A Little Knowledge
I watched a multi-part docudrama series on the creation of Spotify recently called the Playlist. You can find it on Netflix. It’s in Swedish with subtitles with lots of English thrown in. There are six episodes from the perspective of various players. Here’s what I learned. The founder is a guy who just wanted to get rich. He was helped by a guy who was already rich. A really smart coder made it technically possible. A really smart lawyer made it legally possible. Little artists got screwed.
In all of the goings on, I think the biggest trick they played was making it seem as though streaming is different than radio. This dramatically reduced royalties and increased profits for the streaming services and the labels. That was a nice trick. Of course, now I realize I’ve only scratched the surface of this issue, so I’m going to need to do more reading, and that should be fun. Basically, I want to see how anyone not named Taylor Swift makes any money in the business.
Although I have to wonder if there was ever a time in the music business when little guys made real money. Doesn’t seem like it. I mean we can rage against the machine all we want, but it seems as though the machine has always been there in one form or the other over the years. But again, I need to read up and study and see what I can discover, because it occurs to me that a lot of my opinions on the music business have been half-baked and that feels unacceptable.