Has Spotify changed how we listen to music?
Introduction
Everything is free now
That's what they say
Everything I ever done
Gonna give it away
Someone hit the big score
They figured it out
But we're gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn't pay
Not my words, but those of the country singer Gillian Welch. The song was originally written in the Napster era but has been rediscovered and literally covered during the Spotify era by Phoebe Bridgers, Father John Misty and Courtney Barnett.
But is all the opprobrium heaped on Spotify by musicians fair? And how about the listener? A complaint you often hear is that it’s changed our relationship with music. Again, is that true or a myth?
It’s time for a medium sized dive.
So, Spotify was launched in 2006 by the Swedes Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzton. As at May 2024 it has 615 million monthly active users who can access 100 million songs and 6 million podcasts (including this one) and is responsible for over a third of the global music streaming market. It currently adds 40,000 new songs every day. Users can search for music based on artist, album and genre and can create, edit, and share playlists. It is the 47th most popular website in the world.
Unlike physical or download sales, which pay artists a fixed price per song or album sold, Spotify pays royalties based on the number of artist streams as a proportion of total songs streamed. It distributes about 70% of its total revenue to rights holders, which in practice usually means record labels, who then pay artists based on individual agreements. We will soon be discussing the fairness or otherwise of this system.
The insight which has enabled Spotify to succeed can, as often, be stated very simply. It is Customers First. Sounds obvious until you consider the pre-Spotify world. Your choices were the illegal options of peer-to-peer streaming. Pandora, where you couldn’t control what music was played. Or iTunes where you had to purchase the songs to listen to them.
What if, Spotify’s founders asked, you paid a subscription to have all the music all the time? But we should now reflect 18 years later on how that insight played out.
The Remuneration Issue
If you do any research into the effects of Spotify on listening habits, you immediately become engulfed by a tsunami of highly emotive opinions regarding how artists are paid. So, I’ve tried to take the heat out of the argument as much as possible and stick to the facts. However, we all have our biases when we believe we’re being objective, so apologies in advance.
Some people take the view that Spotify is immoral because they pay musicians such a tiny margin. It’s true that the margin an artist receives seems pitiful – you basically get $2.38 for every 1,000 streams which sounds like a rather small sum.
But there are other sides to the story. I’m on Spotify and don’t expect to get paid by them for downloads at all. One key difference with my line of business is that playing an instrument is far more of an actual skill than talking. But perhaps also with podcasts there’s no history of paying for them. By contrast, once recorded music came in a hundred or so years ago, musicians had a good run of charging for shellac, then vinyl, then cassettes, then CDs, then MP3s briefly. So, musicians got used to packaging their music up and selling it.
You don’t have to be on Spotify as an artist and some artists aren’t, even major ones. It’s not mandatory. And people don’t seem to stay away for long. Taylor Swift left and came back. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell left because Joe Rogen was on it, but they’re back now too. It seems that no one can afford not to be on Spotify.
Now what Spotify does do for artists is provide a highly convenient platform for listeners to explore their music, then potentially go to gigs, purchase merchandise, physical CDs and vinyl, and tell their friends, all of which are in the artists’ interest. Artists can become accessible in a way that would have been harder pre-Spotify via tools such as “Fans also like” for other bands. Previously you were relying on the music press, trusted DJs, or friend whose opinions you valued.
It's also worth remembering what immediately preceded Spotify. That wasn’t the world of 14.99 CDs. It was the wild west world of Napster and Limewire, when everything really was for free. Musical income figures.
However, again, smaller artists point out that Spotify download scores are now used by venues to negotiate their pay down.
So much for the artists’ remuneration. I’ve alluded to the view that from a listeners’ point of view, Spotify seems a vast improvement on what went before. But is it? Let’s explore further.
A New Disposability
My parents-in-law live in Kenya. When we lived in England, we would go to visit them once a year or so. Driving out of Nairobi Airport, the sight of Marabou storks on the telegraph poles and the iridescent superb starlings immediately caught the eye. Had they been spotted in Balham, a fleet of twitchers would have immediately descended on that suburb. But as it was, the locals largely ignored them and even as a visitor you rapidly became accustomed to their presence. Because they weren’t rare, they were less valued.
To continue with the bird theme for a moment, the rarest bird in Australia is the night parrot, the holy grail for birders. But up close it looks like a rather unremarkable fat budgerigar.
To draw the point of comparison, there is a line of thinking which says that when music is inaccessible, the arduous process of discovery makes you work harder at appreciating what you get. From my point of view, clicking on Spotify is preferable to setting out for a record shop on the bus in the rain and gambling paying 15 quid for an album from which I’ve heard one track. But not for everyone. Let’s hear from social media commentator Stevie B Demille.
The key difference is that if you wanted something you had to buy it - and having bought it you were motivated to pay attention to it, give it a chance with multiple listens. Those first twenty or so albums that I owned myself have stayed with me for decades, just because they were all I had, so I listened to them over and over again. I get the feeling that is an experience lost to those newly discovering music today, and if I'm right then I genuinely feel sorry for them, because having access to EVERYTHING means paradoxically that you don't really get to intimately know anything.
I definitely look back fondly on Three Imaginary Boys by The Cure and Setting Sonsby The Jam when they were two of the seven albums I owned in my embryonic collection of vinyl records. Other albums, like Entertainment! by the Gang of Four and Metal Box by PIL I recorded from the Herbert Art Gallery Lending library and played till the cassette tape snapped. I had a friend who had a tape-mending machine but the tape was always a bit wonky after that.
Then again, I’ve played Boat Songs by M J Lenderman and Long Leg by Dry Cleaning all the way through, apart from the last song on the Lenderman album which I skip, and they were both released in the last couple of years. And I do that on Spotify. Also I can listen to Spotify wherever I want.
From a Guardian article titled “Fans quitting Spotify to save their love of music”come this quote.
“Taking the extra step to load it on to my phone, or the extra step to flip over the tape, or put the CD on in the car, it feels like something that I’m doing, rather than something I’m receiving,” says Wendy Eisenberg, a musician and teacher. “And that sense of agency makes me a more dedicated and involved listener than the kind of passive listening-without-listening that streaming was making me do.”
I can see the point that is being made here when I honestly analyse my own behaviour. Some writers, I believe, like writing with a pen because it encourages a greater engagement with the writing process and forces you to slow down. I do have a nasty habit of listening to half a track and then skipping it if I don’t immediately like it. If a long track starts slowly and I want to know whether I’m going to like it, I will also skip to halfway through to see if it gets more interesting. So, I do think there’s something in the accusation that Spotify discourages more meaningful engagement. On the other hand, you can listen to a lot more bands than you ever could before to see whether you do like them. So, very much curate’s egg.
A new world of Haves and Have-Nots
Some people understandably want to opt out of becoming another number in what they see as a streaming data capture process. This isn’t perhaps the episodes to investigate in detail the sinister nature of companies and their data capture exercises. Suffice to say, while I’m more or less OK with the Faustian pact, some people most definitely are not, and I fully respect their pointof view on the matter.
Is Spotify creating a new world of haves and have-nots based on finances? Let’s hear from social media commentator Helpmejebus.
Spotify essentially is what radio was in the 1950s. Payola run amok. Labels pay Spotify to push their artists up in search results and push them on Spotify 'radio'. The result is a monoculture. At least on radio there's a few shows and stations left that aren't completely playlisted. I've been told this directly by their editorial staff. It's essentially a closed shop.
This is where criticism of Spotify seems more valid to me. There is something rather sinister about the suggested playlists you receive which tend to feature the same songs a depressing amount of times.
If you do use Spotify’s lists that it curates for you, beware the mechanism involved. Rather like other data capture platforms we could mention, you will find yourself just listening to a narrower and narrower band of listening and ultimately curate for yourself a musical echo chamber. If you are a very casual listener to music, that might suit you fine. But it will be the end of your musical experimentation.
And then there’s your annual Spotify Wrapped which packages up your favourite music from the year just gone to share with friends and assigns you a cohort – Musical Maven or whatever. The problem I have with that is I leave Spotify on in the background while the family eat dinner. So Beach House may not be my favourite band but my friends assume it is.
Nor can Spotify use any lateral thinking - yet anyway. When I put together a playlist for my other podcast Sombrero Fallout – why not give it a listen? – I might have a theme such as female bass players or the contemporary Chicago scene. Spotify is incapable of recognising the thread that unites the songs so its suggestions are generally useless.
The moral is if you do use Spotify, don’t trust the algorithms and think for yourself.
Summary
So, there we have it. Some broadly themed views on the streaming service that is Spotify. To sum up.
Point 1. Spotify tends to pay record companies rather than artists. But the net effect is artists do get paid a derisory amount.
Point 2. That said, Spotify does provide a platform to encourage access to music and further invest in the band.
Point 3. You can now listen to all the music all of the time which you couldn’t before, yes. But, in all honesty that has led to a change in listening habits where music is treated more disposably, for better or for worse.
Point 4. Spotify does seem to be encouraging a mono-culture and possibly a slightly sinister one. You will disappear inside a self-curated echo chamber if you don’t fight back against the tyranny of the algorithms. Fortunately that’s not hard to do.