Category: Updates

So yesterday brought the news that Bandcamp had been bought by Epic Games. It arrived via a very upbeat email – from Bandcamp founder and CEO Ethan Diamond, and it kicked off a flurry of conversation on Twitter, the vast majority of it skeptical at best and heartbroken at worst.

It’s certainly the case that for the longest time Bandcamp has been the bastion of indie success against the total mess of the corporate, VC-funded, short-term gain, tech-bro world of start-ups. Bandcamp has from the start prioritised slow growth but getting things right – every time they introduce a new feature it takes ages for them to develop it and then they trial it extensively rather than throwing it into the wild and letting everyone screw up with it.

As you know, I had a fair amount of input in the run-up to the launch of their subscription service, at a time when I had an annual meet-up with Ethan in San Francisco to chat over what was working best for me and what I’d like to see happen to Bandcamp. There’s a lot of functionality in the subscription platform that is made up of things that I asked for – some of them were definitely just synergy in terms of how we thought of it and some no doubt originated with me. I was also one of the first three artists to get to trial it for a year before it was thrown open to anyone.

So I have previous form with Bandcamp, and of course have made it the sole home for my music online for over a decade. So a change as massive as this comes as both a shock and has the potential to significantly disrupt my music life if it goes badly. Almost half my annual earnings at the moment come from Bandcamp, so its continued success is something that I’m literally banking on.

So what do we make of the decision? I’ve been reading a lot of the responses to it, have privately reached out to a number of people who have knowledge of both the games industry and Epic or who work at Bandcamp. I don’t have access to any not-yet-public information, so none of this is based on exclusive info that I have, and as such represents my attempt to make sense of the decision based on previous dealings with Bandcamp and the wisdom of friends.

First up, the announcement – summarised it says that Bandcamp won’t change its mission or core function or its economic model, but will have Epic’s capital, platform and expertise “to expand internationally and push development forward across Bandcamp, from basics like our album pages, mobile apps, merch tools, payment system, and search and discovery features, to newer initiatives like our vinyl pressing and live streaming services.”

So, firstly, I believe that this is Bandcamp’s intention. None of my dealings with Ethan or my knowledge of what they’ve been offered in the past suggests that he’s in this to bullshit people. It is possible, obviously, that the sums of money involved have made him change course completely in terms of his honesty with Bandcamp’s users – let’s face it, he’s never going to say ‘BTW, you’re all fucked because I just made millions!’ But possibilities aside, I have no reason at this point to doubt that his – and Bandcamp’s – intentions are for this to be an additive experience rather than one that kills a very successful, profitable platform.

Let’s look at the list of things they want to improve:

• International reach: this is a HUGE one. Bandcamp currently only exists in English. [EDIT as a friend at Bandcamp just pointed out to me, the fan-facing text on the website is also available in Japanese and French!] Obviously the text of the site can be translated by apps, but offering the kind of comprehensive support they try to give to fans and artists, tooling up to offer all of that in another language is expensive and complex. Assuming Epic have this capacity, that’s an immediate win for Bandcamp…
• Pushing development: I’m not sure what Epic bring to the ‘album pages’ – there’s a possibility that Bandcamp as the sales home of a LOT of game soundtracks could give them reason to try and integrate game links back and forth with those? Total guess… The mobile app and merch tools seem fairly obvious in two ways – the tech team and integration with Epic’s current gaming platform. Which could be an add-on or could make the Bandcamp app unusable. A lot depends on how the people at Epic view Bandcamp’s current profitability (aside from any actual contractual terms in the sale, which make all of my conjecture moot). If they respect it as a going concern, they’ll perhaps try to support and enhance that functionality, but it’s way outside the way most tech companies work in that it doesn’t feature an ad-funding or data-scraping model AT ALL. Bandcamp’s uniqueness is more than just the sales platform. It’s supremely non-intrusive and non-invasive, and also gives artists an amazing level of control and access to their audience without having to rely on an algorithmic gateway. Messing with that terrifies me, frankly. If what happens is that Epic scrape a bunch of user data and use it to do A&R for UMG or Warner (also part owned by Tencent who have a 40% share in Epic), then that’s grim but won’t ruin it for the rest of us. If they cover the site in ads and start to filter what we get to see and what gets sent to us not based on editorial content or what our friends buy but some sort of gameable, chargeable algorithm, that’s a massive step away from Bandcamp’s core values. I imagine Bandcamp believe that won’t happen at this point. We’ll see.
• Next up is Payment system. This might be one of the biggest things they’ve gone for – again, this is conjecture on my part, I know a lot of people have a problem with PayPal, myself included, but replacing it with a bespoke system was potentially ruinous to Bandcamp’s business given just how central PayPal is to the entire online financial system. They use Stripe for a lot of credit card stuff, but getting away from PayPal requires a whole other level of infrastructure and partnering. Epic is of the scale where they could build their own banking system, which Bandcamp’s experience so far with so many different types of sale could be really useful for, and the costs involved in that would no longer involve haemorrhaging money to PayPal, particularly on small payments. My (somewhat educated) guess is that, along with live streaming, this is one of Bandcamp’s biggest concerns. And it’s one that makes sense.

The bit that makes less sense is the political side of this, going from giving money to PayPal, owned by an epic billionaire douchebag, to Epic, also owned by a billionaire, but with a 40% stake owned by Chinese tech investors Tencent. So there’s something about this that made Bandcamp do this deal rather than another deal, something bigger than just ‘getting away from systems own by billionaires’ – I know they’ve turned down a number of offers from within the music industry over the years, so it’s notable that they went with this. It could just be timing, but it could also be that Epic offered something meaningful. I’m not discounting that possibility/likelihood.

• The last two ventures are also interesting. Vinyl pressing is possibly the most capital-intensive aspect of all of this, in that to do it the way they want, they need to build their own pressing plants, which also means having the machines built to press vinyl – if they do this, there would be a level of innovation going on within the music economy that could serve indie artists incredibly well. Vinyl is still a growth market, but the pressing plants are backed up and monopolised by the Majors for reissues. Getting new vinyl pressed as an indie in anything other than wholly boutique quantities is frustrating and slow. Bandcamp scaling this could change things for people who want to do that.
• And live streaming – again, this could be a point of synergy or the parasitic collapse of Bandcamp’s team of ninjas. Bandcamp has started to offer live streaming of gigs. Epic does streaming, including of films, within Fortnite. Both have infrastructure and skills the other could want. Bandcamp obviously has no scale to offer Epic, but taking over Bandcamp’s streaming service and incorporating it with a gaming one would make sense for Epic, given that they are very much minor players in the streaming game. Twitch and YouTube would be obvious competitors here, so pairing a new gaming streaming platform with a music-specific one would make a lot of sense if they were going for that. The fact that they’re also streaming movies inside Fortnite hints at much bigger ambitions – something suggested too by a friend in the games industry who offered a WAY more pessimistic assessment of what all of this means than I’m writing here (her perspective is backed up with years of experience and insight, so I’m not in any way discounting her sad appraisal of what’s likely to happen, but I am trying to factor in what I know of Bandcamp’s dealings so far)… A lot of musicians are using Twitch. A Bandcamp-led campaign to get indie musicians onto a new platform would be massively more effective than Epic trying to do that themselves and just poach people from Twitch…

So where does that leave us? My desire for Bandcamp to remain that lovely bastion of independence is gone. I don’t get to have that any more, and complaining about them doing what they’ve done doesn’t help. What I’m concerned about and will be monitoring closely is whether any of this impacts the functioning of the subscriber community – easily the most important aspect of my music making life, and the subject of my soon-to-be-finished PhD – but also how people find music within Bandcamp – when people describe Bandcamp as a download delivery system, they miss out the incredible amount of internal traffic that is involved in how people discover music. That plus an ongoing familiarity with Bandcamp is worth far more than the percentage of my Bandcamp gross that they take as fees. It’s a net gain for me to have them take that money and invest it in infrastructure, coding and development. Inasmuch as the deal with Epic helps them to do those things, I’m OK with it, even while preferring indie things. I’m an ideological purist but a functioning pragmatist.

But I am also concerned about the ethics at the heart of the company. Ethan says that Epic shares their values. The way Epic is structured and funded reveals that to be at least partially not true. Bandcamp’s way of operating up until now is markedly different to Epic’s, and it will be interesting to see what happens to Bandcamp’s annual fundraisers etc. They’ve chosen some pretty great causes to support in response to political happenings in the US over the years, and I’d hate to see that stifled by concerns from Epic’s investors. It’s a distinct possibility that they will clash head on and how that plays out would tell us a lot. I operate my business on fair trade principles. Bandcamp have always branded themselves as a fair trade music company, and that is now less clear than it ever has been. It’s not necessarily gone, but it’s not clear cut the way it was.

But outside of that, I am going to be watching developments in the space that has just opened up to the left of Bandcamp as people with a concern for free and open tech tools are re-energised to look at what’s happening with fresh impetus. Maggie Vail who was one of the people behind CASH music – an organisation who developed a bunch of super cool and experimental tech tools for artists – and has already tweeted (perhaps semi-sarcastically?) asking about people wanting to explore that space again. It will be interesting to see if anyone just seeks to build a new version of Bandcamp. As much as I’ve been perfectly happy to have my music available in one place, it’s not healthy to live in an ecosystem where your financial viability is in the hands of one company.

That said, Corey Mwamba tweeted this morning ‘Don’t let businesses trick you into thinking they’re your friends.’ but for me it does work the other way round – my friends run this business. They’re not making decisions based on what I want, obviously, but they are friends whose intentions and ethos have consistently been in line with my own up until now. Again, it’s possible that my friendship with Ethan was merely a way for him to extract information from me. I think it would be absurdly hubristic of me to assume that my conversations with him were valuable enough to be worth faking a friendship! We hung out and chatted and he built some of my suggestions into the way Bandcamp works, and as a result my earnings from Bandcamp over the last decade have been roughly the same as if I’d had 20 million streams on Spotify. Not band for a subscriber community of 280-something people, eh?

Bandcamp currently remains unique in providing the infrastructure for the kind of community I value, for centring music recordings within a space where I can charge an annual fee, give my subscribers WAY more music than they’ve nominally paid for, and gather around that music a discussion of caring, insightful, literate and fascinating opinions that informs the way I understand what it is that I do as an artist. That community is unique and is formed of the people in it, but the affordances for building that and maintaining those relationships are absolutely essential to the ethos behind the subscription engine within Bandcamp. It’s genuinely brilliant, and in my case genuinely life-changing. I’m not about to jump ship because someone else is funding it, but the possibility of it ceasing to function the way I need it to to maintain what is important to me is significantly higher today than it was two days ago, and I’ll be keeping an eye on what’s happening at Bandcamp, and what else is developing outside of it.

[This is an epically long post – over 3000 words – it ought to be at least two or three posts, but I’m far too busy writing a PhD to give this the kind of attention it needs and deserves in terms of editing, tidying and whatnot. So make of it what you will… that said, it may be helpful if you’re trying to get your head round the various arguments about Spotify]

With the recent increased scrutiny placed on Spotify thanks to their tendency to give millions of dollars to berks who give a platform to conspiracy theorists and transphobes, it has also amongst my musician friends reignited the discussion about Spotify’s economics. Something on which I’ve been pretty vocal over time. So I’m going to try and summarise that here, and then offer some thoughts on streaming and why the argument against Spotify is not an argument against streaming. And therefor why I hope that any collapse in Spotify’s position in the market (it’s WAY too early to make that call, but we can hope, right?) would possibly offer us a chance to rethink the economics of streaming.

So, Spotify’s problems, summarised – Spotify began by realising that they needed two things to get an edge over everyone else in the race to be the first ‘all you can eat’ streaming service – a catalogue and a platform. The catalogue they kickstarted by doing equity deals with the Major labels and the platform they got (I can’t find the reference for how this worked, but I definitely remember it being talked about at the time!) by – I think – doing a deal with 7 Digital who built the first version of Spotify in exchange for the being the exclusive ‘shop’ within Spotify – yup, when Spotify first started, you could buy most of the music that they played inside the browser window. So the idea that Spotify pointed you to a sales opportunity and had no mobile app made it a very different proposition with a very different set of affordances. At that point, the ‘Spotify is more like radio’ argument was a whole lot more compelling that it is now. Which is not to say that there aren’t millions of Spotify users who use it like radio, just that the number of prior experiences and economic transactions that it has subsumed is way, way more complex than it was in Year 1. (it’s worth noting that Spotify weren’t the first to try the same thing – an almost identical app called Datz was built, and had a press launch but it turned out their attempts to get the majors on side involved a whole lot of lying to each of their negotiators who rather awkwardly actually talked to each other ahead of the launch, and the whole thing collapsed spectacularly).

As Spotify evolved into some kind of ‘total music solution’, removing the sales platform not long after the deal with 7 Digital ran out, and adding a mobile app and offline storage as soon as they could, their economic model (which made sense in relation to radio, but was problematic in terms of cannibalising sales revenue) didn’t evolve. It just got more opaque. News emerged of bands and territories and labels negotiating different deals, of Spotify lobbying to reduce statutory royalty payments for streams, and despite having been to at least three talks where it was explained in depth, I still couldn’t tell you in any great detail how Spotify calculates who gets what. However, there were winners – it became a new form of ‘viral’ success to have a playlist hit, one track that landed on a massively subscribed playlist and made good money for the artist. What was also apparent, perhaps like radio in this respect, was that there was minimal lateral movement from playlists to wider awareness of the artist. Spotify itself didn’t really engender that kind of audience building.

Which brings us to the problem of communication – Spotify for a long time gave no analytic detail to artists. Following a campaign by, amongst others, Cellist Zoë Keating, they eventually made some available, but it still wasn’t all that easy to access depending on which aggregator you used to get your music on the platform, and there was still no way to converse with your audience. That aspect of fan/audience/community building has always remained well out of reach of the platform itself. There were many stories of artists leveraging Spotify to build audiences, and for those who owned their entire catalogue and publishing, the economics were in some cases quite reasonable.

However, the simple fact remained that the purpose of Spotify, economically speaking, was built around the re-leveraging of IP/value in existing catalogue. Getting people to pay again to listen to works they’d already bought. For the Major labels, almost all the value they have is in music we already love. They are looking at a humungous volume of songs and albums that we already love, that have already made, collectively, billions of dollars in sales and royalties, that have been milked via reissues, reformatting and remastering for decades, that can now without any manufacturing at all, be turned into a steady trickle of income that collectively amounts to a hell of a lot of money, especially if you have equity in the company, get a preferential royalty rate AND a shareholder payout. You get paid for your own work, and a cut of the profit on everyone else’s, as well as – I assume – a much deeper access to analytic detail across the entire economy.

So bands that had effectively made all their money and for the last couple of decades were making extra on licensing and CD reissues, suddenly had a way of not only reselling, but monetising usage. Experience pricing is what it’s called in some circles. You’re not paying for a product, you’re paying to access an experience. Paying by the amount of time (or, crucially, the number of times) you access a particular piece or song. It’s notable that Spotify pay per play, not by minute of play – this has both increased the number of tracks on an ‘average’ album considerably, and shortened the length of pop songs too. Affordances, eh?

So, there’s essentially no meaningful way to contact your listening audience on Spotify, the money only works at scale, in an economic model that was designed to leverage back catalogue value not recoup recording and marketing budgets, the calculations were opaque and favoured the majors (meet the new boss, same as the old, coked-up, wanker boss) and throw in a few scandals around fake artists and arms dealing and you’ve got yourself one toxic fucking stew of wholly untenable ethical wrongness. Except because of the deals with labels, many, many artists were unable to extract their catalogue, and because of the near-monopoly Spotify had on the conversation around streaming (if not the entire market – they’re the biggest player, but Apple, Amazon and to a lesser extent Tidal have a chunk too, as well as some other smaller players) a lot of artists were terrified to pull out and were in no position to actually talk honestly with their audience about what was going on and why the economic model was potentially ruinous for their creative endeavours.

As someone who was in control of my entire audience, who knew virality was a ridiculously long shot, didn’t want to make music designed for playlists and NEEDS to talk to his audience, I pulled my music off Spotify almost exactly a decade ago – the basic argument is a fair trade one – the company sucks in every imaginable way, and I didn’t need to have anything to do with it. I also pulled all my music of Amazon and a host of other platforms, and have refused to use either service for the same amount of time.

But, alongside that has been an ever increasing level of frustration with the nature of the argument against Spotify and the way that it becomes a bunch of essentialist garbage about ‘streaming’. I’ve almost certainly stumbled into this particular mess myself on more than one occasion. So let’s talk about streaming.

Spotify’s model uses streaming as its technological foundation, but Spotify is not synonymous with streaming. Streaming at its most basic just means that the file that is being decoded into music is hosted elsewhere. That’s all. To that extent, Bandcamp is also a streaming service – the fact that most of my Bandcamp listening happens through either the web browser or the mobile app is made possible by Bandcamp’s essential nature as being in part a streaming service. That streaming in no way undermines their economic model, in fact it’s pretty integral to it given how easily it makes accessing the deeper recesses of your Bandcamp collection, as well as browsing other new work with a view to buying it.

Where Bandcamp and Spotify diverge in their use of streaming is the economic model around that streaming. On Bandcamp, the music that I’m streaming is either free for me to hear because the band or small label have made it so I can hear it, or it’s music that I’ve bought and I own. And by own I mean it’s mine to access and play over and over again for as long as I want without paying any more money to keep accessing it. I can download the file in as many different formats as I want, play them on any device without interference, and the amount I paid for it in the first place is the only exchange of money needed for that to continue.

In contrast, Spotify sells two things – first of all it rents access to the catalogue – you can either pay for that with time by listening to adverts, or you can pay to remove those ads and have access to it all for a monthly fee. That money you pay doesn’t go directly to whoever you listen to, but it goes into the central pot of Spotify earnings that is then divvied up amongst the rights holders, with the Majors getting their bit first and everyone else getting theirs based on a pecking order and the percentage of the total Spotify streams that their work represents.

What you also get for your money is a cloud of metadata built up around you and your listening habits. Some of it you control –

• playlists,
• bookmarks,
• previously listened to work,
• stuff you’ve favourited,
• curated playlists that you’re subscribed to

and a load that you have less direct control over –

• the content of those curated playlists,
• other data scraped from your social media profiles and traded for the targeting of ads or music promo,
• the ways in which Spotify maps your music community and includes their preferences in what it recommends you listen to,
• and people just buying access to your ears in various ways.

These are all variously super useful or annoying depending on how well you perceive their algorithms to work at finding your taste, and how comfortable you are with their particular way of cataloging and bookmarking the work that feels like your collection.

If you stop paying, or suddenly get super tired of listening to ads and decide to delete your account, your access is gone. No matter how much you’ve previously paid, you no longer have access to that music. You are only ever renting access to that music, and there’s no point at which you have paid ‘enough’. No point at which it becomes yours beyond the walls of the service. There are myriad unlicensed ways of extracting music from Spotify, easiest being just recording the music as it plays into a DAW, but there’s absolutely no way of taking your catalogue of work elsewhere or even transferring the metadata in any useful way. (it’s worth artists being a little more aware of this when they get frustrated at people not quitting Spotify soon enough – it’s a big break to drop all of that metadata and start again elsewhere, especially if it’s a completely different economic model you’re suggesting!)

So what you’re paying for is no longer about ownership of music. It’s about experiencing music, and you pay based on what you listen to.

It’s super important to realise how hard – impossible, even – it is to usefully compare these two ways of paying for music in the short term. So much of the commentary around the economics of Spotify fails to understand who is massively advantaged in experience pricing and how much of the way we’ve always listened to music is now suddenly economically active as well as generating highly valuable metadata, in ways it has never been before. The reasons for this I’ve already explained. But what’s also ignored is how the fact that people who keep listening keep paying you impacts the longer term economics of any given track or album.

So what’s the big deal? The experience economy surely extends the economic lifespan of recorded music way beyond the extremely short shelf-life of the vast majority of music under the old system (especially when we factor in just how epically limited shelf-space was in record shops before digitsiation made it possible to access the vast majority of the history of recorded music via some means or other).

The problems for me are as follows. The first one is Spotify’s expressed and repeated action that demonstrates a desire to pay as little as is humanly possible for the rights to music. There’s no ‘how much do we need to comfortably run this service while still making the lives of musicians better?’ – the basic economics is transnational capitalism as its most fucked up, with opaque bilateral deals, lobbying and a bunch of shit that’s basically fraudulent, before we even get to the justification for giving $100M to fucking Joe Rogan to spout bullshit.

So their payment system, which works for the Majors as a way of leveraging extra money on music that people already love, makes it exceedingly difficult to justify the even modest recording and promotional budgets on which the vast majority of indie music industry machinery is built. Let’s not kid ourselves that being an indie musician has ever been easy, or a place where you’re likely to do well. But in an economic field where there are myriad ways of funnelling money into the pockets of those most in need of it, Spotify fails. If your response to this is ‘ah well, that’s how capitalism works’, then I wish you all the ill-effects capitalism has to offer. I want better than that for the world, so it’s a piss-poor excuse.

Secondly, in order to keep you wedded to their ecosystem and keep you paying, Spotify stays as an intermediary between you and your audience, making direct communication super difficult, and/or expensive. Sure you can take out ads and target your previous listeners, but there’s no reason that should be the case in a service that’s already made billions out of your work being on there. Again, capitalism isn’t a good enough excuse for shitting on broke musicians.

Thirdly, absolutely no thought has been given to how communities form around music beyond the aggregating of massive listening data. Which works to connect you with more music in the system, but it doesn’t allow human relationships to cross-over into relationships of mutual discovery. The trust relationship Spotify is built to enhance is our trust in its recommendation engine, not our trust in each other to find and talk about music, and certainly not our trust as artists in our audience to do that. This isn’t an even vague part of Spotify’s remit, but from where I am, fostering human relationships based on care, conversation, trust and accumulated experience and wisdom is vital to every context in which I’ve ever found out about music, from hanging out with friends through to what I learn from my own subscribers on Bandcamp.

So how does this reflect on streaming? It doesn’t. There’s nothing inherently bad about streaming. There are streaming services that pay masses more than Spotify does. There are other possible economic models that make experience pricing way more meaningful and viable, and there are ways to enable fan communities to function as communities rather than an algorithm-generated blob of metadata.

There are experiments with new ways of doing this that are worth looking at – Resonate, while not actually functioning in a way that I find useful yet, is a cool and helpful way of thinking about fair trade experience pricing and the transition to ownership. At least one of the bigger streaming companies has suggested it will switch to a model of dividing up what you pay to the people you listen to – no more communal pot to pay for the free/ad streams out of other people’s paid accounts. FairMus seems to be an experiment in this model – it seems like a supremely obvious one to me – I can’t see any decent reason why this wouldn’t be the model from the off, but it’s another reason to hate Spotify. I have no desire for my subscription money to go to making rich people more rich while the broke-ass band I’ve listened to for three hours this week only gets pennies.

I have no innate problem with experience pricing – as a man of a certain age, I am still a fan of ownership, I like the long term implications of buying things on Bandcamp and being able to download them, them being mine, but that’s a cultural thing, not an ethical one. Ownership doesn’t really matter, and I love the fact that experience pricing makes it possible to get paid for people loving your music more. It’s not true at all that the more you pay for something the more you love it – that’s another weird myth that’s totally undone by the number of favourite albums I and many other have that we bought for 50p in a discount bin – but it does make sense that the opposite is possible, that my money is somehow divided up amongst the people I listen to most.

But that’s not the whole picture. There are artists whose music I barely listen to who I still want to give money to for their work. Not by ‘tipping’ them but by buying their work. I actually really enjoy being able to encourage people who make interesting work to keep doing it even when it’s not what I am in a position to listen to all day long. I don’t think that the estates of Miles Davis or Jimi Hendrix or The Beatles  need any more money from me no matter how much time I spent listening to them. With a product-based economy, I’m continually investing in new work, and I can do it at the point of departure for a project, and it’s not spread out over the next few years. So the economic return is front-loaded, but may actually end up being smaller in the long term than via a fairer trade experience pricing model.

So maybe what we need is both. I know a LOT of people who have told me over the years that they use streaming services to predominantly play music they already own. This points to the inherent conservatism of older people’s music taste – genuine new music foragers above the age of maybe 25 are fairly rare as far as I can see. They are a significant chunk of the music buying market, because they have disposable income, but the majority of their peers are spending their money on vinyl reissues or Sonos systems, not investing in new artists. I’m not one to put much extra weight on what ‘the mainstream’ does, simply because it’s never been a place where epically creative work has been the norm, and while it did for years sustain a middle class of performing musicians who are struggling today, that’s as much about the cost of living and the significant relative drop in the cultural standing and meaning of music against other forms of entertainment as it is any internal collapse in the music industry. If you want to campaign for musicians to live better, your energies are probably best used arguing for rent control and UBI rather than railing against the significantly less impactful internal economic squabbles of the music industry.

So streaming is OK with me, Spotify very much isn’t. Should you use another streaming service? I’ve not yet seen one that interests me as a listener, but I’m really not sure what I’ll do the next time I want to buy an album that isn’t on Bandcamp – I used to shop on Google Play, but as I won’t shop on Amazon and iTunes is a giant ball-ache to use, I’m not sure where I’ll go. It’s getting harder and harder to just buy non-Bandcamp music for a sensible amount. We’ll see where that goes.

If you’ve made it this far, well done – email me and I’ll send you a download code for something lovely on Bandcamp.

As is the way with Internet things, just as it happened with that Joni Mitchell quote a while back, there’s a Vince Gill quote that’s circulating as a meme again after a few years away. The actual quote is apparently from an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in February 2012, and begins ‘I still want to have hit records’, which points to a slightly different set of concerns than the bit that’s circulating.

The quote in the meme is this, “The devaluation of music and what it’s now deemed to be worth is laughable to me. My single costs 99 cents. That’s what a [single] cost in 1960. On my phone, I can get an app for 99 cents that makes fart noises — the same price as the thing I create and speak to the world with. Some would say the fart app is more important. It’s an awkward time. Creative brains are being sorely mistreated.”

Now, remember that this is from 2012 – the streaming economy was in a wholly nascent form, and the idea of railing against a download costing 99¢ seems absurdly quaint in these days of micropayments and disappearing songwriter royalties. Continue reading “More Nonsense Music Economy Quotes, this time from Vince Gill (in 2012!)”

As is usual at this time of year, here’s a selection of my favourite records this year. Thanks to the Bandcamp Friday initiative, I’ve bought more music this year than certainly any time since my late teens, possibly ever. Over 200 albums, in fact. Some of them came via Bandcamp subscriptions (the option to subscribe to an individual artist for a set annual or monthly fee, the same model as the subscription I offer), but many were single album purchases.

These are not the only albums I really enjoyed this year, but a selection of my favourites and the ones I listened to most…

Dishevelled Cuss – Dishevelled Cuss

Pop-punk greatness from one of my favourite guitarists on the planet. Dishevelled Cuss is Sugar to Tera Melos’ Hüsker Dü:

Jasper Hoiby’s Planet B

Jazz with electronics and speech samples from the genius Danish bassist:

Pulled By Magnets – Rose Golden Doorways

Anything Seb Rochford releases is cause for celebration, but Neil Charles’ bass on here is just extraordinary. Doom jazz? Not sure what to call this, but it’s brilliant.

Throwing Muses – Sun Racket

I’ve said quite a few times that I can’t think of another band of their vintage that are making the best music of their careers and doing it without even the vaguest hint to nostalgia. Kristin Hersh is one of the greatest guitarists, songwriters and makers of records of her generation.

Field Music – Making A New World

I bought a LOT of Field Music Music this year, filling in my collection each Bandcamp Friday. This was their new one, and it’s outstanding. The cleverest pop band on the planet, without ever sounding remotely smug.

Beauty Pill – Please Advise

Chad Clark has been making pretty much flawless music for well over two decades. I love following his journey and learning new things from everything he releases. Another absolutely killer mini-album here. He’s a sonic wizard, with some of the best production and arrangement ideas happening anywhere in music right now:

Stillefelt – Stillefelt

three of Birmingham’s (the UK’s?) finest improvisors making absolutely glorious experimental, minimalist, ambient music. Love this so much.

Liz Frencham – Love And Other Crimes

Liz is one of those artists whose self doubt drives them to be better and better. I wish she could hear her music the way we do, but I’m also grateful for the incredible music she makes being just the way she is.

Michael Manring – Small Moments

A new Michael Manring album is cause for an actual party, such is their rarity. But when it’s this good it’s so worth the weight. The absolute master of solo bass, making music that renders the bassness of it utterly irrelevant to the experience of listening to it. Just incredible.

David Binney and Kenny Wolleson – Basu

I think possibly the only club gig I went to this year was David Binney, with Billy Mohler in LA. This album with one of my favourite drummers, Kenny Wollesen, is a glorious slice of jazz, improv and electronica

Azusa – Loop Of Yesterdays

My metal album of the year, Liam Wilson on bass, incredible changes of mood and emotion. Deeply inventive, expressive metal.

Ren Harvieu – Revel In The Drama

I’ve listened to this LOADS this year. I met Ren at UnConvention in Manchester in March, bought her record soon after and absolutely love it. Scott Walker, Tori Amos, Everything But The Girl, and all kinds of other amazing influences combine into something totally beautiful and original

Lobelia – Positive Songs Project 1 and 2

For all it’s horrors, the Pandemic created space for my amazing wife to record some of the best songs of her career. I REALLY need to go back and remix a load of these (don’t mix vocals on headphones, kids, you’ll overdo the reverb something rotten), but this is glorious music.

Hope And Social – S.E.N.T Vol 1

Hope And Social making records by chain letter. Such a great idea and such genius execution.

Billy Nomates – Billy Nomates

Found randomly via a Tweet from somone at 6Music. Post Punk Electronica with some killer bass grooves.

Yvonne Lyon – Growing Wild

I’m unashamedly a MASSIVE Yvonne Lyon fan. Such a great songwriter, and here she digs into the experiences of growing older and wiser.

Colfax – The Jupiter Expeditions

Quite a few of my collaborators in different fields released music this year, and this record by Daniel Berkman is just marvellous – old school electronica with field recordings and vocal samples. Wonderful.

David Torn – Fur/Torn

A solo Torn album on Bandcamp. There ought to be LOADS of these, given how much great music he’s dropped on Soundcloud over the years. But this one is marvellous. One of the most important guitarists in the history of the instrument.

Harry Styles – Fine Line

Obviously not on Bandcamp, but special mention to Harry Styles for making an absolutely killer pop album. The first time I heard Adore You, I was blown away by its brilliance. Love this insane video:

There were other things I really dug this year, other music that I bought that I’ll spend more time with over the coming months and be in love with by this time next year, but for now here’s the Good Stuff that got me through the shittiest of years.

Today is Bandcamp Day – the day that Bandcamp waives their revenue share, giving it all back to the artists and small labels who sell their music on the site.

Bandcamp, in a paragraph: 

For those that don’t know, Bandcamp is the Farmer’s Market of music online. Music and merch from independent artists the world over, in glorious HD formats, with the vast majority of the money going to artists. Counter to pretty much every other digital music business model, they don’t make a penny until we make many, many more pennies than they do. There are no fights to pay musicians less, like the Spotify lawsuits, no attempts to take rights away, or keep musicians away from their listeners. It’s the perfect Fairtrade music platform. It’s also where I host my subscription offering – that’s the best possible way to support what I do and get everything – head to stevelawson.bandcamp.com/subscribe for more on that.

Anyway, I’ve released a few new things for today. The first is one of my favourite projects I’ve ever been involved in. Beautifully Disturbed is a duo live album with trumpeter Bryan Corbett. Bryan is an incredible musician, and a truly brilliant improvisor. I feel deeply inspired every time we play together. Here’s the album – it’s only £2 on Bandcamp, so you can use the rest of your money to buy other things, or you can pay more if you feel so inspired.

Next up, I asked my subscribers which of the three albums I should release from my recent Italian tour, and because the spread was across all three of the albums, I decided to make all three available Pay What You Want. PWYW means you get to decide what you can afford. You can spread your money out across whatever it is that you want to buy. Give it all a listen, and see what grabs you:

There you go. A ton of new stuff from me for your lovely ears.

If you want some recommendations, my bandcamp collection has everything I’ve ever bought there, and will be updated through the day as I buy new things today! I’ll be reinvesting 20% of everything that comes in to me in new music.

A few thoughts on this YouTube subscriber swap thing that’s going around… (in case you’ve missed it a LOT of musicians have been promoting the idea that we should reciprocally follow one another to help reach the 1000 subscriber limit so we can start monetising YouTube channels, and then play each other’s videos on mute to gain revenue) 

FWIW, I’ve been on YouTube for 14 years, have just shy of 2K subscribers, have other videos on there posted by bass accounts that have generated hundreds of thousands of views, but IF I’d been monetising my account from the start (that wasn’t even possible back then – at least a third of my views on there were from before there was ANY money in YouTube), my total number of views would’ve made me significantly less than $500. In 14 years. Maybe a few bucks more if I could’ve persuaded people to watch ads on them.

See, you get paid almost nothing on YT for your music. Like, effectively nothing. You get paid for people watching ads. So you’re asking the people who are watching your videos to spend hours and hours collectively watching bullshit so you can make pennies. If that’s a byproduct of you doing what you do anyway, knock yourselves out. Go for it.

But making ‘content‘ so that you can somehow start from scratch while quarantined to make any money at all through YouTube views, AND trying to get that happening through a network of other people who are also trying to make content and aren’t even following anyone based on whether they actually like what they do??? Are you high? If your understanding of who you are is that you are an artist trying to sell your work, this is not your business.

I get that you’re trying to come up with strategies to make this work at a time when we’re REALLY struggling to stay afloat, but getting people to spend hours watching stuff they aren’t invested in so you can make pennies is not a good use of our time in quarantine. It’s not good economically and it’s not good spiritually, and it’s not even remotely likely to make any sensible money for anyone but Google.

If you already have stuff on YouTube and want to earn some scraps for it, sure get registered for ad revenue. But honestly, it’s not worth anything unless THAT’S YOUR BUSINESS. Like, a full time job. A quick google search suggests that 7 MILLION views a year (it’d be a hell of a production/marketing task to get 1% of that on content you own the copyright on – remember, you won’t get paid for videos of cover versions unless you license/register them, the writer will) will pay you LESS than I make a year from 260 Bandcamp subscribers.

I’ve said it god-knows how many times, the streaming economy has no response to this. The major labels and streaming companies COMBINED initially donated less to help musicians through this than Bandcamp earned for them in one day of waiving their fees and promoting it as a day to help. One day. Rihanna has donated more than her entire industry combined, just because she gives a shit. (Spotify have since announced $10M of matched funding donations to three music-focused charities )

An economic model designed to massively prioritise paying people for already-famous music that doesn’t require a marketing or production budget is never going to be a sustainable ecosystem for a mass of creatives to earn a living. Stop trying to make fetch happen. If you’ve had a viral hit on a playlist or two on Spotify and have made some money, that’s brilliant. I want my friends and colleagues to make money, but it’s not sustainable across the system, and trying to game YouTube with some ‘follow for a follow’ nonsense is not going to suddenly get you all the kind of resilient audience who are willing to watch ads to see your stuff that is needed to make money off this.

Last thing – every person I know who is making SERIOUS money off YouTube (or is using YouTube as a significant part of their marketing funnel to a business that makes money – not the same thing) has studied this stuff to a significant level. They aren’t just great musicians or teachers or gamers or whatever. They are deep into marketing techniques, into the kind of video they need to make to get views, they study click through rates and patterns, interpret YouTube stats about viewer retention, they are constantly tweaking that shit to make it work.

My advice? Make the best art you can. Focus on the art right now. YouTube aren’t throwing anyone a lifeline. Everyone’s at home watching video, and you’re competing with people who’ve been in this game for a decade, have teams and a strategy. Just make great art, and make a case for the people in your audience who REALLY CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU DO and have the means to pay for it to help support it.

Reciprocal follow-me-back strategies have been around since MySpace, and they always suck. They are never pro-art, and result in a bunch of pushy, aggressive people seeming way more popular than their art deserves because they chase the follow-backs, not because they have anything worthwhile to share.

In short, the massive problem with this is that it assumes the the number of followers that it says you have on your YouTube page is more significant than the community of interest that the number is supposed to represent. Follow for a follow is a low-grade simulacrum of an actual community that are invested in what you do and care about it. It represents how many people were needy enough for their own follower count to go up that they would also click yours. You and your art deserve much, much better.

Do your art
Shout about the stuff you love
Invite the people who can afford to to support art – not just your art.
Stay safe.
Wash your hands.

Here’s a load of my favourite Bandcamp releases of 2019 – aside from Liam’s record being my favourite, they aren’t in any real order.

The three conspicuous absences are three of the artists I subscribe to on Bandcamp – Thomas Truax, Andrew Howie and Corey Mwamba. All three released a TON of great music this year, but I couldn’t pick out a best thing. Go hear it all and subscribe to them 🙂

Anyway, all these are fabulous and worth investigating. Go treat your ears and buy something beautiful:

The Long Game by Liam Noble
Probably my favourite record of the year. A pretty much perfect melding of melody, improv, experimentation and incredible sounds and feel. A dream trio.

Scenes From The Flood by Bryan Beller
An epic undertaking, writing a massive sprawling mostly instrumental epic exploring huge themes and personal change. Bryan’s best album, and definitely my rock album of the year.

Transmission Suite by 808 State
A reminder that 808 State were so much more than a ‘rave’ band – beautiful experimental EDM, with some of the coolest analog sounds you’ll ever hear.

Hey Jester by Hey Jester
If, like me, you find a lot of modern ‘edgy’ rock sounds like it was designed by committee, you may find the Hey Jester album to be a breath of fresh air. Packed full of great tunes, killer ideas and epic playing from all three of them. There’s a load of Jeff Buckley and Muse and stuff like that in there, but it’s way more fun than a load of corporate rock references could ever do justice to. Go listen.

Daughter Of Ocean by EchoTest
Another year, another absolutely killer record by EchoTest. Julie and Marco going from strength to strength.

Æ by Anton Eger
Just when it felt like the ‘Nu Jazz’ tag was getting a little stale, Phronesis drummer Anton pulls out this magical mix-up of jazz and electronica, with a ridiculous cast of musicians. Really amazing.

Lullabies For Monsters by Lullabies For Monsters
A spectacular bit of instrumental story-telling (with an accompanying written story), meticulously constructed and deeply moving.

KUNDABUFFA by KUNDABUFFA
Almost as prolific as me, Andy and Theone put out a ton of great music, broke the band up (one of the albums is called “KUNDABUFFA Is Dead”!) and then carried on releasing amazing music. A project to keep an eye on, cos so many good things are going to come from this…

Devotion by Dave Douglas | Uri Caine | Andrew Cyrille
Spiritual bass-less improv. always a good thing 🙂

You Are Beautiful; We Are All Beautiful v2 by Candy Says
More electropop genius from Candy Says. Everything that do is gorgeous – Juju’s ear for melody is absolutely golden.

Metamorphosis by Mai Leisz
I’ve been a Mai Leisz fan for many, many years – one of the most brilliant bassist/band leaders on the planet. Lots of 70s melodic fusion influence here, tons of killer writing and playing, and nothing annoying at all. Go buy her entire catalogue.

Pull Back for Sound by Clatter
New music from Clatter!! Many, many years after their last one, and it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. At times angry and deeply moving, the production is as great as the songs. Absolute prog magic.

All Will Be Said, All To Do Again by Sarah Gail Brand / Steve Beresford / John Edwards / Mark Sanders
Possibly the best recorded example of the magic of the London improv scene (though Mark’s from Birmingham 😉 ) – Lo and I saw this quartet live not long before this album, and were absolutely blown away. The most engaging, coherent, beautiful and challenging of improv records.

45 by School of Language
Protest funk from one half of Field Music. Just brilliant

Blurring Into Motion by Charlie Cawood
Orchestral prog? Post-millennial chamber music? Who knows, just gorgeous music overflowing with exquisite melodies and the most incredible arrangements.

Happy Bread (and Cruel Hangovers) by Hope and Social
That this isn’t my favourite H&S album but is still one of my favourites of the year tells you loads about how great they are. The opening track is one of my favourite things of the entire year.

Round One by Jumpstarted Plowhards
New old school punk with Mike Watt on bass. An adrenaline shot to the heart.