Ted Gioia: Is old music killing new music? But what’s happening in music today feels less like individual acts of exploitation and more like the razing of an ecosystem. Complaints against bloodless businessmen are hardly new. Spotify didn’t sign him for his talent or care at all about his impact-good or ill-on the world with a heartless, almost video-game sensibility, they signed him to take market share from Apple and Google (and Pandora, I guess). In the context of the devaluation of so many artists’ work, the backing of Rogan feels like a particularly nihilistic move. Many would gladly follow Neil Young off the platform if they could afford it and it didn’t mean severing connections to people who want to hear their music. I don’t know many musicians who actually care deeply about the content of that podcast, but they are aware of the pitiful amounts-in most cases!-that come their way from Spotify. Spotify paid $100 million for the right to exclusively host Joe Rogan’s podcast. Spotify is betting that what used to be known as the music industry is in fact dead but that maybe the company can make money in the “audio industry.” But that shift involves decisions that disappoint even people jaded by years of experience with the recording business. The podcast-advertising ecosystem is still lush enough to support additional harvesting. Besides enticing new subscribers with Spotify-branded podcasts-Rogan and Gimlet Media at the forefront of these-Spotify gets a new place to run ads. Spotify doesn’t have those things to turn to. The biggest tech companies have other ways to make money: Apple sold music by the song before starting a streaming service but always generated most of its earnings off hardware Google has a seemingly infinite array of mysterious revenue sources. Too many middlemen take their share, and there’s a limit to how much people are willing to pay for music now that the internet exists. It is a villain, paying pitifully low royalties per stream to artists, while the rich people in the industry-whether label heads, or Spotify executives, or famous artists-somehow still get richer.Įven though the small number of streaming services have access to almost every bit of music that’s ever been recorded, and even though they strike near-monopolistic deals with near-monopolistic major labels, there isn’t quite enough money for anyone to make a good profit on streaming music. Spotify is a hero, having brought new money to artists and labels when the music industry had hit rock bottom in the mid-2010s. But at its worst, it’s a bad actor in a worse industry that historically treats artists miserably. It’s certainly how I listen to music: streaming Daniel Tiger songs in the car to get my kids to stop fighting making a playlist of Mavis Staples solo songs after reading her biography even playing my own music, over and over, trying to remember how a song goes while prepping for a rare mid-pandemic show.Īt its best, Spotify is an elegant tool-a conduit between artist and art and listener. More and more, Spotify is the way people hear what I make. And ultimately, the dispute between Young and Spotify over Rogan’s show says much more about what is happening to the music business than it does about free expression or artistic integrity.Ĭonor Friedersdorf: What’s the purpose of boycotting Joe Rogan? The rights of speech and association are, as always, constrained by contracts and commerce-in the arts as much as in the tech world. He’d signed away those rights to his label, which is part of Warner Music Group, and he had to ask Warner to let him leave Spotify as a personal favor. But, notably, Young himself did not in fact have the legal right to leave. He has the moral right to get off Spotify, the largest music-streaming service, to protest Rogan’s comments about COVID-19 vaccines. I’m out of here.” I support Young’s stance. I assumed he was just telling the company, “I don’t need this. When Neil Young said he’d take his music off Spotify if it kept streaming the podcaster Joe Rogan, I doubted he was trying to deplatform Rogan.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |