Digital Dust Bowl, Part Deux

STREAMING PLATFORMS ARE VERY CONVENIENT PIECES OF TECH WHICH ALLOW A MORE DEMOCRATIC PUBLISHING OPTION FOR NEW AND UNSIGNED/INDEPENDENT ARTISTS. THIS POSITIVE ATTRIBUTE CANNOT BE UNDERSTATED OR IGNORED. YET I NOTICED SOMETHING STRANGE IN HOW NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS WERE CHANGING ALBUM CYCLE PROMOTION AS THE YEARS PROGRESSED. THINGS BECAME MOST NOTICABLE DURING THE PANDEMIC ITSELF.

COVID REVEALED HOW NON-EXISTENT MECHANICAL – PUBLISHING – ROYALTIES ARE. IT LOOKS AS IF MOST MUSIC STREAMING GIANTS ARE ACTING LIKE VALUE VILLAGE: WHEREBY THEY’RE TREATING THE CONTENT AS LARGELY DONATED BY THE ARTISTS, AND ITS BEING DONE UNNECESSARILY FOR EXTRA PROFIT AT THE ARTISTS EXPENSE. STREAMING PLATFORMS (POSSIBLY BY PROXY, NOT ON PURPOSE) SUCCESSFULLY AIDED IN DESTABILIZING MUSIC INDUSTRY INCOME STANDARDS, SEEMINGLY NOT BECAUSE OF ANY OTHER REASON THAN: “MORE MONEY FOR SPOTIFY/PANDORA/ETC IS FINANCIALLY BETTER THAN MONEY FOR THE ARTIST, TRUMPING MUCH OF THE FINANCIAL STABILITY OF THE MUSICAL PROFESSION BY THE MASSIVE REDUCTION TO FRACTIONS OF A CENT PER STREAM. ALSO KNOWN AS “TANKING ALBUM SALES”, ETHICS DON’T EVEN MAKE AN APPEARANCE IN THIS THOUGHT PROCESS. THIS IS WHY MANY HAVE SAID ITS THE BEST AND WORST OF TIMES TO BE AN ARTIST.

When the dude who coded an Algo pads his bank account with 50% of the Platform’s Artist Royalties…Spotify was financially pandemic proof, meanwhile with no shows allowed and venues shut the world over, even artists in international outfits were barely scraping by, having to get a second job. I used Spotify for over a decade and learned later most of the thousands I paid went straight to Spotify and virtually none to the Artist in my library. I felt deceived to say the least, I had assumed Platforms would be similar to physical sales, I suppose on Spotify we are just “renting” the songs so that does qualify for lower royalties being earned, but not to fractional cents that’s surely a bit extreme, no? We no longer regulate publishing royalties on digital platforms, all because SPOTIFY decided this in their Terms of Service and no one seemed to notice, but at least working at McDonald’s pays a barely living wage🥲

This Tri-Blog entitled: the Digital Album Dust-Bowl Series will finish covering: The concerning state of Mechanical Royalties in modern Music, What the options are, and What the different players and their layers will be. I think NFTs could prevent a greedy company from collecting artist Royalties via a shitty deal terms of service. Of course as soon as Artists can send their fans to a more artist friendly Platform there will be little reason to give Spotify unfairly discounted content for their Network. Imagine if Netflix paid Producers pennies on the dollar… Everyone would be switching to Paramount Plus like it’s the way Streaming is supposed to treat its creators. I mean remember the MySpace migration to Facebook? I do, it all took place over a month in 2010. Really quite shocking how universal the switch was and no one wants some nerd getting their favourite starving garage band’s rent money.

I prefer writing optimistic content, the third and final part in the Dust bowl series will be the last entry and should lead into solutions and ideas to these issues for the remaining posts. Hopefully this blog becomes helpful to someone out there, and is seen as constructive criticism.

I’ll see this post out by linking the fitting “We Eat Our Young” track by Cattle Decapitation. Make sure to peep the lyrics when you’re on Spotify 😅https://open.spotify.com/album/2L4ZJ3BTuZe04IjLP5eNrc?si=MASCIkI7R5WItugeWcCfEQ