There are two important things happening in the United States today and, believe it or not, they are related. The first, of course, is that today is the day of the midterm elections. A day when a small minority of annoyed Americans will go out to the polls and try to defeat their enemies. And the second thing has even more potential to change the future. Taylor Swift is no longer on Spotify.
Artists have been complaining since the dawn of Spotify that it was bad for them, bad for their business, and in general a basically legal way for everyone to get hold of their music for next to nothing. Spotify pays artists between $0.006 and $0.0084 per play of their songs, so if I, Tenor Dad, recorded a song and put it on this streaming music service, and every person who reads my posts listened to that song, I would make, over the course of one year, approximately $200. But hey, what if I recorded an entire album! What if I wrote ten songs, rented a studio, hired some musicians, and really poured my heart and soul into this masterpiece of musical art for all of my fans. Well, then I would be looking at $2,000 over the course of a year, if you all streamed the whole album every time you read one of my posts, which for some of you is every day, and for others once in a while. I’m sorry to the people who check in every so often to catch up on several posts at once. You will have to stream my hypothetical album many times in a row. You will probably get sick of it. Especially track #7. That one gets weird after a few listens.
So for me, Spotify is not a good way to make a living as a musician. But what about Taylor Swift? She has a few more followers than I do. Surely she could make some good money on Spotify? Yes, yes she could. She could probably make millions. But that really isn’t the point, for her or for me. To some, the answer to a low minimum wage is that you should just work more hours, in hopes of working your way, eventually, into a “better” job. And what those people are saying, basically, is that they don’t value your work. In fact, the more exhausting, demeaning, and horrible a job is, the less we should pay people to do it. Which is insane. You know who we should pay less? People sitting in cushy corner offices with amazing views. You wouldn’t have to pay me very much to do that job! I would, however, want a fairly large sum of money to clean a Taco Bell restroom at closing time.
So when we tell musicians that, in order to make more money they just need to get as many streams as Taylor Swift, we are telling them that music has low value, and if you want to survive in this digital landscape, you just need to make a lot of it to survive. A song has less value than a grain of rice, so accept it and let the profits land where they should: in the pockets of the studios and corporations. We may pretend to value art in our culture, but what we really value is business.
But now there is a new way. Taylor Swift has said that she will no longer allow her songs to be streamed on Spotify. If you want to legally acquire her new album, you are going to have to vote with your wallet and purchase it. And let me tell you, purchasing something, in this business society, is powerful. Money is a vote. The supreme court said it. Big business said it. And now it is true for music again. And as much as Spotify has tried to imply that Taylor Swift needs them, lest she be forgotten and overlooked by the gajillions of Spotify users, the reverse is just as true. Without the big name, popular artists on its playlists, Spotify would be over almost instantly. If the major labels and singers all pulled their stuff tomorrow, that would be the end. And Spotify knows this. It’s why they made a playlist, trying to lure Taylor back into the fold. But I don’t think she’ll be back.
We all have a vote today. The people in control will continually try to remove that power from us, often by convincing us that we can have it all, and so there is no need to vote in the first place. They will try to block your vote, if you are voting in a direction they do not approve of, and they will convince you that your vote doesn’t matter. But it matters. It matters today at the polls, and it matters at the grocery store, the gas station, and on iTunes. Music has value. Music matters. You have value. You matter. Now get out there and let everybody else know it.