Should Musicians Boycott Spotify?
A case for the rejection of music streaming services on ethical grounds
So I did a gig recently which was essentially a songwriters showcase event. It was a lowkey, community arts project type of deal with an ‘open mic’ approach. The event aimed to give local musicians a platform to show off their original music and try out their new material.
The event was great and I enjoyed it immensely, both listening to the other artists and performing my own songs to an audience who, by definition, care about songwriting as they were exclusively people who are drawn to this kind of event and wanted to hear new, live music.
I played a selection of my own songs, both young and old, and found the audience to be incredibly receptive and supportive. It was the first gig I’ve played in ages (so long that I can’t remember) where nobody shouted ‘play Wonderwall’.
As I finished off to the greatest sound in the world, rambunctious applause (the narcissist artist’s favourite drug), the MC (who I happen to know relatively well) took to the mic and did her rigmarole; ‘Let’s hear it for Pete Brennan’, and ‘What a great set’, etc.
I started to pack my guitar away as she continued until I heard her say something like, ‘You can find Pete’s music on Spotify’ to which I instinctively (and quite rudely, I must admit) shouted ‘No, you can’t’. Perplexed into silence, more from the abruptness of my interjection than the content of my statement, she looked at me with an inquisitive look on her face, looking for clarification. I reiterated, ‘I’m not on Spotify’, to which she curtly replied ‘Why not? You should be’.
Resisting the temptation to launch into a philosophical lecture that evokes the writings of David Hume and challenging her on the epistemological sin of ‘getting an ‘ought’ from and ‘is’ (which was my first thought I must admit), I realised that we were both standing on stage in awkward silence with the confused audience looking on at this weird spectacle. A standoff between two people who were looking at each other in silence, like two cowboys waiting for the clock bell to strike, signalling that it is time for us to draw our six shooters. Not great entertainment and, admittedly, kind of unprofessional from both of us.
Noticing the dead air and the fact that this was neither the time nor place to explain my ethical objections to streaming services I simply said, ‘It’s a long story’, finished packing away my gear and got the fuck off the stage.
Later, I spoke to the MC, apologised for interrupting her and clarified my position. My explanation was messy, clumsy and long-winded. She understood well enough but it took longer than it should have to articulate my position to her, so, in this article, I will attempt to, as concisely as I can, lay out my ethical objection to Spotify and any of the other streaming services.
Broadly speaking, I believe that the majority of corporate music streaming services operate under a ‘theft by consent’ business model.
A bold statement. Libellous, perhaps. Probably, but who cares anyway as nobody reads my SubStacks.
All the big ones are guilty of this in my estimation but let’s use Spotify as our example.
There is no shortage of articles and think pieces out there that infer that streaming will be the death of music. A quick Google will spit out thousands of opinion pieces from older musicians, creatives and general ‘shakes fists at the clouds’ types stating just that. But it is not just a Ludditian grievance that the old guard holds in face of technological and cultural change anymore, it's real.
As Music Business Worldwide reported in October 2023, Spotify announced and has since implemented a new royalty payment structure for the first quarter of 2024. You can read the full article here; https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-is-changing-its-royalty-model-to-crush-streaming-fraud/ but broadly it suggests it is trying to move to a model that supposedly greater favours ‘working artists’ (Ingham 2023).
They outlined the three points of their plan but for the purposes of this article, we will focus on point 1: ‘Introducing a threshold of minimum annual streams before a track starts generating royalties on Spotify – in a move expected to de-monetize a portion of tracks that previously absorbed 0.5% of the service’s royalty pool’ (Spotify 2023).
This pissed A LOT of people off. But what does it mean?
I recommend the following SubStack article by Chris Dalla Riva as it concisely explains this stuff by answering the question raised by its title, ‘Why is Everyone Mad at Spotify?’
In short, it means that a massive percentage of artists who publish their work on Spotify will never get paid for it. Which artists? Well, the smaller ones. The independent artists. The struggling artists who need to recoup financially from their music more than anyone. This won’t affect Taylor Swift, The Weeknd or Drake, but it will affect the very ‘working musicians’ that Spotify’s initial statement claimed they were aiming to help. This is my grievance.
These megastar artists can and do generate revenue via these platforms, but only because of the volume of streams. According to a tweet from the United Musicians & Allied Workers X page from November 2023, the MAXIMUM monetary amount that any artist could receive in 2023 is $0.003 per stream.
Admittedly this X page has ideological lean in opposition to Spotify and regrettably does not cite a source for this calculation so we have to take it with a pinch of salt. I have however seen this statistic repeated in other sources including the original Music Business Worldwide (Ingham 2023) article and the following article in the Guardian (Krukowski 2023). https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/30/spotify-smaller-artists-wrapped-indie-musicians
As of the second quarter of 2024 however, reportedly two thirds of artists will no longer have access to these meagre royalty figures, as any song streamed under 1000 times in will not qualify. That is MOST songs on Spotify. Most artists who are trying to grow their business incrementally with the hope of one day paying their bills with their music.
So is this because Spotify offers free accounts and allows paying subscribers to stream songs endlessly for the subscription fee, and therefore doesn’t generate much revenue? Well, no. Admittedly there is no way they make enough from subscriptions to pay a dollar per stream like iTunes used to offer a $0.99 download, no one would pay (that much) to listen to a song each time anyway. But that doesn't mean that streaming services cannot be lucrative for the higher ups.
As of May 2024, according to Forbes, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is reportedly worth $4.8 billion dollars so Spotify is by anyone's standards generating a lot of money somehow. That is a fact that many have highlighted in lieu of Ek’s recent comments about the cost of creating (I’m going try to avoid vomiting) ‘content’. (Bleurgh! I failed).
In his tweet from May 29th, 2024, Ek opens with the line ‘Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content’.
You can read his X post here: https://x.com/eldsjal/status/1795871513293320204
This brought a wave of criticism crashing down on him from artists and creatives around the world and he has since addressed his critics on his X feed calling his previous statement ‘too vague’, ‘reductive’ and a ‘clumsy definition of content’. I’d say so, mate.
My favourite response was this one from Singer/Songwriter KT Tunstall.
Another musician who I saw hitting back at Ek’s claim is Sam Buckingham. She is not as well known as Tunstall, (her Facebook profile does have an impressive following of 11,000), but when I read her post, I felt she summed up my feelings perfectly. She represents the very ‘working musician’ that Spotify’s 2024 plan was supposedly aimed at helping. A touring musician who is trying to run a business as a performer and creative artist who would absolutely benefit from the additional income stream of her music being streamed.
In her Facebook post (which you can read in full here: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/vrX6UnC7vagafuya/), she said, ‘Firstly, Daniel’s comment implies that making content is my goal. It is not. Creating work that fully expresses my voice, sharing it with people to (hopefully) have a positive impact, paying my bills & having enough for retirement is my goal. “Content” is one vehicle to (maybe) help me get there’.
This perfectly describes how I felt when I first read the criticism aimed at Ek in that first pile-on. ‘Content’ is a horrible word to describe someone’s life’s work. I believe this is what prompted Ek, in his ‘apology without actually apologising’ to call his original comment ‘reductive’.
Buckinham also highlighted the fact that the business model of Spotify is designed to aid those on Ek’s side of the business, rather than those on the artist side. She continues; ‘Me creating “content” is DANIEL’S goal for me so that his business remains viable’. This is damning and I fear, all too telling of the insidious nature of the business model of streaming services.
Then Buckingham perfectly hits on the point that stuck out most to me when she said; ‘“close to zero” is simply not true. My album DEAR JOHN cost around $20,000 to make. It took three months. By the way, time IS money bc time I spend creating is time I can’t work to earn real life cash’.
Ek’s narrow-minded statement was such an obvious example of what writer Rob Henderson terms as a ‘luxury belief’ in his 2024 book Troubled. (Subscribe to Rob’s SubStack here: https://substack.com/@robkhenderson)
Henderson defines luxury beliefs as ‘ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes’. An example he uses is the ‘defund the police’ movement in the US that was peddled by middle class individuals who lived in nice areas that would never see the negative, downstream effects of such a policy. Instead, they virtue signal the idea as a progressive policy, not seeing that the very ‘oppressed’ people they are campaigning for (from behind their gated communities), live in the very neighbourhoods and are in desperate need of police presence and are the very individuals who are most at risk of being victims of crime when there is no longer police on the streets to uphold law and order.
It is easy to see how Ek, (from his figurative, ivory tower and staring at his 10 figure bank account), could become so detached from the real world that us normal people live in that he would think that the £20,000 that Buckingham spent on producing her album is ‘next to nothing’. But I can think of no reason, beyond empathy, why Ek should give the slightest fuck about us. It’s his prerogative how he runs his business and, philosophically speaking, he has no duty to feel empathy for anyone at all.
Earlier on I described the streaming service model as ‘theft by consent’. What do I mean by that? Well, exactly that. Musicians OPT IN to having their music distributed without compensation. I have some sympathy for the plight of struggling musicians trying to get their voices heard over all the noise but honestly, they have to shoulder some responsibility. Corporations are going to do what they always do and if you allow them to use your ‘content’ [bleurgh] without paying you then of course they are going to.
It may be ethically reprehensible behaviour on the corporations part, but that doesn’t make it any less of a fact, or a reality. It's like walking up to a starving lion and moaning that the infernal creature has the audacity to eat you. Right or wrong, predators exist and if you offer yourself up willingly as prey, then some of the blame rests on you. Some may accuse me of victim blaming but that mentality is part of the problem I fear. The mentality that refuses to accept reality, the fact that bad people who do bad things exist irrespective of what is morally right and will hurt you regardless.
The reason we have laws against things is because people do those things. Legally, you shouldn't have to look up the street for approaching cars when you're about to cross at a pedestrian crossing. The Highway Code stipulates that you have the right of way and all motorists are law bound to stop for you (The Highway Code: Rule 195 & Rule H2). But do you do that? Do you cross without looking? Of course you don’t. You check that they’ve stopped because you know, that no matter how rigorously the law gets enforced, there are always those who are going to break it. Just like there are always con men waiting to rinse you of your hard earned and rightful money. Just like there are always venture capitalists wanting to exploit human desire, ambition and desperation.
But where does that leave us, the artists? Penniless, struggling and destined to give our music away for free? Not as I see it. I implore musicians to vote with their wallets and boycott streaming services completely. As I have said before, I am working on generating musical [gulp] ‘content’ [barf] for my SubStack so I can distribute my music directly to the consumer behind a modest paywall. I’m undecided as to whether I’ll do it on this page or a second, dedicated music page as this page does have a lot of my political baggage attached by now.
Might be worth setting up a new one just for music. In the meantime, fuck Spotify, fuck Daniel Ek and fuck the music industry.
I’ll give the last word to Sam Buckingham, as she once again perfectly and concisely says what I was thinking. ‘So if one platform provides all the world's music to most of the world's people, and the musicians themselves are required to work harder and harder to get that music heard, while earning less and less - well, that’s not a business model to be celebrated. That’s exploitation’ (Buckingham 2024).
You can follow Sam Buckingham here: (Please do) https://www.facebook.com/sambuckinghammusic
Thank you for reading…
Pete Brennan - The Common Centrist
Bravo. I’ve always hated streaming. I’m no longer a professional musician or adjunct professor but I will do all this old lady can do to help destroy these « business models (barf). »
Fight on. ❤️