Recently Neil Young and other famous artists pulled their music off of Spotify in protest of Spotify broadcasting a podcast full of misinformation about health issues. Spotify is in the business of collecting huge amounts of personal data about customers and monetizing it. They do this using music streaming.

Many independent artists have been complaining about Spotify for a long time. Spotify executives have said in interviews and in court that Spotify pays artists "more fairly than traditional radio," yet many independent artists seem to be pissed off at Spotify for how little they pay for our content. Why are we pissed off and if those statements are not true why have Spotify execs not been sued for libel? This question reminds me of a scene in Star Wars, when Obi Wan tells Luke Skywalker that his father is Darth Vader. Luke responds that his aunt and uncle lied to him, and Obi Wan replies, "they did not lie- what they said was true from a certain point of view. When your father became Vader the part of him that was Anakin Skywalker died."

Spotify can make the statements they do because devoid of context they are true. One spin on the radio can be heard by millions of people at the same time, whereas a Spotify stream is one person listening once. When you compare the payment for these two things, the statement is true. The problem is context. Radio caused sales of physical product. Literally a song getting played on the radio drove people to go into a record store or eventually on-line and buy a CD or record. Spotify and other streaming services, on the other hand, made physical sales obsolete. With radio you heard a song whenever the music director played it but with Spotify the listener makes a playlist and hears the song whenever they want, just like playing the CD (but of course with much lower audio quality.) Why would anyone pay for something once they could get it for free? It is all about context...and it is not the consumer's fault or the artists' fault...

To get a meaningful number of plays on Spotify, artists hire playlist influencers. The cost of this is pretty similar to the cost of hiring radio promotional people, but radio promotion drove sales thereby earning artists real money, whereas millions of Spotify plays earns artists nearly nothing, money-wise. So we're pissed off. We complain. We also miss albums with credits and art work, etc, but we want you to hear our music so we go along...

Ok- I'm gonna go spin a vinyl Neil Young record. Keep on rockin' in the free world Neil, and good on you for standing up to the man!

Monday, February 14th 2022