Listening to music
After over a decade of relying on streaming services, I recently made the switch to buying one album a month, and using YouTube to stream everything else I want to listen to.
Collecting & listening to music
I was trying to recall the last time I truly enjoyed the streaming experience. It was in 2012 when I first started using Spotify. It felt incredible to to play any song I wanted to without having to spend time looking for it and downloading it.
Over time, I fell into a habit of either listening to the top tracks by an artist, a platform managed playlist or just shuffling through my liked songs. I also largely stopped paying attention to new releases, trusting the streaming platform to surface them. This was very different from the pre-streaming days when I tracked new music releases, and had to actively choose what music to download and listen to because of bandwidth and storage constraints.
Earlier this year, I started listening to entire albums in order - without skipping any tracks - and I realized that I was enjoying the music more. And that I was understanding and appreciating the albums on a deeper level. I found myself looking up stories about artists, albums and the lyrics more often. This led me to to consider buying albums instead of paying for streaming.
Two months in, I'm enjoying the intentionality and friction of the whole process. Everything from picking the album I want to purchase, actually buying it, downloading the album to my computer, moving it to my phone and listening to it on a local media player. Eventually, I know that I will run into storage limits and spend time deciding what albums need to be on a secondary device but I'm looking forward to making those choices.
I also like having my own copy of the music. And not being dependent on the continued existence of a streaming company and their ability to renew licensing deals. Switching to a different service or to buying isn't too hard now but I might struggle to deal with this when I'm 99.
Artist Payouts
While thinking through this switch, I also did a little digging into how much artists are getting paid. It's shockingly small according to every source I looked at. Recently published numbers on Headphone Honesty suggest that Spotify pays out $0.0032 per stream, while Apple Music pays $0.01.
According to Statista, the average person is streaming music for about 25 hours a month which corresponds to an artist payout of $2 if they are using Spotify. So we have a large number of people that are paying $10 per month for Spotify, $2 of this going to the artists while Spotify gets to pocket the rest.
For my own listening—about 100 hours a month—that’s around 1,900 streams, generates about $8 for the artists each month. By comparison, I’m now spending $15 on an album, which generates about $11 for the artist. Even at my relatively high hours of listening, buying still yields a bigger payoff for the musician than using Spotify and most other streaming services.
How much should artists earn from each stream and album sale? I don't have a great answer but clearly $8 per month is definitely better than $2 or $8. If you want to keep streaming, consider using Qobuz or Tidal if they are available. They both pay more per stream and offer better sound quality.
Ghost Music
Another concern I have with streaming companies is them pushing so called "ghost music" in their never ending quest to grow profits. Liz Pelly delves into this issue in her recent article for Harper's, The Ghosts in the Machine.
By opting for the convenience of streaming we're supporting companies that are actively harming musicians ability to make a living and the quality of music being produced.
Playlist filler and mindless listening
According to a source close to the company, Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.
Music discovery & muzak
Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living. Or perhaps the company was aware that this project to cheapen music contradicted so many of the ideals upon which its brand had been built. Spotify had long marketed itself as the ultimate platform for discovery—and who was going to get excited about “discovering” a bunch of stock music? Artists had been sold the idea that streaming was the ultimate meritocracy—that the best would rise to the top because users voted by listening. But the PFC program undermined all this. PFC was not the only way in which Spotify deliberately and covertly manipulated programming to favor content that improved its margins, but it was the most immediately galling. Nor was the problem simply a matter of “authenticity” in music. It was a matter of survival for actual artists, of musicians having the ability to earn a living on one of the largest platforms for music. PFC was irrefutable proof that Spotify rigged its system against musicians who knew their worth.
Notes:
1. The numbers cited here are for the US. The payout for both albums and streaming varies by country.
2. Artists rarely keep the full payout from either streaming or sales—labels take a share.
3. Major labels can be just as predatory as streaming platforms, often seeking bigger cuts at artists’ expense.