The Spotify Problem

Brandon Lucas Green writes about Spotify from an indie musician’s perspective and his piece contains some useful insights. Green points out that the service is a much better value proposition for musicians who are already popular and on major labels.

Artists living in a late-stage capitalist society (ie. basically all living artists) need to accept that Spotify is not for them. This is a for-profit business whose biggest cost source is royalty payments to artists. The only ones they cannot avoid are major-label artists, due to the outsized influence of the 3 major labels (oh and Tencent Holdings, the massive Chinese conglomerate, which has a stake in both Spotify, Warner Music Group, and (full disclosure) Epic Games which formerly owned Bandcamp). Therefore, it is not a surprise that the labels and Spotify peacefully coexist in a rat-king of entangled investments, including from private equity.

Though he acknowledges the many downsides to Spotify, Green concludes that it’s still better for an indie musician to keep their music on the service. Even when giving people links to Bandcamp, they still want to get their music on Spotify, if that’s where they habitually listen.

It’s not surprising to me. My youngest son listens to the free tier of Spotify rather than our family Qobuz subscription. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I also think part of the problem with discovery is that there is so much music out there. The fragmentation of the music scene is immense. It’s not like people gather around the water cooler to talk about the latest Beatles album these days.¹ I’ve read through many a year-end “best of” music list and, with the exception of a few common picks, most are entirely different from each other. To be honest, though I spend a fair amount of time reading and keeping up with music, I still see a lot of music I have never heard of in just about every list I come across. Some of it I might even like, but who has the time to go through everything?

1. Much of “pop” music is so offensive these days that discussing it in the workplace would be a precarious proposition anyway. Try mentioning some of the lyrics from Chappell Roan or even Katy Perry and you would probably get hauled into the office of any self-respecting HR department. ↩︎