An Open Letter to Taylor Swift

Is this really true? I mean the per stream payout is insanely low compared to an album sale (I think it’s like $7/thousand songs played vs $1 per album). But album sales were just front loaded vs streams being paid out pennies at a time.

If an album has 10 songs and I buy the cd, the artist gets $1 (if they’re lucky, they probably get much, much less). If I stream those 10 songs they get $0.07 (seven cents).

But for albums I’ve bought I might listen to those songs hundreds or even thousands of times. If I streamed them all the artist ends up making more but it might be over 20+ years.

I think I’ve listened to Joshua Tree 500 times but it came out in 1987. So that’s 35 years. While it’s only a few cents per year, over time it’s much more than what they’d get from an album sale.

I’m also not sure what the alternative is and I haven’t heard of many proposed. Spotify is already $15/month. Even if they doubled their payout and upped the price to $30/month it’s still just pennies per year.

Most consumers of music don’t care enough to seek it out, and there just isn’t (?) big money in indie music. I grew up in the age of the CD transition, and CDs were how I bought my first music. It was touted as cheaper (but got more expensive) and the quality of the music went down (1-2 good songs on an album).

Digital initially changed that and gave some power to consumers. I could spend $2 on the 2 good songs. Now I can spend $10/month (less than purchasing 1 album) and have unlimited music.

Basically, the enshittification of the music industry, to the point where I, an average music consumer, don’t really care.

Radio is what, 100?

>The streaming platforms prefer a situation where fan loyalty is to their app, not the musician.

Where’s this coming from? Havent listeners always been “loyal” to inevitable platforms? I don’t understand this decline in loyalty to fans.

>Musicians only make pennies on new albums—or fractions of a penny—where previously they made dollars

You mean back when people bought albums? Is it up to Spotify to compensate all these artists lost wages that were originally given by 100+ record companies? The entire foundation has been replaced, stop vilifying streaming platforms.

> AI bad, grrr

So much music, especially techno, sounds like it was made by AI anyway. Do guys like this ever stop and think maybe Pop music is easily emulated because it’s derivative? That maybe not everyone seems music as art? It’s going to happen no matter what “Tay Tay” has to say.

Kids are going to be singing songs that only existed the second they pressed the play button, and that one kid will only know the lyrics, I think there’s some beauty in that.

>Live music is in even worse shape—venues have never fully recovered from the pandemic

People aren’t going to start seeing shows because “it’s the right thing to do”. That’s not something that will last. Read bowling alone, general community decline is a long standing topic.

>The major record labels don’t care. They would rather buy up the rights to old songs than create new ones.

Again, is this true? Are new artists no longer being signed to major labels? Can labels even make money off new artists?

> Indie radio, music media, and other traditional supports of music culture are also in irreversible decline.

I don’t really know what that means, but…ok?

So much of these points are just weird opinions that the writer just assumes we agree with.

Taylor is never going to read some academic blogger’s anti-corporate music rant. And even if she did, her fans are tweens. That force of children has no idea what you’re talking about.

Write a letter to Neal Young and his fans. You’d have a better chance, they’d eat this crap with a spoon.

And in the world of tech if you say "considered harmful" it's a similar thing - the label makes the message worthy of attention.

Hard to understand but that's the way people seem to work.

Would it do them any good?