Last week I published an opinion piece in the Guardian about Spotify’s new minimum for paying out royalties – the subject of a post here on Dada Drummer Almanach a month ago. (You guys get everything first! Thank you for subscribing.) The response has been a bit intense. It reminds me of the first time I wrote about Spotify royalties, all the way back in 2012… not only cause I am once again surprised by the level of interest generated by the topic, but because the specific pushbacks I’ve been getting are almost exactly the same.
These complaints fall into a few categories - there are the, “You don’t know anything about the real music business” ones. The “90s are over get used to it” ones. The “Just don’t use streaming then if you don’t like it” ones. But in a way they all boil down to essentially this, which came in via the Guardian comments section:
Something along these lines is always among the responses I get to any critique I publish about streaming – the problem must be with my music, because if more people liked it I’d earn more. How can I deny it? But what this misses is the issue of scale. Not all music is meant for all people – that’s pop music, and that’s not what I make. Neither do most musicians. Music that isn’t pop is actually a thing – it’s not just unpopular pop. There are innumerable genres of music that don’t attempt to speak to everyone at once. Streaming technology can serve all these musics, but the way it is currently designed for compensation rewards only music that can function “at scale.” That leaves a lot of music without a sustainable platform in the current technological moment. And yet that music needs to be sustained – for different audiences’ sake, as well as the musicians who make it.
I could argue with these reply guys, but what I’ve learned is they don’t care about my answers any more than they care about my music. So perhaps a better response is simply to share more music for which they also probably assume there is “no audience.”
Regular readers of this newsletter know that at the end of nearly every entry, I include a link to some music I’ve been listening to. That means this is all music that has an audience. I can personally guarantee it.
When I put the various 2022 links together, it made for a good weird playlist, my “wrapped” if you will. That seems an exercise worth repeating – so here’s a 2023 list of similarly necessary music. You’ll find experimental cello music, group improvisation, post punk, folk song, outsider classical composition, ambient electronics, and even some sad bastard music along the lines of my own brand of indie rock.
When the Roses Come Again, by Daniel Bachman
Matana Roberts, Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden…
Night Visiting Songs, by Charlotte Grieg
Don Cherry, Eternal Now
I Am Not There Anymore, by The Clientele
My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, by Anohni and the Johnsons
Dredd Foole & The Din, Songs in Heat
Picture of Bunny Rabbit, by Arthur Russell
Archangel Hill by Shirley Collins
Jerusalem, by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
Since Time Is Gravity, by Natural Information Society
Scree, Jasmine on a Night in July
Širom, Rural Underground
Under an Endless Sky, by Dorothy Moskowitz & The United States of Alchemy
"Music that isn’t pop is actually a thing – it’s not just unpopular pop." Brilliant.
I hate when people use the "make better music" comment. There was a time when a variety of artists were given similar levels of exposure, allowing people to choose for themselves, and resulting in "not-pop" reaching an audience. (Like him or not, there's a reason why most people have, at least, heard of Frank Zappa). The playing field should be leveled out. If you play a great song for 10 people, chances are all 10 will enjoy it. If you play an uninteresting piece of garbage to a million people, well, only 11 people have to like it for it to outsell the great song. Simple mathematics. Taylor makes billions, not because she "makes better music", but because her shows are full of people who have never been exposed to Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebr. Am I suggesting all Swifties would become Gebr fans? Of course not, but if only 1000 people did, she'd possibly make a couple of Spotify cents and she could purchase that box of kleenex she's always wanted.