Spotify controversy continues, Joe B weighs in

When I first started buying vinyl a lot, my favorite price for new was the first-weekend sales at the mall record stores I frequented, which was 5.98, tho pretty sure "normal list" was already 8.98. I went to the inflation calculater and that price I thought was in my range, the sale price, is basically 14 bucks now. So in theory I should feel fine paying 14 for new vinyl, and in fact given I'm now an adult with a decent salaried job and not a teen working part time for minimum wage, should feel fine paying a lot more; yet my mind has not quite adjusted to inflation or my increased earnings, and 14 feels way too much for new vinyl, but at least I know now it's just me being a cheap jerk I guess.

 

Thanks. This makes much more sense. It's funny to think about bands like XTC or Steely Dan if they started today. Very little or no touring---they'd probably be unknowns!

 

Nope.

Too many bands at the lower end of the food chain, not anywhere near the level of income or influence of the bigger bands - therefore dependent upon ANY kind of revenue-promotion scheme available.

This is just like "XYZ band made it big this way and other bands need to be creative like them and come up with a different business model".

Spotify and Pandora and other streaming services, have way too many people by the nuts, as it were, and are quickly becoming the only game in town. Bigger fish wanna sit it out, they can afford to do it. Spotify and Pandora and everybody else sucking that slime trail of cash, wont care. Millions of other necks to suck on.

 

Wait, people care what this hack says?

 

The bit torrent and file sharing networks would pick up the slack, illegally, as they did in the early 2000s. Several AAA tier bands did not have their music for sale on iTunes, nor on Spotify when it got going. Piracy picked up the slack, aided and abetted by easy to access and use file sharing network picked up the slack.

At the beginning of the 2010s, several AAA tier bands had their music available to buy on iTunes etc but not to stream; often the same bands that did not have paid for downloads available a decade earlier. Zeppelin, Beatles, AC/DC to name but three. All three ultimately came to Spotify, Apple Music etc. I’m assuming. - I do not know for certain - that not being on the services put them at a financial disadvantage relative to being on the service.

Even such long term hold outs as Tool and King Crimson have relented and made their catalogues available for streaming.

The torrent networks have not gone away, as millions of non-paying Game of Thrones viewers know all too well.

Even if there was an agreement between say the top 10 streaming acts to act collectively and remove their music from streaming in a bid to drive more profitable-per-unit sales of physical media and paid for downloads, the file sharing network would likely be the main beneficiaries, not legitimate sales.

Despite 20 years of playing whack-a-mole, file sharing is still a problem (Game of Thrones again). Arguably the continued existence of Spotify’s ad-supported, free to the end user tier is due to the never-went-away threat of zero revenue file sharing.

 

Don't go down that road, Wombat. Don't go talking about the "little guy" and how he's getting burned by streaming.

A local pub band is still a local pub band. They don't deserve any more compensation from streaming in 2019 than they did from their CD sales in record shops in 1999- which was $0. And these independents, these guys who were marginally known? All the money they made off their CD's back in 1999 went to pay off their advances from the labels.

Nothing is different today with streaming than it was years ago with physical media. Social media is a platform for scores of celebrities to rant about something and make it seem like a big deal when it isn't. The recordings pay off the advances, you make your money on touring. That's been the business model since 1940.

 

I think the most interesting comment from Joe Bonamassa was in regards to artists trying to get their song in a movie or commercial. A friend's band did the touring circuit and indie-label releases for 8 years here in upstate NY. Big crowds and respectable (for an indie band) sales. They barely broke even. After 8 years they managed to get a song (15 seconds of it) in a major movie. Band members (or I should say the two songwriters) made enough to live quite well for a few years.

 

Another question: I know it doesn't matter to the current generation who listen to music on iphones and don't care about sound quality as much.

Is it possible to make a playlist and burn CD's from Spotify? For example you could have your subscription fee and have access to all an artist's catalogue. Let's say Dylan, and burn his huge catalogue to blank CD's?

 

Joe Bonamassa also snubs his nose at one of his biggest opportunities- to make revenue as a social media influencer.

And before anyone chimes in with the "but...but...but...music isn't Kim Kardashian, it's art!" spiel, what exactly is wrong with a recording artist putting up a photo on Instagram along with a link to a product? Takes all of 10 seconds for the photo and a line of text. Kylie Jenner gets paid $1 million dollars for a single Instagram post about a lipstick, so what would be the harm for Joe Bonamassa to promote a guitar company or a strap company or the brand of shirts he wears? He can make a few million right there and give it straight to the writers, producers, and musicians he feels so sorry for when he puts $120 worth of premium fuel in his $200K Land Rover.

The biggest win that an artist gets when all is said and done is fame. And fame can be monetized.

 

Sounds like a Ramones song "The NSA took my records away!"

 

Johnny Ramone talks about licensing music in Commando, his posthumously published autobiography. He recalls being taken to task by people for licensing Blitzkrieg Bop in a beer commercial. His reply was that one track, licensed that one time brought in more revenue that their albums had brought collectively in the previous 10 years. And this was before Johnny’s death, so I can imagine the returns on a licensed track now much be highly attractive.

 

No. All playback requires a Spotify client; either a desktop or mobile device application, or having the client/receiver software built into a smart speaker, AV receiver or similar.

The desktop and mobile Spotify apps will let you create playlists of Spotify content and share them with others on the service if one wishes, but the music cannot be written to CD-R or otherwise outside of the service (not without stripping the downloaded/offline synced files of their DRM wrapper somehow - against the terms of service and likely illegal under DMCA). If one has a way of re-encoding the analogue output, that would be another way of getting the music ‘out’ of the service. It’s enough of a pain to do that either buying the legitimate downloads outright or buying the CD and ripping it are easier and preferable.

As long as you are paying, you get to play everything the service offers during that subscription period, compile playlists etc. Stop paying and your access goes away along with it.

DRM = digital rights management. The music files are encrypted and rely on you having an active subscription to gain the key to decrypt and play the file. As soon as one’s subscription elapses, the ability to decrypt and play any offline/downloaded files is removed.

 

Yes! Every pro-streaming cheerleader on this site needs to see this.

 

If the Rolling Stones weren’t on Spotify, people under 40 wouldn’t listen to the Rolling Stones. Back when the Beatles still weren’t on Spotify, I had a conversation with a musician friend about how no one at his work, where they play music all day, ever listened to the Beatles, because they weren’t on Spotify. I have all of the Beatles 2009 stereo remasters and the mono box ripped to my iTunes library on my phone, but I’m probably one in a hundred thousand in that regard. For most young people today, if an artist isn’t on streaming services, they might as well not exist.

If anyone has the clout to go their own way and opt out of streaming, it would be the Beatles. That their music is on streaming services suggests that they feel like they benefit more from streaming their music than they would from boycotting streaming.

 

I'm happy to stream stuff through something like Pandora -- as music to listen to in the bathroom getting ready in the morning, and on my 25 minute subway commute (and 1 hr walk home, if the weather is nice). But I will not pay for it, because it's not worth paying for.

I only use Pandora as a way to discover new (old) bands I've never explored before (or maybe never even heard of before). Case in point, I just heard a New Model Army song on my "Gang of Four" station (via Pandora). I'd never ever heard New Model Army, and suddenly I'm off to the races ordering physical CD's. I'll have their first 5 studio albums and 1 live album on CD within the month, and probably half-a-dozen more (all on CD), by the end of the year.

Streaming is just a high falutin way to sample stuff -- like an expanded version of the 30-seconds of samples for each track on Amazon (or AllMusic), or finding what I can on YouTube (sometimes just a track or two, sometimes whole albums). But it's all just a means to get a better handle on what's worth buying physical copies of.

 

As I said earlier...


once it's in ones and zeros, it's gone

I had the "pleasure" of watching people trade, on a torrent network, for free, - music that I had paid to have recorded, mixed, mastered, and produced onto CD.

Strange feeling of mixed emotions - "All these people listening to our music! Hey wait, all you people owe me money!"

 

wow.

like going into macdonalds and demanding a free hamburger and then leaving without paying because its not worth paying for.

Music has now been devalued so far its not only FREE, its not worth paying for.

 

Why would Metallica or The Rolling Stones give up their 13 million and 16 million monthly listeners (respectively)? Thats on Spotify alone and that’s a lot of exposure. If they limited access to their music to downloads or physical media, they would lose out, because a significant portion of those monthly listeners aren’t going there. Period.

As far as streaming goes, they are hardly the big names anyway. That would be Ed Sheeran, Khalid, Camila Cabello and others who have 40-70 million monthly listeners just on Spotify.

Don’t see these services collapsing anytime soon.

 

Read the rest of my post!!!! I use Pandora for about 20% of my total listening, specifically in order to discover music that's new to me *in order to buy physical copies of said music*.

I hate streaming, and only use it (literally) in the bathroom getting ready for work, and during my commute (by subway, or walkjng), just so I can figure out what to buy next *on CD*.

 

Wombat, the legal owners of those recordings made a deal with Pandora to allow Pandora to stream them. Rooster is fully within his rights to listen to them and buy or not buy the recordings at his will.

If your stance is that the deals the music makers made with the music biz are so heinous and criminal that one should never allow oneself to be exposed to music via the biz arrangements, but only ever buy recordings from artists themselves, well, that's a stance, but none of us would have heard 99 percent of the music we've loved, and paid for!, in our lives.

 

"not worth paying for" was a really poor choice of words, and insulting to anybody who plays music and gets paid to do so.

I see what you are saying, its not different than listening to a radio. But even then, I wouldnt describe music as "not worth paying for". "I dont like it that much and wouldnt buy it" or something.

Oh well.

 

That only holds for big artists who can sell out big venues.

 

I never said any of that. I said that in the olde dayz, musicians didnt have it great, and were all too often taken advantage of by the music companies. Now its even worse..

but thats how it is, and if you wanna play the game, its becoming the only game in town.

But to describe music as "not worth paying for"... how would you feel if whatever you do for a living, or part time, or whatever... was described in such a manner?

A terrible choice of words.

 

it seems so different today...it's not balanced...