At every new flashpoint (Taylor Swift, Steve Albini most recently) in the streaming debate we are met by a torrent of think pieces. Here are three points that are routinely glossed over that should be central to the discussion.
1) It’s Almost Impossible to Compare Past and Present Because of Lack of Data
Almost every piece about streaming music uses an example from the current day and matches it against something from the past. Damon Krukowski’s Pitchfork piece "Making Cents" was illuminating because it was the experience of one person; it was "Here is what we made from our 1987 single 'Tugboat' vs. what we made from our of our songs this year." In Damon’s case, he actually had the information for that specific example at his fingertips. But the truth of the matter is, comparing what it’s like to be in a band now vs. 20 years ago is exceedingly difficult because now we are drowning in data and, back then, we had virtually none. You can see exactly how many plays a song had on Spotify; we can figure out exactly what an artist has earned from those plays, to the penny. If you go back to the '80s and '90s, there are no such metrics. It’s almost all anecdotal evidence and guesswork.
The assumption this leads to, which patchy data is then marshaled to support, is that it used to be easier to make a living selling records than it is now. Is it true? Maybe. How do we account for what "the average musician" made from selling (independent) records in 1994? Of how many made some kind of living doing so? How would you even go about compiling this statistic? Is it hundreds of artists making a living through selling records? Thousands? There were, by all accounts, far fewer people making records in 1994, but we are to assume that more of the ones that did so made a decent amount of money from it. But until we find some way to compile those statistics, direct comparison between our data-dense age and the almost data-less age is very difficult and doesn’t shed much light.
2) Art Has Always Been a Terrible Way to Make Money
Most artists pay to make their art. Putting on a show, and spending your own money to do so, money that is never recovered and is never expected to be recovered, is commonplace. Should artists make more money? Of course. They are responsible for so much that makes life worth living. But when it happens, it usually does so outside the context of market capitalism. I’m reminded of a quote from Lewis Hyde’s great book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Among other things, the book explores the difficulty of treating art as a commodity rather than something he calls "Gift labor." This passage in particular is instructive:
But, you ask, if we really valued these gift labors, couldn’t we pay them well? Couldn’t we pay social workers as we pay doctors, pay poets as we do bankers, pay the cellist in the orchestra as we pay the advertising executive in the box seat? Yes, we could. We could—and should—reward gift labors where we do value them. My point here is simply that where we do so we shall have to recognize that the pay they receive has not been “made” the way fortunes are made in the market, that it is a gift bestowed by the group. The costs and benefits of tasks whose procedures are adversarial and whose ends are easily quantified can be expressed through a market system. The costs and rewards of gift labors cannot. The cleric’s larder will always be filled with gifts; artists will never “make” money.
None of which is to say that musicians don’t deserve to be paid and shouldn’t hope to earn as much money as they can; rather, it’s a reminder that in general art is a bad way to make a living, and there’s no reason, historically, to expect music to be any different.
3) It’s Less About There Being "No Money" and More About Where the Existing Money Flows
Related to and in some ways counter to the point above, the problem with streaming media (and it was the same one posted in Albini’s famous 1993 essay "The Problem With Music") is less "Why aren’t artists paid more?" but rather "If anyone is going to be paid for the buying and selling of music, shouldn’t it be the artists?" That’s what is at the heart of this whole thing, and is also central to Albini’s recent address: Why are middlemen getting paid? Why are engineers at streaming media companies making more than the artists whose work flows through those mediums? Why is Apple the richest company in the history of the world in part because they were so good at making devices filled with music by artists who are making less from their recorded output each year (this is a measurable statistic—how much money is spent on music in the aggregate). A certain amount of resentment is built into this debate.
One section from Albini’s address that stood out and put a fine point on this particular question. He mentions the use of the word "release" to describe a record and basically concludes that we should think of the word in its most essential usage: music is being put into the wild, where it can’t be controlled.
From my part, I believe the very concept of exclusive intellectual property with respect to recorded music has come to a natural end, or something like an end. Technology has brought to a head a need to embrace the meaning of the word “release”, as in bird or fart. It is no longer possible to maintain control over digitised material and I don’t believe the public good is served by trying to.
This makes perfect sense up to a point, but what Albini is forgetting is that corporations can make money from music even while individually musicians cannot. Albini would not, I’m sure, be in favor of a shoe company taking a Shellac song and putting it into a commercial because, hey, it’s been "released" and now it’s out there for anyone to use. "Free" is one thing for consumers but even in the best of circumstances there is still money swirling around music, the question is where it’s going.