Nine Ways Busking Fixes What Technology Broke (Part 2)

[Note: if you haven’t already, click here to read part 1]

Were the record labels ever any good? From the very beginning they:

Much of that still goes on. But, now the labels have added new tricks, like ‘auto-tuning’ the voices of tone-deaf singers so that they can even more shamelessly package sex as music (as The Buggles wrote in 1979, video killed the radio star).

Also, industry consolidation means that today just three gatekeepers (Universal, Sony and Warner) now control 70-80% of the market. Add to that the impact of digital streaming (discussed below), and the indoor music industry looks bleak.

Consider this: international press widely reported that Taylor Swift purchasing her own music was a success story:

But once you look at the numbers, it seems less like a win and more like a boon for big capital. Scooter Braun made $265 million in profit from her music, the hedge fund Shamrock Capital probably earned around $100 million, and Swift spent $360 million of her own money—equalling the profits made by the other two—to purchase it.

In my opinion, even this “success story” is evidence that the power is in the wrong hands.

Maybe you disagree? Let me know in the comments below — Did Swift do well? Is the music industry working as intended? Do you hope to get signed yourself, or did you at the beginning of your career? If so, what worried you most about getting signed? If you did get signed, was it a good deal?

Innovation has never come from the labels, it’s always come from the streets, whether that’s the blues in the rural south, Doo Wop in the industrial north, rock on both sides of the Atlantic, Hip Hop in Harlem and the Bronx, or innumerable other genres created by buskers over the last century.

Busking provides artists with the kind of artistic freedom they’ll never get from a label. It also provides an income, without first needing a gatekeeper to judge them on their looks.

That quote sums up Ted Gioia’s position on whether we should celebrate the rise in Spotify’s earnings. He highlights that even though the platform is increasing its prices, the pittance they pay out per 1,000 streams to musicians is less than ever before (and still reducing).

He also points out that the money spent on music is changing destinations: from musicians and record labels to tech platforms; from the creators of music to the distributors of data. Digital middlemen now take 20-30% of the revenues from music listens without ever producing a beat. At least Netflix, Apple, Amazon and Disney spend billions on creating content. Spotify just leeches off the creativity of others. It is a parasite.

[Note: I’m aware that it’s a little awkward for me to point this out, considering that busk.co makes most of its money from commissions on tips to buskers. However, our cut is closer to 1%]

According to Spotify’s latest report, 22,000 artists earned over $50,000 last year. But, that’s a lie. Artists aren’t the recipients of that money. First, Spotify’s payout is split between the record labels, publishers, independent distributors, performance rights organisations and collecting societies.

It’s estimated that as little as 12% of the money made from music streams will actually make it to the musicians themselves. That stat should have said “22,000 artists earned over $6,000 last year, which they then have to divide amongst band members”. This is how we get to a situation where Snoop Dog earned just $45,000 on Spotify from a billion streams.

All that is old news. Spotify is now intentionally harming its artists. An investigation by Liz Pelly (whose Harpers Magazine article and fantastic book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, are well-worth the read), revealed that Spotify is now paying music factories to generate royalty-free music to slip into their most popular playlists.

The idea is nefarious. By 2023, 150 of their most popular playlists (like “Ambient Relaxation,” “Deep Focus,” “Bossa Nova Dinner,” “Cocktail Jazz” etc) were almost entirely made up of cheaply produced, factory-generated music, put there to lower the amount of royalties Spotify has to pay to musicians.

To hide their tracks 🥁, Spotify attributed them to ‘ghost bands’, who they even gave fake bios and the platform’s ‘verified artist’ badge.

Initially the company called these allegations “categorically untrue, full stop”. However, Pelly interviewed numerous Spotify current and ex-staff members that confirmed her findings, who even shared internal messages showing the employees involved in this elaborate scam worrying how much it would effectively “steal” from real artists.

Is this such a surprise? After all, Spotify is in the “make our shareholders money” business, not the “pay a lot of artists” business.

Take the venture-capital firm, Creandum. They were an early investor in Spotify. But, they are also one of the largest investors in a company called Epidemic Sound, which is the largest of the music factories spitting out ghost songs for Spotify. Creandum is therefore not just profiting from the sale to Spotify of cheaply-created music (incidentally, Epidemic Sound refuses to work with artists signed to performance rights organisations, because of course they do) but also from ruining the livelihoods of those musicians displaced on Spotify.

The metaphor is in the name. Spotify partnering with “Epidemic” Sound truly is a parasite spreading a disease. This is hedge funds VS the musicians, and Wall Street is winning.

The moment a busker earns a single dollar on the street, they’ve earned more than millions of musicians on Spotify. If they earn a living wage in the street, that would put them in the top 0.0008% of earners on Spotify. As for audiences, they can feel great that 100% of their tip in the street goes to the artist themselves.

Artists on Spotify are already competing with the complete works of every musician who has ever been recorded. It would take you about 30 years to listen to the amount of music uploaded to Spotify every day.

If that wasn’t bad enough, generative AI models have enabled anybody to create music in the time it takes to write a sentence. Exactly two years ago, an AI company based in Delaware—one of the world’s most opaque tax havens—announced they’d made 100 million songs, the size of Spotify’s entire catalogue. The company’s CEO said they can now produce, “an unlimited amount of music of any duration and any genre.” And they’re not the only generator doing this.

The business model of this “AI Slop” is that content self-produced on a massive scale is more profitable than art created by a human with a soul. On platforms like Spotify you’re far more likely to produce a much-listened-to hit if you upload a millions songs.

Timing is important here. The AI generators are now in a race with each other, as whomever can get the most songs out in the least amount of time is more likely to win the race to squeeze the final drops of profitability out of digital streaming.

The worst part of this is that musicians have been forced to take part in their own demise. Generative AI needs the free availability of songs in order to train their AI models. So, by putting music on Spotify, artists are paid a pittance (if anything at all) for feeding the technology that is replacing them.

True to form, Spotify has welcomed the rise of AI slop on their platform, and is about to launch an AI-powered music creation tool that will let users plagiarise works without ever having to leave the app.

For audiences, the benefit of busking is clear. In a world where deepfake generators mean we can no longer believe what we see or hear online, and AI slop means we can’t tell if we’re listening to someone that actually exists, busking is the only entertainment we can trust.

As for musicians, they can busk in the knowledge that their music is for the benefit solely of their audience, and not unscrupulous technologies.

We should never have called what the labels were doing as “the music industry”. They don’t—and never did—deserve that title. I’m not sure you’re allowed to quote yourself, but as I wrote in a newsletter over a year ago:

A more honest title for the labels and platforms would be “the music extraction business”. They mine creativity to sell at a profit, while contributing no creativity of their own.

So, the next time you read a hopeful piece about how YouTube, Spotify, TikTok and the other platforms mean that anybody could be a star nowadays, I hope you remember this:

Technology is not the musician’s friend. The platforms don’t have your interests at heart. The music extraction business is both predatory and conservative, and has harmed the vast majority of musicians who’ve ever tried playing by their rules. Busking, on the other hand, gives musicians control, independence, the freedom to innovate and, most importantly, an income every time people consume their music.

I’m away at the moment. We’ll resume normal service soon.

Thanks, and heavy hats,

Nick