How Have Streaming Services Made the Music Industry Fairer and how can They Continue to Improve it?

1. Introduction

The point of this project is to determine how far streaming services have improved the music industries and if they can do more to improve it further. This paper will attempt to clarify assumptions made about the streaming industries regarding public opinion and how people use them to consider purchasing or illegally downloading music. This will give a general overview of how people use the current music industries to consume music. When this is compared to the pre-internet industry, speculation can be made about where the industry can move to in the next stages of its development. This speculation can also be aided by researching new technology being implemented and developed.

When dealing with these issues around recorded music it is important that this research considers copyright, available technology and potential mistakes the industry has already made. It is also important that no assumptions are made during the development of this research. The public are asked a series of questions about their opinions on the streaming and music industries, as to get a clearer view of what the consumers make of the product on sale.

2. Literature Review

Anthony Fantano is a music reviewer who frequently posts videos to YouTube, often discussing the socio-political aspects of the music industry. He has been discussing streaming services regularly since it became relatively mainstream in 2012 with the likes of Spotify (Fantano 2012).

Fantano’s video discussions have documented the development of streaming services over the last six years. It seems that just because now there is more variety in streaming services, doesn’t necessarily mean artists are being treated any fairer and it could in fact mean that we now value music less than ever, purely because the competitive nature of business has created a race to the bottom in terms of prices (Fantano 2012). This means that artists are left with less profit whilst labels and streaming sites keep their percentage.

Fantano comments on this in a video where he talks about how the record industry is taking a turn back towards the old ways of pluggers and label dominance, only instead of using radio, labels will have select artists added to popular playlists (Fantano 2015, b).

Independent artist Brian Hazard (2018) comments on his own experience in purchasing advertising from Deezer in an article titled “I Spent $500 Promoting My Song on Deezer”. This article highlights some major issues the current system has. The most worrying being something that effects both small and large artists. Hazard’s $500 investment netted him 12,200 streams (listens) from which he made $2.13.

The music industry is heavily reliant upon copyright. Copyrights are generally obtained in legally binding contracts, which often allow the allocation, assignment, ownership, control and exploitation of rights. Steve Albini (1994) puts emphasis on the exploitation factor in his article “The Problem with Music”. He talks about how easy it was for artists to be used by the industry during the latter stages of the CD dominated, pre-internet era of the music industry. However, in a more recent article, “Steve Albini on the surprisingly sturdy state of the music industry – in full”, Albini (2014) discusses the way that the music industry may have been saved by the internet. In both articles Albini is talking from a musician’s, producer’s and consumer’s point of view. He discusses that the record industries have been taking advantage of all parties in order to maximize profit.

Frith (1992) concludes that technological development is what has led to most cultural and popular music developments in the last century, starting with the gramophone or wax cylinders designed to be used as Dictaphones and resulting in CDs in the late 1980’s. Every time something like this happens it changes the way we listen to music. CDs and cassette tapes made music more portable and easier to distribute illegally and even more so with the advent of mp3s, mp3 players and the internet.

Fantano (2015) remarks that artists like Prince who at first dismissed the internet as a platform for music are now suffering consequences, such as loss of potential listeners from new generations and the general bad press that comes from snubbing accessible platforms.

O’Dair (2016) thinks that crypto currency techniques hold the answer in the form of the Blockchain. The industry could use it to pay artists, composers, producers more fairly with smart contracts. Although this method isn’t the perfect solution, there are unanswered questions about metadata. Who applies this information? How do they apply it? How much information is included? How do we insure everyone involved on a track is paid and how do we divide the profits?

However, Blockchain technology could be the next big step in resolving these issues and further developing modern culture.

3. Research

The research in section two highlights some issues and assumptions in the streaming industry. These mostly revolve around promotion (Hazard 2018), artist treatment (Fantano 2015, d), public/consumer opinion, the value of music (Fantano 2012) and ethical issues around illegal downloading or copying (Firth 1992).

In order to try to resolve these issues it is important to test some assumptions by asking the public (or consumers of music) questions. These questions have been chosen based off assumptions that continuously crop up in music streaming and ethics discussions, particularly noticeable in the Anthony Fantano videos.

Consumers from across a spectrum of ages and musical tastes from several areas of the internet were asked a series of questions about the streaming and greater modern music industries. These questions aim to paint a picture of the average modern-day music consumer.

They provide insight into:

• how people are listening to music

• opinions on streaming services

• what services they use

• if they pay for subscriptions

• if they believe artists are treated fairly

• if music streaming has stopped them downloading music illegally

• how often they buy music after hearing it on streaming sites

• and how far the agree or disagree that streaming has made music a more democratic process for everyone involved

The questions have been designed to be as nonbiased as possible so they don’t contaminate the results.

4. Analysis and Speculation

The Results can be found at:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-R722YHF9L/

Interestingly, sharing a survey is relatively comparable to sharing music on streaming services. Getting people just to click on the link alone can be difficult and just getting 51 responses was hard enough. It was also difficult getting the survey to people outside of the 18-24 years old range as the only places it was easy and free to share the survey was on personal social media. Even though Facebook groups and a Twitter page with 500+ followers of varying ages were utilised, it proved difficult to garner decent numbers of older data. For this reason, the results will be filtered to only include the 18-24 year-old demographic, results from other age groups aren’t reliable enough.

Q2: How do you listen to the majority of your music?

The answer to this question is surprising. It was assumed that the gap between streaming and digital would be much smaller, instead there is a 69.44% difference in favour of streaming. Interestingly only one person responded with analogue, which suggests that, for the millennial generation at least, vinyl is seen as more of a gimmick than a viable tool for music listening. This could be because of the expensive nature of analogue music or just its impractical nature compared to streaming and digital formats. This result along with that of question 3 can be seen as an interesting result when compared to the result of question 6. It is apparent that despite people thinking that streaming services treat their artists poorly they feel more than happy to use the platforms and even pay for them.

Q3: What is your opinion of music streaming

This question is perhaps more interesting when cross-referenced with others. However, it is interesting to note that 58.33% of people aged 18-24 strongly approve of streaming, with no negative responses at all and only 11.11% of respondents giving a neutral answer. It could easily be assumed from reading or watching media that people’s views on streaming is that of a cynical nature but these results suggest otherwise.

Q4: Which streaming service do you use?

Results to this question are particularly interesting because Spotify holds 80% of the result share. This question allowed people to choose more than one answer though so we must compare results accordingly. This is interesting when compared to YouTube’s share of the results at 65.71%. It is well documented that YouTube is the biggest music streaming platform, perhaps most of their users are under 18 or over 24, or maybe some people answering the questionnaire simply don’t recognise YouTube as a music streaming platform. A lot of people apparently use SoundCloud too, considerably more than use Apple Music too, which is surprising. Apple’s platform may struggle to garner a larger listener base because it relies on a subscription service. It probably doesn’t help that you need an Apple phone to use it in transit. Fantano talks a lot about Tidal as a streaming service, this could be disproportionate as no one of any age said they use it. This could be because of a number of issues the platform has had, mostly concerning very public fallouts between big artists over the platform (Fantano 2015, a).

There is one “other” response here that reads “I use google and amazon play but dont stream through them” which suggests that this respondent doesn’t understand what streaming actually is or was unclear on what the question was asking. Either way, perhaps the survey’s questions could have been explained better and a definition of streaming provided.

Q5: Do you pay for a subscription on your streaming service?

Most of the assumptions around this question are based around ideas that most people don’t pay for subscriptions. These responses have proven this assumption wrong. This raises questions surrounding the ethics and payment to artists on streaming sites, the foremost being, where is this subscription money going? People are obviously willing to pay a monthly fee for music which also means we must revaluate assumptions over people not valuing music anymore but most importantly we must direct our focus on asking what subscription services are doing with this money and why isn’t it going to artists?

Q6: How do you think artists are treated by streaming services?

When cross-referenced with other answers the responses to this question are somewhat confusing. It appears that people have no issue with streaming services and are willing to pay a subscription to access music but they also believe that artists are treated below average by these services or are unsure of their treatment. This either shows a complacency of the respondence or that they simply do not care about how artists are treated or if they are even paid for their works. This again brings up this question of do people still value music? Perhaps people are paying money for subscription and expecting that money to go to the service instead of the artist, or maybe they don’t give it any thought and just see it as a means to remove adverts or access music.

Q7: How often do you buy music?

This question was asked to test the assumption that people don’t buy music anymore. Judging by these results, this assumption is tricky to argue for or against. This question was designed to find out how often people buy music. The issue is that the two strongest responses are less than once a month with just 3 people less responding with ‘never’, which suggests that even if people are buying music, it isn’t very frequent at all. It is interesting to see how many respondence who said they never buy music also pay for a subscription (figure 2). Also, when cross-referenced with question 8 (figure 1) it becomes apparent that streaming is effective in stopping people who would otherwise not buy music form downloading it illegally. This again blurs the line between whether people value music or not. People who don’t buy music mostly have subscriptions to streaming services. However, some of the comments they leave on question 10 “Do you agree or disagree that streaming has made music a more democratic process for everyone involved” are somewhat interesting given this context. Most of them agree with the statement and most of the comments longer than one word, actually criticize the services for not paying artists well enough, which seems somewhat hypocritical.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Q8: Has music streaming stopped you from illegally downloading music?

This is the big question when it comes to evaluating the success of streaming services in terms of balancing the user freedoms that came with the internet file sharing and paying artists a fair amount for their work. The internet became a vast cause of music piracy in the 90’s which resulted in Metallica suing Napster, the biggest free music sharing site. During the 00’s this trend continued through torrent sites such as Pirate Bay and LimeWire. There is an assumption that streaming has solved this issue and judging by these survey results, there is fact to back up this theory.

Q:9 How often do you buy music after hearing in on a streaming service?

Fantano (2012) talks about this idea that some people may or may not use streaming services as a try before you buy type of system. Although there may be some truth in this for particular individuals, most people appear to never buy music because of what they have heard on streaming and if they do it’s pretty infrequent, enough so to be reasonably unimpactful on the industry as a whole.

Q10: Do you agree or disagree that streaming has made music a more democratic process for everyone involved (artists, record labels, producers and listeners)

This is the main question that appears in most conversations about streaming, effectively asking if everyone is getting a fair treatment in the industry and as consumers. Figure 3 shows that most people agree that the industry is democratic and fair. However, many add the caveat that they believe that artists are being underpaid and treated poorly. Most respondence seem to think that record labels and the services are profiting unfairly from the work that artists create.

Figure 3

5. Conclusion

This information points to flaws in the current music industry system. Particularly in terms of artist payment. However, it’s obvious that getting any real change to happen though could be difficult as most people seem to use these services regardless of their own ethics and opinions. This means that getting the industry to listen to any suggestions could be impossible.

Artists seem to be unhappy with the current industry but unable to do anything about it because without these services it would be near impossible to get their music to a larger audience. Only through sites such as Spotify can they make any money off this venture so it’s easy to see why most wouldn’t want to rock the boat. Consumers of music are too content or comfortable with the service streaming companies provide, which makes them complacent.

But what changes could be made to redistribute the wealth with in the industry? It is frustrating to think that despite the industry being over 50 years old, this is still a problem, despite the internet revolution of the 90’s and 00’s, the industry is using streaming to regain its choke hold on the industry. How can streaming services stop this? If they really wanted to because they could quite easily.

O’Dair (2016) has researched the idea of implementing blockchain technology into music. This could be used to direct money straight to artists, potentially cutting out the middle men completely. This way meta data stored in the audio file itself could be used to record exactly how many plays a track has and who should get how much of a cut from the money generated from each play.

Fantano (2015, b) discusses what streaming services are apart from a platform to stream music off of in his video “Real Competition in Music Streaming is Over”. It’s effectively just a series of playlists and ways to get people to listen to the music to generate add revenue or to sign up to a subscription. Is this even necessary? If the whole system could be automated, e.g. playlists generated by algorithms and so on, what do these services need all of this money for? Surely all of it should be going to the artists. It’s understandable that a certain amount is required for server maintenance but up until 2014 Spotify used a peer to peer network, which relies on a network of user’s computing systems as servers (Dillet 2014).

The point is that many people believe that the way money is distributed in the modern industry is extremely uneven, unjustified and perhaps even backwards in many cases. So yes, streaming services have made the music industry fairer by making it easier for artists to connect with an audience and make money by doing it. However, the fact is that the amount of money they make is viewed as unfair by the majority of people who listen to music. The public also feel that these services need to be doing more to stop the old style of the industry coming back and taking control of what we listen to (Fantano 2015, d).

Bibliography and References

Albini, S. (1994) The Problem with Music [online] available from <https://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17> [20 March 18]

Albini, S. (2014) Steve Albini on the Surprisingly Sturdy State of The Music Industry – in Full [online] available from <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full> [20 March 18]

Fantano, A. (2012) Streaming Music? [online] available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dizEEBtIpCc&t=0s&list=PLJuf29Gfc3ESlZOLA4XUEleSlp1U1VwiJ&index=1> [10 April 18]

Fantano, A. (2015, a) Is Tidal the Future of Music Streaming [online] available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV8ianZv-j0&list=PLJuf29Gfc3ESlZOLA4XUEleSlp1U1VwiJ&index=1> [10 April 18]

Fantano, A. (2015, b) Real Competition in Music Streaming Is Over [online] available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1_LoNDxjJk&index=2&list=PLJuf29Gfc3ESlZOLA4XUEleSlp1U1VwiJ>

Fantano, A. (2015, c) You Decide the Value of Music! [online] available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uySf429Z7E&index=3&list=PLJuf29Gfc3ESlZOLA4XUEleSlp1U1VwiJ>

Fantano, A. (2015, d) How Long Can Taylor Swift Shake Off Music Streaming? [online] available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpyNh4P6wSo&index=4&list=PLJuf29Gfc3ESlZOLA4XUEleSlp1U1VwiJ>

Fantano, A. (2015, e) I Like the Bandcamp Platform [online] available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNCB3vj-pfk&index=5&list=PLJuf29Gfc3ESlZOLA4XUEleSlp1U1VwiJ>

Fantano, A. (2015, f) I’m Paying for Music Streaming! DX [online] available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6R_GYuasOo&index=6&list=PLJuf29Gfc3ESlZOLA4XUEleSlp1U1VwiJ>

Fantano, A. (2016) Spotify HATES Exclusives! RANT (Boo Hoo!) [online] available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2PCJl1TnDE&index=7&list=PLJuf29Gfc3ESlZOLA4XUEleSlp1U1VwiJ>

Frith, S. (1992) ‘The Industrialization of Popular Music’. in Popular Music and Communication. ed. By Lull, J. London: Sage, 49-74

Hazard, B. (2018)

O’Dair, M. et al. (2016) Music on The Blockchain. Middlesex University: London

Richter, F. (2017) Rise of Digital Formats Stops the Music Industry's Decline [online] available from < https://www.statista.com/chart/4713/global-recorded-music-industry-revenues/> [20 March 18]

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