In October 2013 The Guardian published an essay by David Byrne under the provocative heading “David Byrne: ‘The internet will suck all creative content out of the world’.” Byrne argues, with support from various musicians, that revenue from streaming music services such as Spotify and Pandora (to say nothing of Beats, Xbox Music, and now Amazon.com) will never be able to sustain musicians across their careers—and that this means death to the livelihoods of musicians and anyone else whose creative work might be accessible through subscriptions or per-use transactions. I differ with Byrne on both conclusions.
“The amounts these services pay per [song] stream is miniscule,” he writes, “their idea being that if enough people use the service those tiny grains of sand will pile up. Domination and ubiquity are therefore to be encouraged.” But nothing says those streams have to come from a single store, even if most of them do today (courtesy of Spotify); a common web standard for playlist sharing would go a long way toward opening up the field of music providers. And the subscription business model—a monthly fee for access to creative content—has been working for TV in various permutations for decades.
One of Byrne’s examples of things he considers unsustainable would be funding all production for movies and TV out of subscriptions to Netflix. According to the Motion Picture Association of America, 172 million people in the U.S. see one or more movie per year in theaters. If each of those moviegoers became a customer of a streaming movie service, paying $8 per month, the movie industry in the U.S. alone would be a $16.5 billion industry—nearly double where it sits today, according to the movie-industry website The Numbers. That’s at $8 every month. What if the Netflix subscription price dropped with volume, to, say, $4 a month? Might Netflix see not twice, but three times the number of subscribers?
Subscription models owe their profitability to scale. If lots of people do it, the numbers work out. If no one does it, subscriptions aren’t profitable—but that doesn’t mean content owners are losing money on the few people who use a given service. Byrne: “In future, if artists have to rely almost exclusively on the income from these services, they’ll be out of work within a year.” This statement assumes current payout rates, current customer adoption levels, and no other forms of music-related income. Byrne seems to think every artist should be able to feed digital bits into Spotify, then sit back and collect dough. He fails to account for sales of CDs, LPs, and t-shirts, concert revenue, licensing, publishing, or placement in movies and TV shows, and dodges one crucial consideration: the need for active, repeat customers across a career. Only a relative few artists in any era can do this, and I’ll bet a bigger percentage of musicians do it today than in any generation past.
So what is the problem?
All indications point to artists being unfairly compensated by current payouts from music services to record companies. Only artists can change how that works, by taking a hard line in the contracts they sign. As I see it, the larger hurdle facing 21st-century musicians is this: Publishing anything is easier than ever. More and more people are producing music, while music listening as an activity remains focused on a handful of well-known artists and titles. The proverbial long tail of songs that sit outside the limelight gets longer by the minute. For variety’s sake, this is good. But the flip side is, any content creator should expect fewer and fewer dedicated ears and eyeballs.
In a given month I play 60 or 70 albums, some of which I own, some of which I borrow from the library, and some of which I have access to through a paid music service. Even if I paid money directly to artists every time I listened, and even if everyone else did the same, there’s no way that every musician who makes records could live off of this—there are simply too many records worth hearing, and too few listens for each. However rare true greatness remains, we’re in the midst of a fecundity of ideas and creativity that’s unparalleled in human history. The only possible result is monetary devaluation of all but the most publicly prized works. It’s artistic inflation. As governments inject physical currency into an economy, the value of that currency drops. So too with artists and intellectuals, art and ideas.
At the dawn of the recording era, millions of people listened to a few thousand recordings. Now thousands of albums see release every month. The mass of things to hear—plays in wait, as it were—grows far more quickly than the store of ready ears ever could. The fact remains that the most popular artists will sell the most deluxe-edition CDs and t-shirts and earn the most listens. This includes the pop star Taylor Swift, who’s selling so many CDs right now, thank you very much, that she can afford to give Spotify listeners the finger. If you’re not Swift, however, or if today’s Swift becomes tomorrow’s Avril Lavigne, diversified income might start looking pretty good. I’m closer to being a David Byrne “super fan” than just about anyone I know. But if he were to pull all of his solo albums from my paid service (which isn’t Spotify), I wouldn’t be going out to buy CDs of Feelings or Look Into the Eyeball, good as they are. I’d be playing my Talking Heads records instead.
Which makes me ask, where’s the sustainability in individual sales, the physical-goods model for creative works that Byrne seems to be clinging to? Artists see one-time gain each time a new song or album meets an individual customer’s bar for purchase, then nothing—until said artist releases something else, and only then if a customer is moved to buy again. How much better for artists to gain with every listen, into perpetuity, not merely from serious fans, but casual fans?
It’s a numbers game, any way you slice it. Let’s be thankful for the many (and still expanding) ways to slice, both for creators and consumers.
[A version of this article appears in issue 25.]
12 November 2014