone in the crowd unfamiliar with RFTT, songs like “Good Times Never Roll” and “I Sell Soul” off Barfly could easily pass for vintage numbers. However, it’s the old material that most of the crowd was there for: “Sonic Reducer,” “30 Seconds over Tokyo,” and “Ain’t it Fun,” and they reacted appropriately. The only thing missing was “Final Solution,” despite cries for it from the crowd. These were songs we all knew, standards of the Dead Boys and Pere Ubu repertoire. At the time, Thomas had recently finished a tour with the current incarnation of Pere Ubu, performing “The Annotated Modern Dance”—their first LP along side attendant singles, including “Final Solution.” This may be why RFTT skipped it.
Though we all knew the songs, they transformed in the hands of their originating band. “30 Seconds” was all the more menacing, though somewhat less atmospheric than Ubu’s take. “Sonic Reducer” was delivered more as a formality, though not robbed of its impact. As it started, an older, grizzled hipster type with the beard of a homeless drifter threw himself at the stage, and was tossed about a bit—the middle-aged version of a mosh pit, or slam dancing, or whatever they really did back in the day. The opening band certainly didn’t get half as warm a reception, proving that the old guard still can teach a thing, or two, I suppose.
Perhaps the only true nod to any sort of crassness to the event was Thomas’s sneering comment about his favorite part of the show—selling the merchandise from the stage. Thomas offered up their new CD, their old CDs, CDs they’d been given by other bands… I handed over $10 for a copy of Barfly, in a cardboard case not unlike a vinyl record of yore. As I passed the money over, I looked in David’s eyes, and told him I hoped to see him perform again. “Me too,” he said, and he sounded like he meant it. All theatrics and irony were gone in that moment, but it was fleeting, and he was exchanging pleasantries and plastic for dollars with the fans again. Maybe someone else got that same experience from it.