Streaming services are bad news for classical and jazz musicians...and eventually their fans

No, because their customers will most likely buy the albums [at their store] they're telling you to listen to. Your store gets it. You don't.

On top of that, almost all of their customer are ALREADY on Spotify, so it won't matter at all.

 

Hmmm good question. I hadn't thought it through that much.

I guess some modicum of honesty would be refreshing. Let's just admit that we value our ability to listen to whatever we want more than compensating the musicians or "supporting the artists".

But yes...if we really put our money where our mouths are...we'd dump the streaming.

 

I don't stream at all. What do I win? Day pass to the moral high ground?

 

I barely use streaming and I admit it. If I am acting legally, my concern is hearing the best quality music I can with the best quality sound I can get for as little money as possible.
Much as the artists care more about getting the best deal they can from their record companies and from Spotify more than they care about making the music as cheap as possible for their fans.

I just don't feel streaming is a satisfactory solution on the quality front for any purpose other than checking something out to see if I want to buy it.

 

You've just won this!

 

they are on spotify? i am a custome and i aint on spotify. dont know about the other customers, cant speak for them, but if im sitting on the computer reading on their spotify the good records to listen to seem to me the logical move would be to just click on spotify and listen to all of it for free instead of getting in my car, drive many many miles spending money on gas and tire wear, and spend hundreds of dollars for what i can listen to for free.

 

I've got one of Zoe Keating's discs, too--pretty cool! Incidentally, she has (or had) some cool videos on her website of her playing her cello while running her loops with (as I recall) a foot pedal. Pretty deft. Worth checking out.

 

I don't mean to alarm the Americans here, but lots of countries subsidize their music industries in one way or another. In fact, of the countries I'm most familiar with, the U.S. is the only one I know that doesn't subsidize their music through a Ministry of Culture or through a set broadcasting regulations that require a certain proportion of local content. I personally favor such support for smaller countries, though whether a large market like the US should follow suit is another question (if you can't find a market for your music among 300 million listeners, isn't that a sign that maybe you should view your music as a hobby not a profession?). This doesn't mean that musicians in other countries live well (they still don't!), but a second-tier band in almost any other western country will have a much easier time getting their videos funded, their music played on radio, and their performance booked on national television. I'm talking pop music here.

But, yeah, as per the thread title, classical and large-scale musical projects are facing special pressures all over, even in places (like parts of Europe) where classical music is actually, you know, popular. The usual solution is to subsidize some select superstars pretty well and let everyone else get squeezed. Of course, the superstars are exactly the ones who can get decent university posts, but never mind...

 

Yeah man, I'm gonna rip and resell it. Free music! Well, free something.

 

Another point that anti-streaming arguments forget is this:

Buy a copy of an album (single, MP3, what-have-you), the artist gets a cut. Listen to it however many times you want, they never see another cent. Burn a copy for your car, rip a track to your phone, it's all good, it's all legal, you already paid your money, they don't see squat.

You pull up Spotify and listen to that same album while you're at work, they get something. Fire up the app to stream in the car while you're driving, they get a cut. Doesn't matter if you already own it, or not, every time you listen to a song on Spotify, the artist gets a cut. Even if you're not a paying member, they get a cut of the ad revenue. Sure, it might not be a big cut, but it's more than they've gotten from your listenership since you bought that cd five, ten, twenty years ago.

So, we can band together and boycott streaming services, go back to our mixtapes and cds, and that helps the artists how? Perpetuating the myth that everything will go back to the way it was in 1989?

 

Honesty: I don't personally value all artists on a given streaming channel equally, and thus my personal willingness to pay for their music is not them same.

 

The problem with state sponsored art or media is the tendency for governments to support art that bolsters the views of those is power and not that which is critical of them or encourages questioning of authority. If the support provided is large enough, this effectively suppresses certain viewpoints.

This is less of an issue with instumental music, but the political view expressed by the creators could still factor in, even if the work itself is devoid of such views.

 

Looping with foot pedal controls is her main modus operandi and what she does in concert, too.

 

It can even be an issue with instrumental music - Shostakovich had several late-career run-ins with USSR authorities when his (only instrumental) works weren't seen to be sufficiently Communist, which is a pretty weird for something that has no lyrics.

 

This is actually something I usually forget. Thanks for reminding me.

I really need to make it a point to use Rhapsody in the office more versus just playing my own files. It's going to be background music anyway so it's not like it has to be the highest quality, and then the artist gets a cut of that. Yeah it's pennies but if every fan did that it could actually be something significant. My own files = they see nothing except that first purchase.

 

Well, in the field of art anyway (leaving aside opinion and news media), I tend to think this is less of a practical problem (and more of a theoretical problem) than Americans often make it out to be. Is it a problem in a totalitarian or a theocratic state? Sure, of course--but if you live in a theocratic or totalitarian police state with Zhdanov-like notions of close cultural management, then you've got a raft of other more pressing problems to deal with than whether your artists are producing only busts and paeans of your beloved leader.

In non-totalitarian countries with some disposable income, where governments and people have some vanity invested in the idea that they can handle a little dissent and where there is some fluidity of politics as coalition governments form and reform in different combinations, the mainstream of culture tends to be pretty broad and the mandate of funding agencies likewise broad. You can probably think of works at the extreme edge of acceptable taste (or beyond) that even a permissive government agency would balk at funding, fair enough, but in non-totalitarian states, the government is only one funding source of the arts, so these margins of art have some other options (the market, institutions and foundations, private commissions) if they require funding. And if, at these extreme margins where government agencies decline to fund them, if the market likewise declines and private and institutional funding is not forthcoming, well, I have to say, the artist might do better to rethink the project, as it seems too expensive or too idiosyncratic in its appeal.

The counter argument proceeds from a pretty straightforward question: doesn't the consumer-oriented marketplace produce its own type of sycophantism? Shall we poll SHMF on whether the most popular and profitable music is also the best music? I bet I know how that poll would play out! If there is some locally important art form (classical? large-scale jazz?) that can only survive or thrive with some non-market assistance, I would think that government might have a reasonable roll to play.

All that said, it may be that the U.S. constitutes a unique case here, simply because it is so rich, so populous, and so culturally uniform (by global standards). If an American wanted to make the case that the U.S. market of 300 million was large enough to support any art worth supporting, well, I'd listen to that argument. But Americans might also consider that, as a special market, they are a special case. Other marketplaces suffer different constraints and might reasonably follow different policies, no?

 

We Americans recall Pete Seeger being blacklisted and are less confident that non totalitarian countries will keep their hands off artists that do not toe the party line. But lets back away from politics if possible.

 

I know it's skirting the line a bit, but imagine the arts were controlled by government subsidies in the 1960's -- I think the 60's music scene may have turned out a little differently.

 

As someone who's managed metadata projects in the publishing and live events (speaker bureau) fields, I wanted to chime in on some of the above points.

The problem is not adding metadata -- I've never heard of anyone not being able to set up a framework to add metadata about a file. Especially where there are pre-existing real-life analogues to follow. The real breakpoints come down to two things:
- Putting in the data: (which may have to be done by hand, after someone has produced the information about a given file). This may take x amount of time, depending on the amount of data you need to enter. I figure the number of files for jazz and classical being discussed is astronomical.
- Retrieving the data: When it's your own internal product, you control the framework for displaying this data. When you have multiple competing systems without a shared framework, this data cannot be retrieved consistently. When you have multiple players with a variety of interfaces, you cannot claim that the data will be seen equally/evenly amongst all users. It's like what head_unit said about his CD carousel.

I'm not a music biz guy, but I'll make a guess and say there has not been a conversation amongst any of the major players to have a unified metadata framework (and if they are, I stand corrected, because it would be a visionary step for the streaming industry). I just don't see any signs of that happening soon.

 

Certainly in the last couple decades as well we have had instances where politicians were scoring points by singling out artists whose work they mocked or disapproved of being funded by the NEA and calling for defunding of the NEA as a result of them being willing to fund such things. I'm not saying the kind of art they were complaining about has any particular merit, but I would rather that consumers of art and folks that donate funding decide what merits funding through their purchases and donations (or through their attention to ad sponsored media) rather than it be determined by the government what artists taxpayers should support. Unless you are going to have the government simply give a $5,000 a year tax credit to everyone that checks the box saying that they are a musician or artist, arts funding is going to require subjective decision making that I would rather keep out of government hands.

This doesn't rule out some limited funding, provided it does not become even close to a dominant means of support for the arts. Certainly governments can fund events that include performances. And professional musicians do get some public funding by being able to tax deduct pretty much all music related expenses in their lives. Not just equipment puchases and travel, but lessons, and they can reasonably maintain that when they buy cds and go to concerts it is a form of market research.

 

Terrible idea. I don't need a government deciding which artists are OK to fund.

 

You know what? You bring up some good points. I don't see a really good argument against this...

 

I doubt a country like the United States would even entertain such a notion.

 

My wee point, which I am now a little regretting having introduced, is that the choice isn't between totalitarian state control of all art, on the one hand, or else the absolute dictates of the consumerist marketplace on the other hand. If that were indeed the choice, then okay, I'd cast my vote for the market: better Katy Perry than whatever they listen to in North Korea, for sure! In fact, however, it's not a choice between the one or the other: in fact, there's a lengthy continuum between these extreme poles that most Western countries position themselves comfortably between, giving limited government support for the arts.

I can see that the very notion rubs some people here the wrong way, which I regret--I have no wish to ruffle anyone's feathers, I'm not that kind of guy. But, in the context of a thread that worries whether the market will fail classical and jazz music, a thread that worries that these art forms will collapse because there is no place for them in the contemporary marketplace, I would just ask for some recognition that other countries, with a less stressed relation to the idea of government, have found a different balance of these things--and (I would say) they have been the better for it, according to the values they hold.

 

And we better not support our local music stores that sell used CDs and LPs as artists don't get a cut of those sales either.