If they improved their interface, and more importantly, put together an iPhone app that worked well, it seems like the ideal way for everyone. I didn’t realize Spotify didn’t reimburse artists – really, there is no payment whatsoever?

I’m not sure that any involvement with rights organisations has to be feeding yourself to the machine. Now that a significant portion of sales and plays happen via the intertubes it should be possible to track them.

Plays on services like Spotify, Last.fm and so forth could be attributed and a slice, or at least a few crumbs, or the pie shared. The PRS could do this if it would lift it’s head up and embrace the changes digital distribution have wrought.

As you say, it doesn’t take much to make a small business or individual’s music career sustainable.

I used to be the VP of Marketing for Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab and it was the label iself that had a cult following. People admired our remastering and QC standards to such a degree that they were actually “subscribers” of the releases..

Second, really interesting perspective in that whether we get paid or not Indie artists still need to be where the people are. You are right, but how is this any different from when the majors teamed up with myspace while butting the indies out (only difference is myspace is more established)? I am fine with someone creating a community, allowing music to be discovered and getting paid for doing so. Spotify, from my view, deserves to get paid. It is just unfortunate that some get paid, some don’t. I’d rather no one get paid.

My solution is that since the labels own stock in spotify, the artists on those labels should own stock in the majors. Won’t really happen, but I think it would work.

And also, I disagree that similar sites before this failed because of poor setup. Some certainly did for that reason, but there are plenty of sites like Muxtape who were sued into shutting down because they wouldn’t play ball with the majors. Just because the majors, 7 years or so too late, finally decide to support newer online methods of distribution does not mean that Spotify has discovered the holy grail business model.

I think what’s great is that this doesn’t have to be about ‘independent musicians’ but is about whether I want to support Miriam Jones making music, or Susan Enan, Michael Manring, Jonatha Brooke, Ryan Scott, Yvonne Lyon… they aren’t ‘independent musicians’ when I’m thinking about paying for their music, they’re people who make music, whose stories I know (to varying degrees) and who’s music I’m grateful for.

The relationship between me and any member of my audience is bi-lateral. They aren’t some amorphous blob, and I’m not ‘independent music’. They care about it to varying degrees and for a panoply of reasons.

This weekend I was told by a friend that she played my music in the delivery room while giving birth. Her and her hubby now want to book a house concert. Most of their friends haven’t heard of me, so having already bought my CDs, they are still ‘more’ grateful for the music that the cost of the CDs allowed them to express, so they are willing to risk inviting their friends to a gig in their house, one they’ll have to explain time and time again, out of their sense of the ‘value’ in what I do. And as a result, I’ll make a few hundred quid. Sounds like a win to me. I don’t need that many gigs like that a year to make my music career sustainable, profitable and entirely independent from the machine of the music industry.

Everyone loves music and have varied tastes, but its damn near impossible to compete with free..

FIL

See you in Wales! x