8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

In a Land Before iTunes

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A review of Michael Denning’s new book Noise Uprising – which sounds fascinating – in New Republic:

Denning’s story starts in 1925, when engineers perfected the technique of electrical recording and the 78 RPM phonograph record supplanted sheet music as the basic unit of the music industry. A handful of Western record companies spent the next five years recording local music across the world. Some of the music they recorded—Indonesian kroncong, South African marabi, Shanghainese huangse yinyue—remains unfamiliar to most Americans. Others, like jazz and tango, have become ubiquitous. The quantity and diversity of recordings from this period reflect the record companies’ basic indifference to the music they put out: They were willing to record anything that might persuade local consumers they needed a record player.



The varieties of local music recorded during the phonograph boom were not quite “folk” music rooted in the rhythms of rural life. Instead Denning calls them “vernacular” music—music performed and listened to by the people, as opposed to the high tradition of “classical music,” guarded by a small, highly trained group of musicians and mostly performed in formal settings. Vernacular music, like vernacular languages—Spanish, Italian, etc—belongs to everyday life, whereas classical music is more like Latin, used by officials and in high art. And just as vernacular literature gained strength with the invention of the printing press, the rise of vernacular music began with the phonograph.


As the article points out, the fact that the publisher has supplied a follow-along Spotify playlist for the book creates a comment about the continuing evolution of these themes:

But accessing these songs as streaming data, rather than shellac 78s or expensive CD reissues, also suggests that the way we experience music is still being relentlessly transformed. Like the phonograph boom, the digital era combines elements of democratization with the persistence of large corporations and the commodity form. Perhaps more than any of its specific conclusions, Noise Uprising is valuable as a challenge to think through the audio politics of today.

The Argument For Streaming Services To Adopt ‘Subscriber Share’

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Cuepoint:

If you subscribe to a subscription music service such as Spotify or Apple Music you probably pay $10 a month. And if you are like most people, you probably do so believing your money goes to the artists you listen to. Unfortunately, you are wrong.

The reality is only some of your money is paid to the artists you listen to. The rest of your money (and it’s probably most of your money) goes somewhere else. That “somewhere else” is decided by a small group of subscribers who have gained control over your money thanks to a mathematical flaw in how artist royalties are calculated.

There is a better way to approach streaming royalties, one which addresses all of these problems, and it’s called Subscriber Share.

The premise behind Subscriber Share is simple: the only artists that should receive your money are the artists you listen to. Subscriber Share simply divides up your (subscription fee) based on how much time you spend listening to each artist. So if you listen to an artist exclusively, then that artist will get the entire (share of the fee), but if you listen less they get proportionately less.


I bet a lot of music fans – and artists – will be surprised that this is not how streaming royalties are presently calculated. Indeed, the ‘money pool’ method that’s currently in place divides the money that’s available among total plays for all artists. Thus, a hair salon running Spotify on ‘random’ 24/7 decreases the amount paid out to the independent artist who gets repeated plays from dozens of diehard fans.

Sharky Laguana makes some great points in his article – as well as in this earlier article he wrote for The Kernel which I think explains Subscriber Share even better – but I’m wondering how the ad-supported ‘free tier’ that Spotify relies on to attract new adopters complicates things. Would Spotify be able to maintain two tiers of royalty calculation: the pool for ad-supported plays and Subscriber Share for subscribers? Is that necessary?

Of course, the question is whether the services would even consider this change. Sharky is correct in that once music industry folks have something set in stone it’s going to take some really big chisels to get it changed. His idea for ‘Silent September’ proposed in the article is interesting and worthy of conversation, but unfortunately seems a bit quixotic. The idea’s purpose of poking at the major labels carries one big truth: the majors will have to be on board for Subscriber Share to become a possibility. Regardless, I’ll probably still participate to some degree … I’m mainly listening to independent artists anyway.

I feel the best way a change like this could come about would be if a new service adopted this royalty method and made their policy overtly public, attracting artist support and in turn shaming the other services. I assume Tidal uses the ‘pool’ method of calculation … for all their talk of supporting the artist, this would seem like pushing on an open door for them. What about the newly launched Baboom? This service names their payout method Fair Trade Streaming … “we want your fan’s subscription to go directly to you” is a sentence found in Baboom’s press material to potential artists. I assume this means they are adopting some form of Sharky’s Subscriber Share method. I’ll look for confirmation, and this story will certainly continue to develop.

How To Ignore YouTube Completely

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Music Business Worldwide:

Over the past year, major labels appear to have woken up to a crucial fact: when fans are listening on YouTube, they’re not listening on other services… and YouTube isn’t paying nearly enough.



According to IFPI estimates, YouTube and other ‘exclusively free, ad-funded platforms’ contributed $641m to the global record industry last year. Subscription streaming services coughed up $1.6bn.



That fact becomes infinitely more damning when you combine it with this one: YouTube has over a billion monthly users, and they love to play music. There were just 41m people paying for music streaming in 2014. Recent Ipsos research even found that more than a quarter of internet users (27%) listen to music on YouTube without even watching the video.



Spotify realises that all this represents a unique opportunity to debunk a music biz myth that has frustrated the Swedish company since birth. It’s the one that goes: YouTube is a friendly promotional tool, while Spotify is an income-focused commercial service.


One hold-over from the days of physical distribution is that feeling that your digital release should be available in as many stores as possible. I remember thinking this way as well in the early days of digital sales … I felt my music should just simply be available in every digital shop the same as how I wanted my vinyl releases in every mom and pop record store. But then came the realization that not all these outlets paid the same (or even at the same consistent time), and that some that didn’t push or weren’t selling adequate numbers of my label’s music were taking up as much of my effort as those that followed through.

Targeting the outlets that give you the most benefit is wise … sort of a loose application of the Pareto principle. If fans are using YouTube to stream your music, but Spotify or Apple Music are paying more per stream, then by all means you should work at pulling the focus away from YouTube.

One problem: if you or your distributor are providing music to Google for Google Play or their related services then you are probably opted in to the YouTube Music Key program. A static, generic video using the cover art will be automatically created for your song and available on YouTube which could torpedo this strategy of exception. Even the One Direction song referenced throughout this MBW article is on YouTube via Music Key. However, as far as I know, YouTube Music Key videos are not available outside of the US due to licensing restrictions … but I’m sure this will eventually change.

Follow Up – re: Spotify’s Discovery Chart

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Stefan Prescott writes to us:

Before you dismiss (Spotify’s) discovery chart, remember it’s the same model as we had at our record stores when folks would come in and we would hand them a pile of records. Spotify have nailed doing this at scale based on listener’s data. I love the list; every week so far I have added music from their discovery chart to my various playlists. They have also solved the issue that iTunes and Amazon have not been able to do in their downloading model: offering visibility to millions of songs that are not necessarily new releases that folks would never hear otherwise. This list is not something derived from record label / artist manager marketing efforts. It works because the data is personalized. Finally, from experience, nobody recommends with 100% accuracy, but at least I am getting thirty tracks a week that I am interested to hear.


Great comments, which inspire me to investigate Spotify’s auto-curation a bit further.

I responded:

I am mostly interested in the differences in methodology rather than any outright dismissal, and I see Spotify’s as more rewarding for emerging artists which is where my preference actually lies. I just know, on a visceral level, the ‘For You’ tab on iTunes Music _feels_ more personalized, even though Spotify’s discovery list may actually be more so.


Those seemingly intangible factors that can make digitally delivered music connect or not connect with individuals … this is something that I will certainly be exploring further on this page.

Inside Spotify’s Plan To Take On Apple Music

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Fast Company:

(Spotify’s) Fresh Finds takes a central component of The Echo Nest’s original methodology—its web content crawler and natural language processing technology—to mine music blogs and reviews from sites like Pitchfork and NME and figure out which artists are starting to generate buzz, but don’t yet have the listenership to show for it. Using natural language processing, the system analyzes the text of these editorial sources to try and understand the sentiment around new artists. For instance, a blogger might write that a band’s “new EP blends an early ’90s throwback grunge sound with mid-’80s-style synthesizers and production—and it’s the best thing to come out of Detroit in years.” If this imaginary act goes on tour and writers in Brooklyn dole out praise of their own, the bots will pick up on it. It helps address an issue some people have voiced early on with Apple Music, that its selections aren’t adventurous and it tends to recommend things you already like rather than things you might like.



I have the feeling that Apple Music is closer to getting curation right than Spotify. People respond to recommendations when there’s a personal aspect … like when it’s a mixtape from a friend (or someone you admire), or a recommendation from that blog writer whose taste is so spot on, or that guy at the counter in the hip record store who is always handing you cool 12″ singles. Apple Music’s apparent understanding of this might be in part because they have publicly hired tech-savvy musicians to oversee these things, while Spotify seem to be bringing on music-savvy techies.

Are Apple Music’s playlists a bit obvious? Sometimes … but I was recently surprised by a dance-oriented playlist focusing on Factory Records that contained songs I’d never heard before (and I thought I was a Factory completist), and a space-rock playlist compiled by a musician I hadn’t heard of which turned me on to a few other new artists. Apple Music’s playlist recommendations can get a bit uncanny (in a good way) once it gets to ‘know’ your taste.

Spotify’s idea of intensively data-sourced curation is intriguing, and I am sure they are utilizing some amazing innovations bordering on artificial intelligence to try to make it work. But a playlist delivered weekly under the same headline — that the recipient knows is auto-generated — is easy to ignore. And the discovery-bot will inevitably get it wrong a few times, throwing in curve-ball songs that are completely outside of the listener’s taste-zone. I don’t know about you, but something like this is only allowed a few times to get it wrong before I’m not interested.

That said, the emphasis on discovery that the streaming services are embracing makes me hopeful. If Spotify’s system does start turning people on to emerging, self-released artists then that’s an amazing thing. Likewise, it would be nice to see Apple Music’s playlists include more emerging artists. I think having regular (monthly?) playlists from notable tastemakers — music bloggers, cutting edge musicians, and even non-music types like fiction writers and film directors — would add to the ‘personally curated’ touch and increase the chances of discovery.

Apple Music also needs to improve their Pandora-like ‘radio’ function. In my experience there is zero amount of potential discovery going on there. When I tell Apple Music I want a station that sounds like The Slits, that doesn’t mean I want to hear The Slits every other song, and it certainly doesn’t mean I want to hear “The Killing Moon” for the dozenth time. Pandora has this problem, too, though not as pronounced as with Apple Music. Maybe this is where Spotify can find an advantage?