MUSIC: Joanna Newsom Attacks Spotify

I like Joanna Newsom a lot.  Joanna Newsom is cool.

Joanna Newsom is also the latest artist to complain about streaming eating into her bank account – she specifically mentions Spotify, but her music isn’t available on any streaming service.

 

The lovely Joanna Newsom

After some typically eccentric comparisons to bananas she said:

“Spotify is like a villainous cabal of major labels. The business is built from the ground up as a way to circumvent the idea of paying their artists. The major labels were not particularly happy with the fact that as the royalty money dwindled more and more, their portion of the percentage split agreed upon in their licensing agreement got smaller and smaller.”

Now she does have a point – but unfortunately, fairly or not, these complaints from artists are beginning to annoy music fans.

Essentially the problem for artists is that Spotify pay all the royalties, the labels take a massive cut, and the artist gets a fraction.  Spotify responded to Newsom’s complaint by tweeting that they pay 70% of their revenue in royalties to labels, $3 billion to date.  They make the point – and I believe it’s a fair one – that the problem lies with the artists’ contracts.

Who would’ve thought it, the music industry screwing over artists?

And that’s the point – it’s the industry screwing them over.  It’s not us.  I read a rant like that and my gut reaction is “well, what do you expect me to do about it?”  Or more succinctly, “boo hoo”.

Artists need to start getting their managers to renegotiate contracts with the labels instead of washing their dirty linen in public because it’s not a good look for them.  It’s like when bankers complain about not getting big enough bonuses – it pisses off the larger part of society that are struggling on minimum wages and hiking rent prices (soon to be exacerbated in the UK with the loss of tax credits but that’s another story altogether…)

Home Streaming Is Killing Music?

The fact is people who pay for music are going to go for the most cost-effective option.  If you have to live on a tight budget, music is going to come under the ‘luxury item’ category.  I used to spend a fortune on music, even though I was shopping in discount places like Fopp.  But I couldn’t really afford to do that, to the point where my love of music was getting me into financial trouble.  Spotify seemed like a good compromise – paying for music without pirating, and at the same time actually staying in the black (well, sometimes).

So when people I respect and admire – Thom Yorke is another – come out in force against streaming, it doesn’t make me think “right on, tell it like it is”.  It makes me think they don’t understand my situation, or that of a lot of their fans.  It especially seems like a U-turn from Yorke, who was willing to let people pay whatever they felt was fair for ‘In Rainbows’ in 2009.  Well Thom, a lot of people have decided that £9.99 a month is fair given their circumstances, and your response is to have a little moan and take all your music away from them.

As far as I’m concerned it’s not a good look.  People who are streaming are paying for music legally – it’s not realistic to tell customers they should pay more.  Because frankly, there’s a significant amount of those customers who will call your bluff and go back to torrents.  Look at this comic from The Oatmeal – it’s about television rather than music, but the principle’s the same.

This is all reminiscent of the ‘home taping is killing music’ scare of the 80s.  But this time it’s not the big bosses (‘The Man’), it’s the artists who we like to think of as being on our side.  Like I say, I’m not saying artists don’t have a point about being ripped off, but they need to take this up with their labels and managers instead of slagging off the streaming companies because when they do that the implication is that people shouldn’t be streaming.  Which means that they are blaming their own fans, that somehow it’s our fault.  It paints the user as the bad guy, forgetting how much we actually have to pay even for downloads, let alone CDs (and ticket prices, and all that shiny pricey merchandise…)

Not engaging with streaming is starting to make artists look out of touch.  Streaming as a medium is staying.  If Spotify closed down tomorrow (and they don’t make a profit, so who knows?) that wouldn’t change.  Apple Music has further legitimised it as the future, as downloads from iTunes slowly and softly vanish away.  Artists need to deal with it in a more positive way, at least in public, or risk alienating their audience.

PS Joanna Newsom's album, Divers, is out on Friday.  I've pre-ordered it because I like her.  But there are going to be an awful lot of people out there who will be torrenting it and perhaps her entire back catalogue.  I don't condone that in the slightest.  But it is a fact that that is what will happen.  Attack those people Joanna.