Are you a musician? Have you ever worked a real day in your life (and were fairly compensated for it)?
In the current marketplace, music has been made (practically) worthless. The ‘working musician’ is a dying breed and to save it the fans and laborers of the music world need to fundamentally shift the way we consider music and its value. But before we even consider changing this we have to first look at who sets the monetary value of music in the current marketplace and how it is valued.
In much of our current hyper-consumptive climate, the arts as a whole are incredibly undervalued. While streaming companies are reporting record breaking earnings (no pun intended), their payouts to musicians (and now authors, podcasters, etc.) appear grossly inadequate. But what many of us fail to see is that these low payouts are indicative of how a streaming company’s managerial class values the commodity: as a mass web of flat content with which to collect and broker data.
The real business is data brokerage. Musicians provide content to streaming companies who then use this content to capture attention and harvest information to be sold. Efforts to gain bigger and bigger swaths of data are only in part subsidized through subscription models and sold as a ‘service’ to those of us consuming the content on these platforms. This slurry of content which all art and media becomes online is valued at fractions of cents, because each track is only an infinitely minuscule piece within the lure of content. If we accept the streaming platforms as data brokerage firms, we can begin to understand the marketplace in which music is being sold, and in turn the value of music as dictated by that marketplace.
Musicians cannot produce their way out of this hole. They are fighting for attention against every release by every artist whose work was ever been uploaded. This may be fine for the major record labels or catalog holding companies (whose millions of fractions of cents ultimately add up to a more notable payout) or for the individualist consumer (there’s never been more consumer choice for so cheap), but for a musician who may put out 1 to 40 full-length records in the their entire lifetime this marketplace is- to put lightly- unsustainable.
The data/attention economy and its subsequent marketplace is unsustainable for the arts and culture because it was in no way made for them- it was made for the data. Our current market puts the value given from consumers on the ‘service’ of the streamers and not on the music itself. This form of economy is cultural resource extraction. The value the attention economy provides in return is easy, cheap novelty.
This is the value transaction at the core of this economy, and what serves this economy at its core is often times what flourishes. Think: bands increasingly making popular TikToks or Instagram reels, not popular records.
What is needed to save the ‘working musician’ and continue our robust music culture is a fundamental shift away from whom working musicians provide value to and in turn how working musicians acquire fair compensation. The only way for this to happen is for it to grow organically on a individual and community level. Put your money where your mouth is, vote with your dollar, etc etc.
Be stubborn, for everyone.
The Resident Sound 