Taylor Swift, Adele and Neil Young. These are just a handful of high profile artists that have chosen to remove all, or parts, of their discography from music streaming services such as Spotify, Deezer and Apple Music.
Why? Well, for a variety of reasons. From, ‘the quality of music is too bad for mine to feature’ to ‘We’re not getting paid enough’ it seems that some modern and even old school artists are unable to cope with the change in the way the music industry has evolved to distribute the art created.
While this newfound way of accessing, discovering and listening to music may not be perfect, to shun it as a whole (we’re looking at you Adele) is only going to lead to a music industry that will continue to be dominated by monetary greed. Some music streaming services have got it spot on, here’s why.
The main issue artists have with allowing their music to enter the domain of the streaming system relates back to money. It is no secret that artists, no matter how big or small, on Spotify are paid painfully small amounts of money each time their song is played.
A payment of just $0.006 dollars is paid to artists who feature on Spotify every time one of their songs is streamed, no matter the popularity or size of the artist in question. This is something that Spotify are aware of and are slowly attempting to address as they expand as a business.
However, back in late 2014, Taylor Swift pulled her entire music catalogue off the website citing that “it does not compensate the artists work enough.’’ Whilst Swift, who is worth a cool $80 million, certainly has every right to do this, to complain about money in her position is bordering on embarrassing.
In Adele, we see a musician who to wants to sell her music in the ‘right’ way and in Neil Young we see a person who regularly complains about the quality of sound that websites like Deezer produce. Whilst both valid reasons, in the long run they are destined to succumb to those artists that remain in the system.
What these three artists in particular are forgetting here is the main reason music streaming is both a highly lucrative investment for musicians, as well as a common sense policy. Musicians are forgetting the impact that wider availability of their songs is likely to gain them.
Concert ticket sales; merchandise sales; vinyl sales and an altogether larger fan base will all be guaranteed to rise with easier and more affordable access to music. While Adele and Taylor Swift certainly don’t struggle to sell out concert venues, surely they would want the largest global fan base possible.
This leads us to the final reason shunning music streaming could be considered altogether wrong. Surely, as a musician, creating music for people to listen, relate, relax and dance to would be your main priority and that they would want as many people as possible to be able to access this as possible regardless of quality or money?
Well, that will be a thought for the music streaming shunners to mull over. In the meantime, we can sit back and discover new and old, cheesy and dreamy, good and even bad musicians over and over again through the gem that is music streaming.
Stream at will folks!
Daniel Parker
