Oh yes, another blog post about Spotify. Just what the world needs. I’ll try [edit: and fail] to keep it brief.

There seems to be, at the moment, a massive gulf between the opinion of many artists-still-making-music and the labels that many of them are signed to. The major labels LOVE it. But artists are talking about Spotify as a wholly bad thing for artists – not enough money… ‘free’ music is bad… Rosanne Cash (a woman for whom I have an enormous amount of respect as an artist, writer, thinker and human) called Spotify ‘legalised piracy’. Why the gulf?

Here’s my take – The financial world of the major labels has, for a LONG time, been focused on back catalogue – music that’s already been successful. Reselling something that’s already in the public consciousness is WAY cheaper than marketing new, untested music. Licensing old tracks is also easier, because people know them. And there’s the simple question of scale.

Reality check: for the Majors, the vast majority of the music they will ever release has already been released. Continue reading “Why The Major Labels Love Spotify”

Right, now the subscription is up there, we can have a chat about what it might mean, right?

After all, the word ‘subscription‘ has become somewhat tainted amongst musicians by the conversation around Spotify’s pricing model. Little work seems to have been done to look at what in particular people are listening to on Spotify and the degree to which its impact on sales is asymmetric (sales lost and streams gained not being to the same people) not to mention the whole ‘correlation or causation’ conundrum. But generally, lots of musicians are now thinking subscribing to ‘everything‘ = booo!! hissss!!

So what does it mean to subscribe to just one artist rather than ‘nearly all music‘, and what kind of artists and their listeners are going to benefit from this?

First up, it’s important to acknowledge that this isn’t new. It’s new to Bandcamp, and as a service integrated with the Bandcamp platform, it may well end up being revolutionary, but the idea has evolved from the pioneering work of quite a few people, not least of all (as is so often the case) Kristin Hersh, whose Strange Angels supporters club is exactly this – an annual subscription members club that gives those subscribers access to all kinds of things. Her pricing is tiered, so you can get all kinds of awesome exec perks if you pay a tonne of cash, but for not very much you can get a whole load of music and sometimes cheaper tickets at gigs, things like that. For someone as prolific as Kristin (she has three main projects on the go – her solo work, Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave) it’s the ideal way to not be reliant on the vagaries and speculation of the standard model of

• borrow money,
• make a record,
• hope it sells,
• wait to recoup before doing the next one,
• or just pile up the debt in the hope you get a track on a film soundtrack and clear the decks at some point’ deal…

Continue reading “More (long) thoughts on subscription services.”

There’s one story that’s been circulating a lot over the last few days amongst musicians on social media – “2014 is first year ever with ZERO platinum-certified records” – it tells us that 2014 is (barring some kind of unforseen massive sales surge) the first year ever (ever??? no.) when no single band has had a platinum selling record. In the US. Even though the Frozen soundtrack has sold 3 Million copies.

Meanwhile, 60 songs HAVE sold a million copies in the US.

So what does this tell us? Without some much deeper analysis, not much. Continue reading “Why the ‘no platinum albums’ story in the US probably doesn’t mean the sky is falling.”