In 1981, the record business was in a lengthy post-disco slump, and labels were looking for quick ways to keep shareholders happy. MCA developed the idea of what it called "superstar pricing," raising the cost of certain albums (first done with Steely Dan’s Gaucho and the Xanadu soundtrack in late 1980) from $8.98 to $9.98. When Tom Petty’s fourth LP Hard Promises was readying for release, MCA (which distributed his label Backstreet Records) wanted to pull the same stunt, though Petty—who once convinced ABC Records to renegotiate his contract by pulling a knife out of his boot and using it to clean his fingernails—balked. He threatened to shelve the album, or maybe title it "Eight Ninety-Eight", and urged his fans to write letters to the label. MCA (wisely) backed down, and Hard Promises went platinum, with millions of cover photographs showing Petty standing in a record store, victorious.
Despite it all, Petty didn’t hold a grudge against MCA—he just wanted to make sure his fans weren’t getting ripped off. "MCA has done a great job selling our records, but they couldn't see the reality of what it's like on the street," he told the New York Times at the time. "They couldn't see that raising the album's price wouldn't be fair." Petty earned a Rolling Stone cover for his deed, which still somehow feels like a tenth of the acclaim Taylor Swift has received over the past two days for a hardline Tumbl’d refusal to license her music—not aimed toward a traditional distributor of recorded commodities, but the computer/lifestyle company set to release the latest walled garden for digital music at the end of the month. A mere 34 years after Eight Ninety Eight-Gate, $9.99 will get Apple Music listeners unlimited music for a month, and after Swift’s threat of a 1989 embargo, the company will actually even pay the artists whose music it streams during the platform’s free 3-month trial rollout, which it was previously not planning on doing.
Like Petty, Swift didn’t make her statement for selfish reasons. Instead of fans—who, as with all streaming services, make out like bandits—her gesture was aimed at those much less famous artists, songwriters, and producers who "will not get paid for a quarter of a year’s worth of plays on his or her songs" during Apple Music’s early gratis period. Those very same, not-nearly-as-visible people who themselves had been complaining for more than a week, like when A2IM (which represents indie labels in such bargaining sessions) recommended to its constituents, "please do not feel rushed to sign Apple’s current offer." Or when its French and UK indie counterparts did the same thing, or when Beggars Group made their ambivalence known. If Swift hadn’t spoken up, it’s hard to tell what Apple would’ve done when faced with losing a huge swath of independent label music, though coverage would’ve most likely been limited to music, business, and tech sites, and not the likes of say, People. In an interview with Buzzfeed, Apple’s Eddie Cue more or less confirmed this, admitting he’d been watching the discourse over the past week, and it was Swift’s post that finally pushed them over the edge—throwing in "and indie artists" like a politician generically shouting out "small business owners." After a yawn-inducing WWDC that had pundits cataloging the previously-existing products it was apparently now just slapping its brand on, Apple had just backed down after a blog post.
The difference between MCA getting another dollar from each Tom Petty record, Apple withholding royalties from thousands of artists, and each company backtracking for fear of a public relations nightmare, shows both how much and how little things have changed. Those born during the CD’s late '90s/early '00s sales peak have lived their entire lives in a world in which the economic and cultural value of music is an open question. It started with Napster’s global-scale eradication of a price-based framework for music’s exchange value that had existed (albeit with piracy a nagging subcultural activity) for a century (which, in celebrity-commentary terms, pitted smarmy Lars Ulrich against righteous Chuck D). The emergent era of exorbitantly-funded streaming platforms that are re-routing digital music into apps where digital files act less like commodities and more like utilities have created a new crisis for artists: what’s a single stream worth? We’re getting ripped off, right? Instead of drawing a line in the sand over an extra dollar per unit, musicians like David Lowery, Damon Krukowski, Lower Dens’ Jana Hunter, David Byrne, Thom Yorke, the Black Keys, and others have assumed the much larger task of helping draw the political boundaries around a new hybrid format of listening and retail like nothing before it. They’ve shown their royalty statements, opined about value and commercial ethics, and compared this era to earlier eras—actions that are helping shape a format while critiquing it.
As they’ve taken shape, in terms of the audiences they create (size: one person) and the experience they engender (an exchange of data instead of money for songs that aren’t owned but can only be accessed from within a branded appscape), streams are a confounding economic object, with each iteration given a miniscule economic value. Streaming platforms are part jukebox, part mp3, and part radio—which, we will recall, is a medium that doesn’t pay performance royalties in the U.S. because lobbyists argue it’s a purely promotional format (get on that next, Taylor—though even Sinatra couldn’t close that deal). Swift’s initial streaming stunt of pulling 1989 from Spotify last November came not because she was sticking up for her peers, but because of a fundamental disagreement with the "freemium" agenda favored by upstart venture capitalists and app developers: acquire a ton of users by giving away stuff for free, and then lure them slowly into paying for a better version of that same thing. Freemium is good for fans and Spotify, but it’s bad for artists, who shoulder the financial burden of the service through low royalty payouts for the free-tier plays which outnumber the paid ones.
If Swift’s Spotify negation represented the highest level of music celebrity speaking up about the worth of their music for the first time, a few months later streaming’s musician-driven moment got its own United Artists, with Jay Z, Beyoncé, Kanye, and 13 other massive superstars forming Tidal. Like Fairbanks, Chaplin, Pickford, and Griffith 95 years earlier, Tidal’s launch was a power move for star labor in a quickly corporatizing landscape. Unlike UA, Tidal’s founders—who have 298 Top 40 hits and 53 number ones between them—claim to stand in for all artists in re-establishing the "value of music" from their perspective, not Silicon Valley and the record labels that many of them either own or transcend the need for. Despite this claim for democratic representation, though, there’s no real indication that Tidal is going to do anything for the other 99% of artists besides load their music’s metadata in a slightly new configuration before burying it beneath Jay Z b-sides and Rihanna video premieres.
Maybe, despite it all, Apple Music will be better once it finally launches in a few days—at the very least it’ll instantly dwarf Tidal, and is the only platform big enough to give Spotify second thoughts. But by instantly backing down once Taylor Swift expressed her polite indignation, Apple also revealed the core misstep of seemingly all streaming platforms: situating the "user" as the primary person to please, and letting the artists satisfy themselves with micropayments. Fans aren’t being ripped off—they’re luckier than ever. Artists are given exactly what’s legally required and not a bit more without significant political pressure. All this while we’re constantly sold the myth that anyone’s music can be heard in a democratized digital landscape given the right metadata and marketing. But when YouTube’s doing a similar thing as Apple just did, who’s going to listen to them then?