It's already a done deal so you can't talk me out of it. Before May 2024 is over the music of Wicked Louder and Pro-Grammar will be permanently removed from Spotify. Why am I doing this? If you care about the plight of the artist in the digital age then read on…

The music industry has a long history of ripping off the artists whose work the music industry needs to be the music industry. Ever since recorded music has been sold for mass consumption by the public musicians have been getting ripped off. Look at all those blues and folk musicians in the very early days of the gramophone. Generally, they were paid a one-time amount to give complete control of their recording to the company producing it. And if the artist(s) were rural, uneducated white folks or black you can bet that one-time payment wasn't very much. Because these people knew nothing about business the copyrights and the publishing rights to these works were held by the people doing the recording. You know, the white guys with capital. The rational for doing this, for musicians who even understood enough to ask, was usually couched in the language of ‘exposure bucks’. This rational was, if people hear your music recording it creates a demand for your live performance and that's where you'll make money. Now, the entire system in place to keep touring musicians from earning a livable wage non-withstanding, exposure bucks don't pay for dinner. 

Now let's jump ahead to how the music industry has worked during my lifetime. You start a band. You go out on tour. Maybe record a demo. The goal being getting your band signed to a record label. Let's say your band catches the eye of some A&R guy and you get offered a record deal. Wow! Right? In some ways your problems are just beginning. Now, it costs money to record an album. And the record company will pay for that. Here's the catch, it's an advance against future royalties. That means that before you see a dime you have to pay that money back. In the 1990's the sale of one compact disc that the artist owned the copyrights to the songs and the publishing rights to generated about 70 cents in royalties for the artist. But a compact disc costs $15 dollars, you say. Yup. And if you got a record-breaking advance of $250,000 like Jane's Addiction did to produce Nothing's Shocking you had to pay that back in full before you got a royalty check. Oh yeah, all those posters and tee shirts that went into the record stores at the same time as your album? You have to pay the record company back for that. And all the money they spent on promoting you so you'll be an overnight sensation like Nirvana? Yup, you have to pay them back for that as well. Is it actually possible to become a really rich musician? Green Day sure lives pretty comfortably these days but you can bet a lot of lawyers have been involved in that process.

Let's jump ahead again. This time to the present days of digital streaming. Almost nobody buys physical copies of albums anymore. Everything is on the internet. These companies make it even more difficult to earn any money from selling your music than the previously stated model. Let's talk about Spotify because they are the reason I am writing this. If you stream a single song from Spotify the artist gets 0.003-0.005 of a cent. That is the lowest standard in the entire music industry. And your record company or distributer might take a cut of that. If somebody downloads your song or album to keep you get 10% of the download fee. Theoretically you can make some money this way, but streaming is the norm and that is what we are talking about. 

So, we have established that you don't get much from people streaming your music. And we have established that Spotify, the most profitable streaming service out there, pays artists the least amount of royalties for their work. Here comes the best part. If you don't hit a certain threshold in a one year payment period, Spotify just doesn't pay you at all. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. So, that threshold is a thousand streams in a year if I am not mistaken. So if i sell a thousand streams at 0.003 cents a stream that's $3. And they won't pay it to me. If your company can afford to pay Joe Rogan $100 million dollars to come onboard you can sure as hell pay me my $3. Every other company my music is available for streaming on pays me no matter what I earn. And they are not the most profitable company like Spotify is. So, there's that. To be clear, I sell physical copies of my music at shows. It will soon be available on Bandcamp that way for those who want it. I have my stuff up on streaming services for the sake of convenience. If that's how people get introduced to what I do I'm fine with that. At my current level I am not getting a thousand streams anywhere. But I think I deserve to get paid for them when I do.

And if all this is not enough, there's this. If you digitally publish a book on Spotify they take control of all of the rights to the published work. They will pay you your pittance for each copy sold but if your book takes off and they decide to turn it into a multi book series or, even better, sell the rights to turn it into a Netflix show, you get nothing. So, don't publish your writing on Spotify, okay?

Bottom line, if you want to help out those indie bands that you love, Download the album from Bandcamp if they use it or download it directly from their website. Bandcamp takes 15% and most web platforms let the artist keep 100%. If you can't do that go to a show and buy a physical copy directly from the band. IF you really care about musicians and the amount of work and effort that goes into being a musician you will endeavor to pay them what they are really worth.