The Problem with Muzak – Spotify’s bid to remodel an industry

“The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”

I get that the author wants to listen to "challenging" music that "pushes boundaries" and laments that Spotify's algorithms are surfacing up Muzak instead. But there are other places to go to find your challenging music. For lots of other people, however, music is not some intimate connection with an artist's soul, it's simply something that goes on in the background while you're trying to get something else done or just relax. People seem to want Muzak--who are you to argue with the market when it has spoken?

My observation is that there’s an underlying flaw in the compensation model. I think it was non-obvious and a solution is even less obvious so I don’t really blame Spotify or other services.

Some music is made to be listened to over and over. This category includes ambient and background music, but also any catchy pop-like song (in the broadest possible definition of pop).

Other music is more narrative and challenging. It might be very important and emotionally impactful, but the listener tends to consume it more like a movie. They might listen to it once or twice.

This is a piece of mine I really am proud of. I don’t expect anyone to have it on repeat or add it to a bunch of playlists:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KRQk7TWndBw

It is deliberately challenging.

Back when the model was buying records, there was potential for some remuneration for creating challenging recorded work. Even if it was niche, if enough people appreciated it one could hope to cover costs.

But at a fraction of a cent per play, even if a dedicated listener base absolutely adores your challenging recordings, it’s completely unrealistic to hope to make money from it.

Possibly Patreon or something like it can fill that gap. But I really don’t think being frustrated with Spotify is a productive avenue.

Recently they introduced a feature called “2017 Wrapped”, which contains a playlist named “Your Top Songs 2017”. I imagined this list would contain the songs I actually listened to most. Instead it’s biased so that many of my favorites don’t appear, yet there are major label songs that I don’t even remember actively playing.

It’s borderline misleading advertisement to pretend these are “my top songs” when obviously the list is a pay-to-play for labels.

The author of this article hasn't come to that realization yet.

I love Spotify the product, but it's a terrible, impersonal experience in a lot of ways, and also doesn't feel very sticky to me. Sure, I need access to the catalogue, but the playlists leave me cold and I could easily switch to another service. I feel like there'll be opportunities for instagram-like upstarts to chip away at their base, offering things that their big, impersonal machine can't as it's so focused on scale.

Do they do that? Oh no! Instead, they aggregate together all the music listened to and all the money paid them, take off their cut and then divide the total amount proportionately to artists.

Effectively this means that I'm paying for music that I don't listen to. I hate the fact that some of my money is going to Justin Bieber.

> As an industry insider once explained to me, digital strategists have identified “lean back listening” as an ever more popular Spotify-induced phenomenon. It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll

I can't see what's wrong with this. Is it a sin to consume music to meet an emotional need or match a mood?

> One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform.

This artist doesn't have to be on Spotify.

> If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”

Again, Spotify is a platform whose interests are for itself.

> Spotify’s ambition to superannuate labels is evident. In its quest for total power and control, Spotify has prioritized its own content, and it has made it notably more difficult to find albums rather than playlists.

Of course Spotify prioritizes its own content. No one forces independent artists to be on Spotify.

The writer is lamenting the death of an entire industry, but to blame Spotify is absurd. Blame big labels for pushing Top-40 pop nonsense for the past twenty years. Blame every single person for not valuing art. Blame modern culture for consumerism. Blame the internet for creating an expectation of instant gratification.

"Challenging" music is good and necessary to further art, but it's not a kind of music that the majority of Spotify's audience go out of their way to consume.

I don't think Spotify's netflixified playlists are a big issue. In fact, I think they are decently curated.

The 'music discovery' problem stems from the centralization of music radio (in the late 2000s), causing a selected handful of superstars to reign supreme protected by the centralized barriers to entry.

Spotify has created the inverse problem. Instead of a handful of superstars (other than the ones grandfathered in before streaming became commonplace), the US Top 50 chart (over a given 10 week time period)is fragmented with 100% interchangeable rap songs with DIY production chops. 'Interchangable' is the key word here- none of these artists are able to rise to headliner status and major music festivals are in jeopardy because they are running out of legacy headliners to keep them afloat.

TLDR: Centralized radio enabled labels to conspire to make superstars. Spotify (not intentionally) prevents artists from becoming superstars. There are exceptions, of course, but the revenue numbers from previous generations dwarf those of, say, Fetty Wap.

The punk thing thing to do would be to release a song called "Fuck $Brand" that outlines all the scandals and abuses the brand has been involved in over the years.

Yeah, it's kind of passive aggressive. But when execs at $Brand find out about it, maybe they'll start a corporate blacklist and put your band at the top of it.

Well the distribution side is easy. Unless you have something special, you can just put it on a torrent and have other people help you distribute it. It's the making money part that is hard.

It's still amazing to me that we have things like Spotify trying to control distribution. We don't need any more gatekeepers trying to block users from digital media. Instead we need to start figuring out how our economic models are so broken that they led us to our current situation.

Virtual goods are so fundamentally different that we have companies who don't even realize that they've been automated out. And even worse: We have users who don't understand that and are willing to give these companies money.

Or maybe it's just me getting old. :)

Eliminate the middleman.

Get out and support your local bands.