A worthless waste of time, so give it to me free

Vacancy

Something sure to irritate and offend you, I'm afraid: an article written by someone named Joakim Book, Music Has No Economic Value. It's all about how music has no economic value, because Spotify devalued it. 

Book writes: 

The rhythmical vibrations that move into my ear canal as I write this—

...these guys like to reduce music to that— empty data, oxygen, little more than an atmospheric disturbance. How could it have value? 

—depend on a combination of incredible technical and economic features before they can successfully reach my brain. Set aside the two devices under my control that make the entire thing happen on my end (phone plus headphones), equally crucial is the streaming service (Spotify) and the hardware in their business that supply these sounds to me at the click of a button. (Let’s also ignore the background conditions of electricity supply and internet connectivity, and the general wealth and division of labor of my society that allows me to do this rather than eke out a subsistence farming a hostile Earth.) 

Yes, incredible things are being done by the people who make his smart phone, headphones, his very wonderful and crucial streaming service, and a whole lot of other infrastructure. Many, many wonderful valuable people make it possible for him to fill his useless ears with whatever the hell people like him listen to [see below, and prepare for a shock]. 

Without the producers and musicians who created this specific song, I wouldn’t have had anything to listen to and all these other adjacent products and services lose some of their appeal. 

Music: somewhat more appealing than just listening to dead air through headphones, he conceded. 

Below all of this sits an economic relationship between all of us that permits this pleasant and concentration-enhancing consumption to take place. Modern global capitalism truly is astonishing.

Music: a pleasant and concentration-aiding enhancement to your meaningless mechanical existence in service of modern global capitalism. 

There is plenty of economic value going on here, ultimately because I as a consumer value the state of affairs that comes from it enough to hand over other valuable resources to those who provide me with all of this. Hence I purchased the devices that let me do it, and pay the monthly fee to Spotify. In the background, they kick back some money to whoever maintains their servers as well as the artists who made the songs I’m consuming.

Lots of very valuable services being provided there. And my $7 monthly subscription which gives me virtual ownership of all the music in the world— astronomically below cost, because even Spotify itself only turned a profit for the first time this year— also, in a gesture of unfathomable beneficence, goes to pay even the artists who created the content at their own expense. The Spotify is generous.  

But the individual song that currently streams directly into my consciousness (“The Hymn of Nivoria,” by NIVORO) has no economic value- 

-perfectly illustrated at the end of its three minutes and seven seconds: Another song (“Your Gravity,” by Somna) takes its place. 

 

After that, another and another and another until the playlist with all my favorite songs repeats — but even if it didn’t, I could keep going until I exhausted Spotify’s 100-million-plus songs (which would apparently take me some 300 years). I run out of patience, energy, or even life before I run out of songs. Ergo, the marginal song has no economic value for me. If I didn’t listen to this one, I’d listen to another.

It's a novel argument, that the music industry creates more music than I can ever listen to, therefore the product is valueless. Apply this same reasoning to cars, candy bars, or toilet paper to comprehend its staggering inanity.  

It is also very important to this person's ideological project that music be non-specific. Spotify provides an unending river of stuff to go in my undiscriminating head holes, why should I value any individual item?   

If, for whatever reason, “Hymn of Nivoria” had never been created or its creator had legally withheld it from Spotify’s catalog I would merely have consumed another, similar song. No big deal. 

Yes, not all songs are the same, and I do suffer some marginal loss from never having heard Hymn of Nivoria, just as humanity as a whole would be shortchanged had Mozart never been born. But not really: We would have just listened to and admired something else.

Mozart is just a trademark to this guy. I don't know why he bothers conceding to bleeding reality that not all sounds are the same, just to say well, they really are all the same.  

The specious reasoning is: if McDonalds didn't exist I could just go to Jack In The Box. Therefore McDonalds hamburgers should be free. And Jack In The Box. All hamburgers.

If marginal songs don’t have economic value, then their creators (i.e., musicians) are also disposable, a fact that is quickly dawning on the industry as music creation becomes yet another domain for large language models to conquer. Jeremy Engle for The New York Times asks the same thing: “Will AI Replace Pop Stars?” 

And oh my God, what a glorious day that will be, when the all-conquering language models rightfully expel humans from every corner of capitalistic endeavor... except the one this guy clings to, with his little tech propagandistic blog posts. But he left a logical gap here, from music having infinitesimal value (see below) to it having no value, and transferring that from the musical product to the person who made it. 

Strangely, it is also very important that music be made by people, and not business entities— which, in economic terms, it is. Individual humans are almost as devalued in this belief system as music is. Business entities exist and have rights. So music must be made by undeserving, no-rights having people. 

Economically speaking, the pennies* the musicians earn per stream land somewhere between donations and rent-seeking. 

* - Actually Spotify pays between 3-4 tenths of a single penny per stream for tracks exceeding a 1000 stream minimum threshold.   

So, he is saying: Musicians, at best you are a beggar, at worst you are an encroaching exploiter, intervening between your music and its rightful listener with your demands for dirty money. These guys think they get to decide who gets money in this economic system, like they already claimed it.   

I don't know why these psychopathic artist-hating freaks are always Swedish. Maybe they all live in the same apartment in Stockholm and infest each other's brains full time, intellectualizing about why they should get to profit off music for free. Sorry Sweden— I don't imagine there are a lot of them. 500 years ago cats like this would have occupied themselves devising ingenious methods of torture. Today they write this kind of stuff and fantasize about turning their brains into a microchip. 

It all seems disturbing and weird because it is. Humans are repelled by this stuff. It's corporate propaganda servicing one narrow field of high tech industry, and the would-be oligarch human deformities that inhabit it. People like this dream of their money-spewing auto-jerkoff perpetual motion machine— software creating its own music endlessly for other software to listen to, lavishly spewing itself with software currency it invented. But human culture endures in the small way it always has. 

Except it's not that small. There are still way more of us. Their hubris and their cluelessness about what humans want and need will be their end. 

POSTSCRIPT: Spotify, having annihilated the music business as it once was, has decided it can't make enough money giving away all the music for free, and that it therefore does not want to be in the music business any more. Since spending money to develop and promote artists would be an absurdity to them (see above), they will instead give a quarter of a billion dollars to sweating right wing gashead Joe Rogan to shower the planet with addled inflammatory gibberish.  

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Ha, I got self-conscious about my vitriol and toned down some of my language slightly. They don't call them rants for nothing. I'm just enjoying myself; language is a fun instrument for me, and I'll load it the hell up when I find a deserving target, like this particular creep. 

Laughable myth, or laughable math?

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So here we have a piece called The 17 Most Laughable Myths Of The Music Industry, by blogger Ari Herstand. It's mostly OK, except for laughable myth number 3, which is about streaming:

3) Streaming Is Bad For Music [to be clear, that's a myth, according to the premise of the piece- tb]

A CD or download sale is treated equally no matter how great the album is. It’s a one time payment never to be earned on again. Contrast that with streaming. If a song is great it will get played over and over again for years and years. Earning MORE than just a single sale ever could. Streaming pays less initially, but much much more in the long run – if the music is good of course.

Laughable myth number 10 is also relevant:

10) Record Sales Matter 

He goes on to say that CD sales are “over”, whatever that means. Since he phrased this as specifically CD sales vs. streaming equation, I want to look at the economics involved, and the style of consumption required for streaming income to replace album sales income. Obviously it's more complex than that, but framing it this way was his idea, not mine.

We'll assume one album purchase per customer; and that a CD has ten songs on it, and they sell for $10 each— the basic reality for independent artists.


First: Hold on, an album purchase is not necessarily a one time payment— there are a number of records of which I've bought multiple copies, either because they got lost or broken, or because I liked it so much I gave it as a gift, or because a new format became available. “If the music is good”, people may well buy multiple copies. But from here on out, we'll assume one CD purchase per release per customer.


Second: Spotify pays around $.007 per play; so to earn our $10 from that customer, we need about 1425 plays, or about 142 plays per track. If they only really like three tracks, they'll have to listen to each track 425 times each. But the author says our compensation will now be amortized over “years and years”; to get our $10 within, say, ten years (while hoping our royalties are indexed to inflation— probably not), the customer will basically have to listen to the album fourteen times a year, every year.

Of course, you have the rest of both of your lives to get 142 complete plays, assuming Spotify still exists, and has not gone to a zero-compensation model. You may never get to 142, meaning you are a net loser for that customer, or you could just as easily get 143 plays from that customer before your death, in which case, cha-ching, streaming has paid off!


Third: Yours is not the only record in the world. Other people need to get paid, too. If an average music fan owns smallish collection of 200 CDs, averaging about 40 minutes long, in order for those artists to get paid, that individual has to listen to over 18,900 hours of music on Spotify— about six hours a day, every day, for eight and a half years. For the new economy to work better than the old one, as advertised, everyone has to do that— this exceptionally committed level of real consumption has to become the norm.


Fourth: We can assume that is an indeterminate number of other people will be streaming our stuff, who never would have bought a CD— they're contributing, too. We can count them as “helping” your committed customers reach their 1425 plays, though in fact they'll still be out there listening even if we don't abandon traditional hard formats. You'll need a lot of them to make up for, say, 500 CDs you won't be selling. The catch is, if you're attracting a whole lot of random listeners, many of them would have gone ahead and bought the CD, so you'll need that many more random listeners to help compensate for all those CDs not purchased. It's not an entirely realistic equation, but it illustrates the core problem, that getting paid places too much of a time burden on your fans, which can't be compensated by random semi-interested listeners.


Fifth: If Spotify becomes the way music is consumed by individuals, everyone, regardless of their commitment, means, and style of consumption, is moved to the same system of just paying nothing, or a very low flat rate, to a streaming service in exchange for unlimited music. The disposable income they were spending on albums is now going someplace else. Maybe they'll spend it on something music-related, maybe not— but now music people have to figure out how to get them to spend it on music again. That's the reality when there are changes in the business, but make no mistake that it is only happening to benefit two or three large, wealthy companies— it's not some impersonal, implacable “the future.” It's just some guys trying to make money by devaluing our end product.


Sixth: About this little barb “if the music is good”— suggesting that if you're not cleaning up in streaming, it must be because your music sucks too badly to deserve compensation: people buy CDs for all kinds of reasons. They liked your other records, they liked it when they previewed it in the store, they're part of your local fan base, they saw you play, liked you, and wanted to support you. Those are all excellent reasons to spend $10-15, and those customers are getting a good value. Probably they don't all listen to your CD 142+ times; very few people listen to anything 142 times. Reducing it to strictly a pay by number of hours listened equation means that all of those people who liked you enough to buy your product now have to put in a whole lot of listening hours for you to get paid. If that doesn't happen to be the way they consume music, we're just sacrificing that income.


Let's end with a lame zinger: The idea that streaming, as it is currently structured, is going to replace hard media purchases for independent artists may be the true laughable myth.