| I’m sitting in the house that Wu-Tang built with their money. |
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| Doing the stroke: Syl Johnson at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, May 3, 1997. |
| (Clayton Call/Redferns/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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| rantnrave:// |
Follow the Money
A lingering question, as the medium-hot flames engulfing SPOTIFY spread into their third week, now with the added fuel of racism:
What if SPOTIFY had treated musicians a little better?
The growing crisis, which a lot of people in and around the company probably saw as more of an annoyance than a crisis until a few days ago—maybe it still does to some of them—isn't about music, per se. It's about misinformation and content moderation and the platform/publisher debate and the cancel culture/consequence culture debate and, now, the perennial question of how many times the average podcaster can casually use the n-word in conversation over the course of a career before getting into trouble (my answer: zero).
What it isn't about, at least on the surface, is the one thing musicians, songwriters and their advocates have been howling about for years: how much (or little) Spotify pays for the use of music.
That's been a source of its own debate since NEIL YOUNG first told Spotify, two weeks ago today, that he didn't want his music on a platform that's paying a podcaster who's been credibly accused of spreading misinformation about Covid. While JOE ROGAN's supporters were attacking Young on free-speech grounds (some of them using a "Rockin' in the Free World" meme that betrayed a laughable misunderstanding of the song), more than a few musician activists were attacking him for complaining about what they said was the wrong issue. Don't make it about the comedian, they said. Make it about the money.
But it kind of *is* about the money. And the freemium model. And sound quality. And tech companies taking over the music business. And this particular tech company pivoting away from music as soon as it had the chance.
It's about missing goodwill.
Neil Young didn't go after Spotify and JOE ROGAN in a vacuum. He went after them after years of misgivings about where Spotify and other tech companies are taking the business. It wasn't a coincidence that it was a musician, not a podcaster, not a subscriber, not a public official, who decided he'd had enough after a group of doctors and other experts wrote an open letter to Spotify accusing Rogan's podcast of dangerous misinformation. As BEN SISARIO wrote in the New York Times last week, Young's own open letter was "the latest strain in the company’s complex and frequently troubled relationship with artists. Much of that trouble has been over money."
Nor is it a coincidence that, when Rogan and Spotify chief DANIEL EK both responded publicly to Young, the music industry was more willing to accept the comedian/podcaster's apology than the streaming company's promise to take action. "Record executives," report the Wall Street Journal's ANNE STEELE and JOHN JURGENSON in an inside account of the unfolding crisis (paywall), "felt Mr. Rogan’s response was genuine and pointed out that he addressed Mr. Young directly—a human element they found missing from Spotify’s response."
The Journal piece, which is a hell of a read, came out just before the story took a dark turn: accusations, backed by a viral video, that Rogan freely tossed around the n-word for years on his podcast. The video was surfaced by another musician, INDIA.ARIE, who's said she's pulling her music from Spotify not because of Covid but because of Rogan's "language around race." (Rogan and Spotify have both apologized again and more than 70 episodes of Rogan's show have been pulled from the service.) That didn't happen in a vacuum either. On Instagram, she complained about Spotify "paying musicians a Fraction of a penny? And HIM $100M? This shows the type of company they are and the company that they keep. I'm tired."
It's easy to believe that if Young was happier with Spotify's sound quality and Arie was happier with Spotify's royalties, neither of them would have made such a public stink, and no one else would have followed their lead, and the current three-alarm fire would be more like a smoldering wastebasket. And the artists whose main complaint is, in fact, the money wouldn't be rushing to the scene.
"After years of suspecting that Spotify was becoming increasingly hostile to our interests but feeling powerless to do anything about it, an opportunity we couldn’t have plotted or planned for just exploded into existence," KAY HANLEY, singer of the band LETTERS TO CLEO and co-founder of the lobbying group SONGWRITERS OF NORTH AMERICA, wrote in an editorial in Variety over the weekend. "Now is our chance to seize the energy of a sideways moment and repurpose it to talk about the real problem: Spotify’s consistent pattern of exploitation, devaluation and disrespect of music creators."
Hanley's headline: "Serves You Right, Spotify."
The obvious question, without an obvious answer, facing Spotify at the moment is what to do about the Joe Rogan mess.
But it may not be just a Joe Rogan mess anymore. It may never have been just that.
Rest in Peace
SYL JOHNSON, whose modest late '60s and early '70s funk and soul hits, including "Different Strokes" and "Is It Become I'm Black," became major sources of hip-hop samples, leading to a late-in-life rediscovery and revival. "I don't like record companies," he once said. "I hate 'em." But he loved those rappers—even the ones who sampled him without permission and who he had to sue to get his money. They paid well and they had great taste in original sources. Johnson died less than a week after his older brother Jimmy, a celebrated Chicago blues guitarist/singer. Another brother, Mack Thompson, who kept the family's original surname, was bluesman Magic Sam's bass player... Bollywood singer LATA MANGESHKAR, an Indian icon whose voice soundtracked more than 1,000 films across seven decades. "She leaves a void in our nation that cannot be filled," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said... Contemporary classical composer GEORGE CRUMB, who tested the limits of performers, musical notation and classical form in works that ranged "from peaceful to nightmarish"... Dominican producer/DJ XTASSY, half of the production team A&X, who worked with artists including Don Omar, Lucenzo and Pitbull... DONNY GERRARD, lead singer of '70s one-hit wonder Skylark ("Wildflower") who went on to a long career as a backup singer.
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| - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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KEXP |
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| How Musicians are Utilizing Discord |
| By Roddy Nikpour |
| Sound & Vision's Roddy Nikpour reports on how Discord is growing in the music industry and is being used to connect with fans, especially during the pandemic. |
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The New Yorker |
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| When Hip-Hop Was Young |
| By Hua Hsu |
| Sue Kwon photographed the artists whose music would go on to change the world. |
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i-D Magazine |
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| The Linda Lindas are growing up |
| By Hannah Ewens |
| The LA punk school kids behind ‘Racist, Sexist Boy’ prove they’re more than a one-hit viral moment. |
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Variety |
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| Has the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Moved On From ’50s and ’60s Artists? |
| By Chris Willman |
| If the Shangri-Las, Turtles, Monkees, Joe Cocker, Flying Burrito Brothers, et al. have never gotten nominated by now, it's probably not going to happen in the Eminem-vs.-Duran Duran age. But we've got a long list of early rockers and pop worthies that got forgotten along the way. |
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The Christian Science Monitor |
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| With the blink of an eye, anyone can play music |
| By Dominique Soguel |
| If music is the language of the soul, shouldn’t everyone be able to try their hand at it? EyeHarp helps people of all abilities play from the heart. |
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| what we're into |
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| Video of the day |
| “Syl Johnson: Any Way the Wind Blows” |
| Rob Hatch-Miller |
| 2015 doc about the soul and blues singer's struggles to get heard in his own time and his hip-hop-fueled rediscovery decades later. |
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| Music | Media |
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| “REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask ‘why?’” |
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