Here’s another salvaged (and lightly edited) Facebook post, from Dec 2023. Now the dust has settled once again on the weird nonsense of Spotify Wrapped, and we can think about it without people feeling like their immediate and wholly positive desire to talk about the music they love is being undermined, let’s dig into some thinking around these two events that galvanise audience behaviour around music online and what Spotify actually represents in terms of the independent music economy.
Why I’m Not on Spotify
I’m in the fortunate position that I can decide exactly where my music goes. So none of it is on Spotify. Spotify ‘solved’ a huge aspect of music listening for listeners. It imposed a particular model of discovery on those who bought into its idea of ‘everything’ (clearly not everything, but close enough for the majority) and that became normalised through consensus. What it really didn’t solve, in fact it has made palpably worse for artists, is the question of economic viability for niche/small-scale artists.
As a place to listen to Taylor Swift and Chic, it’s amazing. The volume at which their music is streamed means that they make a decent amount of money and can, along with the extra info they glean from enhanced stats and data, pay the people involved in making the music. If your music has already made all of its money in the age of physical media dominance, Spotify is just free additional money that replaces people listening in a context where the artist makes nothing. There are no more copies of Abba Gold to be sold, but if you can monetise the listening, it’s a windfall.
For indie artists, it never worked. The Spotify model, being one that spreads out the earnings from listening over years (instead of front loading the recouping of costs with the significant per-person transaction of selling an album in any format), just doesn’t track with the costs and survival needs of independent artists. Telling someone who can’t pay their rent now that over the next 20 years, if people keep playing a record and it remains on platlists, they’ll make more than they would have on the initial release really doesn’t help. No-one can or should be expected to pile up debt on the false hope of a lottery win like that. It’s nonsense.
Why Bandcamp, but Why So Cheap?
So we need a better model, and right now the best there is for independent artists is Bandcamp. For the most part, it’s a tricky sell to people for whom their entertainment budget is already assigned to Netflix, Disney, Spotify and Amazon. That’s a big chunk of change each month, especially if you’ve got gym membership or some other kind of discretionary spending in there too. To then say ‘please buy all of this music at £8-10 per album’ makes little sense when people are struggling.
So while that’s still the broad consensus around pricing on Bandcamp, I’ve never charged that much. Individual albums are £3. The subscription is £30 a year, for more music than you’ll ever get through within that year. It’s genuinely abundant, and you get to choose the bits that feel most interesting to you, knowing that the rest of it is yours to dig into whenever you want. Happy to discuss ways of digging into the catalogue.
Why This Matters At Christmas
Christmas is a weird time for musicians. Same kinds of pressures as everyone else financially, enhanced opportunity to sell some music (CDs and Vinyl still make fabulous presents for a particular demographic, though re-pressings of classic albums are still the dominant transaction here) and for some, some much needed paying live work (Pantomine sustains thousands of British music careers through the winter.) Alongside this there’s a month off from university teaching over the holidays and into the new year, a tax bill coming up at the end of January, and the lightness of live work heading into 2024 (the beginning of the year is largely a gig desert once Panto season is done).
So, have a think about how and where you spend your money. I’m not organising a boycott of Spotify, but it’s worth having a think about the way that it was sold as the ‘legal’ alternative to file sharing but has in no way solved the economic problems that were identified (often mistakenly) during that period. It doesn’t help musicians, despite there being a few who’ve managed to make it work (this has always been the case with music economy models – it’s never been an egalitarian ‘everyone does OK’ space, but certain aspects of the ‘musical middle class’ have been decimated over the last 30+ years (Karaoke and big screen sports did the low stakes live sector in in the late 80s/early 90s, long before the internet chimed in).
Why Bandcamp Friday Matters
Anyway, if you want to help, Bandcamp Friday is when Bandcamp (despite everything, still the by far the best global platform deal for artists for myriad reasons) give their revenue share on every sale to the artists. It’s made a massive, massive difference over the last few years.
If I was on Spotify, my projected streaming stats would likely be netting me a few hundred quid, and that would be under the old system, not this new one where things that are played less than a thousand times don’t make anything. I’d be making very, very little under that.
As it is, Bandcamp pays my rent each year. I don’t make enough to live on through it, but it’s a highly sustainable model for building community around the music with a minimal audience, because enough people realise that less than a quid a week for the life’s work of an artist you care about is a helluva deal.
If you want to check out my Bandcamp subscription, click here.
Spotify Wrapped
Spotify Crapped (on artists)
Spotify (should be) Scrapped
Spotify Slapped (and not in a good way)
Bandcamp Friday
Bandcamp Payday
Bandcamp (gives us the) Whyday
Bandcamp Smileday
Bandcamp (no more) Cryday