The consumer now is so impatient and they expect so much music in so little time, and then they’ll complain about quality. You have to pick one... Anything rushed is going to sound and feel rushed. And a huge part of the process of making music is living with it.
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Thursday July 14, 2022
REDEF
The thrill of live, the danger of live, or both? The crowd at the Wireless Festival, Birmingham, England, July 10, 2022.
(Katja Ogrin/Redferns/Getty Images)
quote of the day
The consumer now is so impatient and they expect so much music in so little time, and then they’ll complain about quality. You have to pick one... Anything rushed is going to sound and feel rushed. And a huge part of the process of making music is living with it.
- Giveon
rantnrave://
Middle of the Ride

While NASA is looking deeper into the universe than anyone ever has—and discovering it looks like a bunch of pop, funk and disco album covers—researchers here on Earth have sent us the first detailed pictures of what it looks like when your music subscription dollars go directly to the artists whose music you play. It turns out, as experts have long suspected, it’s great for the music universe’s mid-sized stars and a little less rosy for the biggest ones.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a white paper issued by MIDIA at the behest of SOUNDCLOUD, which a little over a year ago became the first major streaming service to offer artists the option of getting paid on a user-centric basis (SoundCloud calls it Fan Powered Royalties) rather than the industry standard pro rata model. Which means most of your $4.99 or $9.99 monthly fee is divided among the artists you play each month, rather than going into a general pool that gets divvied up among the artists *everybody* plays.

More than 118,000 artists opted in in the program’s first year, and a majority of those with between 100 and 100,000 fans ended up with more money in their pockets as a result, according to the report, authored by TATIANA CIRISANO, PERRY GRESHAM and KRISS THAKRAR. Those in the 1,000- to 10,000-fan range did best—65% of them saw their income go up—and those with over 100,000 fans did worst, with 62% of the artists in that group seeing their income shrink. While the report is thin on the specifics of dollars and cents, that redistribution of royalties into the middle of music’s long tail matches what proponents of user-centric royalties have been promising all along. (“Most artists benefit,” Thakrar wrote in an accompanying summary. “Who f***ing knew,” quipped TOM GRAY of the #BROKENRECORD campaign.) What seems to be driving the shift are what Midia calls “active fans” and, especially, “superfans,” who tend to make up a smaller percentage of an artist’s audience the bigger an artist gets, and who deliver an outsize proportion of their favorite artists’ income.

Which is to say, user-centric royalties reward active engagement in an artist’s catalog and devalue passive engagement. Which works great on a service like SoundCloud, whose social features, says Midia, “has enabled it to function as a platform where artists and fans can connect directly.” Artists, up to and including superstars, would be incentivized to engage their biggest fans in a system that “rewards quality of fans, not quantity of streams.”

But would a service like SPOTIFY or APPLE MUSIC, whose core business is the passive engagement of radio and playlists and who presumably have an interest in making sure those streams maintain their value, be incentivized to hop on the user-centric train? The push for user-centric payouts has typically come from music’s middle class. If 10 DRAKEs and JACK HARLOWs are telling Spotify and Apple to keep things as they are, while a thousand MOUNTAIN GOATS and YOLAs are telling them to switch, who would the services listen to? What would be in the services’ best interest?

“There are caveats to this study,” Midia acknowledges. “The results for SoundCloud may not work out in a similar fashion for other services.” But it might be nice to see concrete test results from some of them, too.

In the Crowd

I’m mesmerized by the photo at the top of this newsletter, taken at the WIRELESS FESTIVAL in England last weekend. It radiates the pure, unfiltered joy of seeing live music, even more so after a couple years when so many people had to go without. But it also depicts a packed, barricaded scene that crowd-control experts say could, if enough things go wrong, lead to disaster. I see a perfect weekend, and I see ASTROWORLD. What do you see?

Rest in Peace

Experimental music archivist GARY TODD, who released music by Terry Riley, John Cage, Derek Bailey and many others on his Organ of Corti label... Nightclub impresario MARK FLEISCHMAN, best known as the owner of Studio 54 in the 1980s. He bought it from jailed founders Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager in 1981 and became, in his own words, the “ringleader” to “celebrities and stunning women [who] made their way through the crowd to sip champagne and share lines of cocaine with my golden straw or rolled up one-hundred-dollar bills”... British conductor and composer BRAMWELL TOVEY, who led orchestras in London, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Rhode Island and Sarasota, Fla., and had long associations with the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

- Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator
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