It's clear to say that the mode of consumption has changed from a only a decade or two ago, and I would posit that this is because of how the mode of distribution has changed — distributors and consumers do not need to concern themselves so much with the production anymore so long as there is a product to distribute and consume. Nowadays, digital distributors will charged artists to put their music on Spotify and the likes. It used to be that you bought a record or the slightly more portable cassette tapes from a store because you liked the artist and had to really engage with it to enjoy it, then you had the CDs which could be played in your car or at home, then you had the advent of the online era where you could buy (or pirate) the songs you wanted to hear and keep them on your hard drive forever, and listen to it however you want in any playlist. Now, we have streaming services, the most common of which being Spotify (which I will be focusing on for its ubiquity, despite the existence of platforms like Deezer and Napster), and services which sell music (IE Bandcamp or Amazon Music) are surviving but certainly less commonly used. I'm obviously focusing on music, as I am want to do as a musician, but this applies to movies too; in the beginning there were your VHS tapes, then your DVDs, then online purchases, then Netflix and the eldritch abomination that is the current mess of subscription services.

Moving towards subscription models increased profits exponentially by centralising your data and generating rolling revenue each month (or whatever the term of your subscription is). The main proposition this system poses to you is this: you will own nothing, everything you use is lent to you by a corporation on a limited license and can be revoked whenever and for whatever reason. Compare this to buying a CD, for example, and you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, including burning it on to your phone and using whatever app you want with whatever features you want to play it, and you'll always have it. Subscriptions have recently gone truly insane, with the Software as a Service model (SaaS) outgrowing the likes of Adobe and suddenly infecting cars with heated seats that only work if you pay a subscription.^[1] Imagine irretrievably putting quarters in to an arcade machine that you own.

This is a marked changed in the mode by which we consume media so it's worth discussing what the consequences of this are for artists and their art in the modern day, and if we'll ever see a return to the old forms of media consumption.

The current system of music distribution and consumption

It's no secret that Spotify is bad for artists, with incredibly low pay-outs, or none at all in many (probably most) cases. Spotify has abysmal pay-outs, with Soundcharts reporting that Spotify paid artists $0.0032 per stream by the end of 2018.^[2] Ditto Music reported at the end of 2023 that "From 2024 onwards, artists will also need to hit a minimum number of unique listeners to make their track eligible for royalty payments"^[3] so some artists won't even get paid anyway! They also have a "Spotify Royalty Calculator" which comes with the warning that it won't be 100% accurate — "IT IS A ESTIMATE"^[4] — which could mean that it's anywhere from 99.9% accurate to 0% accurate. An ongoing lawsuit filed by the royalty-collecting non-profit Mechanical Licensing Collective alleges that Spotify has been underpaying artists by underreporting its revenue.^[5]

This is all true, yes, but these complaints often miss the scope of the problem: even if they wanted to pay you, Spotify probably doesn't have your money. You might think that such a monolith as Spotify might be even remotely profitable, but it has never reported a net profit before.^[6] In a move to cut costs Spotify axed 17% of it's workforce (1500 jobs), but it still remains to be seen whether it will report a profit by the end of the financial year.^[7] Spotify exists because of a practice called "blitz scaling" in which an enterprise is given absurd amounts of money to grow first and then worry about making profits later. Frankly, if Spotify began to make profits and didn't have to underpay the artists so much, the people who produce the content, I still wouldn't trust that they'd start paying fairly.^[8]

For one, Daniel Ek could never pay me enough to propagandise for him, but more seriously Spotify's history and investments shows an interest in abusing artists as much as possible. In order to get their content on to the most common music platforms independent artists need to pay a digital music distributor such as Ditto Music or CD Baby, which means that independent artists are paying for their content to get monetised by someone else and often aren't seeing any of the royalties themselves and anyone without the means aren't able to share their art. Spotify has been financially invested in this cottage industry of digital music distributors in the past, although it has since sold this stake.^[9]

There are yet further controversies, as Spotify declared that all Car Things would cease functionality after consumers had purchased them, leaving them with expensive paperweights.^[10]

Music has become extremely accessible, both creating and consuming it. YouTube is filled with tutorials if you want to start creating and Spotify has just about every song you could ever want,^[11] practically monopolising the minds of consumers with its ubiquity on what feels like every phone on the planet. The relative value of music as a whole has been significantly decreased — it is often taken for granted today when in decades past it was a large industry which customers were keen participants in despite the fact that it's still everywhere today, scoring your life with playlists and radios. In either case, it appears to me that Spotify doesn't particularly want to be seen succeeding as its failures are used to justify underpaying artists.

Clearly, I want alternatives to Spotify which are better for artists and consumers and are more sustainable as a business. What does that look like? It looks like the past, if you ask me. I've committed myself to using Bandcamp, where one can buy the audio files from their favourite artists and is accessible for artists to get on to by self-uploading.

It's not without controversy, however. Bandcamp was recently purchased by Songtradr. Bandcamp United, the union for Bandcamp's workers, claimed that Songtradr initiated lay-offs amounting to half of the workforce after it had published a list of demands and that these lay-offs disproportionately effected black workers.^[12] It also wanted to avoid any word that might sound like "lay-off". While Songtradr clearly wants to portray this as a necessary evil, stating that "while the revenue has been consistent, over the past few years the operating costs have significantly increased making it impossible to continue running the business the way it has been",^[13] it's a marked change in the internal culture of the company which we should rightfully fear will be externalised.

While Bandcamp's artist-first model is certainly a vast improvement in just about every way it could be compared the streaming model this shows that there will still be needs for alternatives and competition for artists to leverage in the space in order to struggle for better conditions for themselves and the workers of the company.

The future system of music distribution and consumption

I think it's worth prefacing this section by saying that I don't think we're going to return to the world of the past with CDs and vinyl records. While there's certainly a place for physical media it simply doesn't offer the convenience of digital formats. They won't see mass adoption again, although there will always be fans who swear that vinyl sounds better^[14] and people who enjoy the extra content in CD cases like lyric sheets and artwork or people who just want to support artists by buying physical media like a piece of merchandise.

The future will be digital. I can't see anyone going back to anything less than the ultra-convenience of digital. I also don't see people moving away from the massive and expansive libraries offered by services like Spotify, where you can stream whatever you like for a fee. Some artists have their own platforms to sell their content but I think this is an unrealistic method for mass music consumption because of the convenience Spotify offers as a library. Systems like Spotify are thus the perfect ones for massification.

But, as stated before, Spotify will need to start breaking even, otherwise it won't last. In that case, we either imagine a similar system with different funding or we go backwards in history and readopt music downloads over music streaming.

One proposed system which strikes a balance of the library-convenience of streaming services without the capitalist funding is socialised copyright, in which royalties are paid out by the state which maintains its own Spotify-like experience. That certainly seems like a utopian idea, and as with many utopian ideas it also seems to be practically impossible to begin to build in our current system. Nonetheless, we should attempt to imagine and fight for better systems whether or not they're possible.

Whether we end up with socialised copyright or not, it's clear that if Spotify falls apart something will rise in its place, and if that falls apart something will rise in its place again. Music is too important to not just our society but all humanity to be left behind. Music appears to be, for a lack of a better expression, in our blood. It'll live in.