Musicians push back on dwindling payments from streaming services

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: For tens of millions of Americans, it’s a no-brainer, nearly every song ever recorded for just about $12 a month or free if you don’t mind the ads.

But while the streaming giant Spotify has conquered the music industry, many of those responsible for the music on the platform, the artists themselves, say they’re getting a raw deal.

It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Woman: Chappell Roan.

(Cheering)

Geoff Bennett: At this year’s Grammys, a plea from one of pop’s biggest stars, Chappell Roan, in her speech accepting the award for best new artist.

Chappell Roan, Musician: I told myself, if I ever won a Grammy and I got to stand up here, I would demand that labels and the industry profiting millions of dollars off of artists would offer a livable wage and health care, especially to developing artists.

(Cheering)

Geoff Bennett: But you don’t often hear it on music’s biggest stage. It’s a common refrain. Despite record profits and nearly a decade of sustained financial growth across the industry at large, many musicians say they’re being left behind and that the rise of streaming is to blame.

Damon Krukowski, Musician, Galaxie 500: It has become enormously more difficult to make a living as a professional musician since streaming entered the marketplace.

Geoff Bennett: Damon Krukowski has been a professional musician since the late 1980s. He’s one of the founders of the influential indie rock band Galaxie 500.

Damon Krukowski: For an independent artist like myself, I never really needed or participated in the mass market. But I still had a career, a career that supported me and the labels I worked with.

Geoff Bennett: He’s also a member of the UMAW, United Musicians and Allied Workers, a group of thousands of artists organizing to change working conditions in the music industry. He says the current system isn’t working for the vast majority of his peers.

Damon Krukowski: What’s changed is that, with the concentration in streaming and the concentration in the marketplace to just three companies, Spotify, Apple and Amazon, we have no way around it. We have no other ways to reach our audience and no other ways to market and sell our music.

Geoff Bennett: Twenty years ago, more than 90 percent of revenue from recorded music came from physical album sales. But, today, streaming accounts for 84 percent of that money. And Spotify, with an estimated 103 million American users, nearly twice as many as competitors like Amazon or Apple Music, dominates the game.

And that has big implications for how artists get paid.

Liz Pelly, Author, “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist” Streaming services don’t pay per stream,and they also don’t pay artists directly.

Geoff Bennett: Liz Pelly is a music journalist. She recently published a book on the company, “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.”

She says the way that Spotify pays means your subscription dollars don’t go directly to the artists you listen to. Instead, they fan out across all music on the app by total listening percentage. And even that money goes to rights holders firsts, like record labels, before it gets to the artists.

In 2020, that averaged out to about .003 cents per stream, which means a musician would need roughly 800,000 monthly plays to equal a full-time $15-an-hour job.

Liz Pelly: The reality is that the vast majority of that revenue that has passed along to the global recorded music business ends up being passed along to the major record labels.

Geoff Bennett: And it’s not just independent musicians who say they’re getting squeezed. In 2014, Taylor Swift briefly withdrew her entire catalog from the platform, saying in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free.”

And other big names from neo soul pioneer India.Arie to Radiohead’s Thom Yorke have done the same. Pelly’s book also unpacks the other ways Spotify has shifted music culture, like through its influential editorial playlists and personally tailored algorithms that can make or break a song. She compares some of the company’s tactics to payola, the now illegal practice of secretly paying for song plays on commercial radio stations, though Spotify says its internal marketing tools give artists a chance to reach larger audiences and don’t guarantee plays.

Roland Pemberton, Rapper: If you don’t get on one of those playlists, basically, nobody’s going to hear your song.

Geoff Bennett: Roland Pemberton is a Canadian rapper who performs under the name Cadence Weapon. His 2021 album, “Parallel World,” won the Polaris Prize, Canada’s award for best album of the year.

Roland Pemberton: And it’s become this thing where every label and artist in the world is fighting for these few spots, how many monthly listeners you have, how many streams you have, how many followers you have on social media. It’s — these metrics have become extremely impactful, when they didn’t exist before.

Geoff Bennett: In a statement, a spokesperson for Spotify said it has paid out more than $60 billion to the recording industry since the business began. Spotify also said half of last year’s $10 billion payment, a record for a single retailer, went to artists signed to independent record labels.

“That,” the company said, “is a far cry from the pre-streaming era, when a radio station only had room to spin the top 40 tracks. It is an indisputable fact that with each year more artists are making more money on Spotify. The number of artists generating at least $1,000, $10,000, $100,000, even $10 million per year has at least tripled since 2017.”

But musicians like Sadie Dupuis of the band Speedy Ortiz say artists just don’t see enough of it.

Sadie Dupuis, Musician, Speedy Ortiz: It’s really a tiny, tiny portion of a cent per stream. It doesn’t add up in a substantive way in the way that a large amount of record sales might or a sold-out concert in front of quite a lot of fans might. Most of the income really comes from the live music sphere. It comes from creating and selling merchandise. Sometimes, that’s records. Often, it’s T-shirts.

Geoff Bennett: Which is why she and others like Krukowski are advocating for an alternative, the Living Wage for Musicians Act, introduced last year. The bill would create a new revenue stream via attacks on streaming platforms and a new fee for subscribers, which would then pay out to musicians directly until they reached a cap.

It’s based on a similar payment system Congress established for satellite radio.

Damon Krukowski: It would be a game changer for musicians in the industry. It would rectify the situation where we are not being paid directly at all for the principal distribution of our recorded music. And it would make the profession of music so much more sustainable for so many more people.

Geoff Bennett: The bill faces stiff headwinds, but Krukowski says he thinks it’s a bipartisan issue, since he says music has no political party.

In the meantime, Pemberton says, those who want a different future should look to themselves to build it.

Roland Pemberton: I really think we just need to get back to a more DIY spirit, a more community-led situation where we’re buying each other’s records again, we’re going to each other’s shows. I think people just need to divest as much as they can.