Hey there, hope you’re doing alright, and welcome to issue #62 of Crow’s Nest. Hope you got through the last issue before diving into this one!
Anyway, this past week has marked 2 important annual milestones for those who care about the workings of the music industry: this year’s Spotify Wrapped launch, and the last Bandcamp Friday. Both are significant for what they are, and what their respective platforms are likely to become.
Let’s start with Spotify Wrapped. The streaming service’s annual end-of-year stats promotion gives you a fun snapshot of your streaming data from the past year, presented as easily shareable graphics: your top artists, songs, genres (both well-understood and metadata-derived Frankensteinian creatures), your aggregate listening statistics, and other fun things such as the city your listening habits most strongly resemble. (Mine was Islington unlike many of my peers who got Burlington. I’ll take Corbyn over Sanders politically too tbh.)
Three years ago, Liz Pelly noted that Wrapped is, at its core, a free advertising service for Spotify. No use of service, no stats, no Wrapped, nothing to share, jealousy of the attention your peers get, temptation to share if you use Spotify but haven’t posted about yours. FOMO if you don’t all around. No surprises, and no disagreements there.
Pelly also notes that the usage of stats based on listening volume is in many ways a hollow way to understand and value art, noting different functional uses for music and how music you may only listen to once or twice can be much more significant or important that something you have on repeat in perpetuity. Recently, I saw someone compare the streaming numbers for Andre 3000’s experimental woodwind album New Blue Sun to Outkast’s back catalog to argue against the former’s relevance. You don’t need to dig out that quote from Eno on VU to know that, even if only a few hundred or thousand people listen to New Blue Sun and are inspired to do weirder, stranger art because of it, its impact will be far greater than millions of people who hear ‘Hey Ya’ in the background when they put on a ‘Totally 2000s 2unes’ playlist.
Materially, though, your personal listening on Spotify is not monetarily rewarding your favorite artists. As Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500, Damon and Naomi, and the Dada Drummer Almanach newsletter notes, Spotify maxes out at paying $0.003 per stream. Listening through a 10-song, 40-minute long album nets the artists—really the rights holders who may be the artist but that’s a separate conversation—$0.03. Actual figures will vary with track runtimes but on average you are ‘paying’ around 5 cents an hour to the artists you listen to on Spotify. If I were writing this on the clock, I’d earn more in the time it took to write this paragraph out by an order of magnitude than what I ‘paid’ by listening over that longer period.
Krukowski also notes that this is proportioned out across all artists on the platform and not among your own listening habits. Whatever percentage of streams an artist had of the total pot is their split of the revenue. If you pay $11 for a month of Spotify Premium and only listen to one small act for the entirety of that month, guess what? You gave Morgan Wallen at least several orders of magnitude more of that $11 than the artist—the only one you listened to that month—gets.
Let’s take a look at my stats for some real numbers. Spotify says I listened for 40,114 minutes this ‘year’—the Wrapped presentation explicitly excludes December—working out to almost exactly 2 hours of listening per day. I spent 537 minutes listening to my top artist, Dumb, and played my top song, ‘Pod’ by Snõõper, 22 times. Admittedly, I can churn through music I claim to like quickly, and I do a shitload more listening each day, primarily through Bandcamp. While I don’t have my Bandcamp stats handy, Spotify says I’m in the top 7% of users for listening time in 2023. My math suggests my listening is allocating around $3 of my monthly $11 to artists I actually listen to; otherwise, my listening does not change who gets what share of the other $8, I guess.
Back of the envelope calculations for Dumb, almost certainly all listens of Pray 4 Tomorrow, earned the band an estimated maximum of $0.71. Streaming ‘Pod’, probably my favorite song of the year, on Spotify netted Snõõper a whopping maximum payment of 6.6 American cents. I knew the numbers would be low, but even I am shocked at just how low they are. At Spotify’s rates, throwing loose change at an artist when passing them on the street is a more lucrative and dignified payment method.
Moving forward, Spotify’s not getting any better for the majority of artists. Krukowski notes that, starting next year, Spotify will not be paying out royalties for songs that earn fewer than 1,000 streams per year. That’s two-thirds of the songs available on Spotify. Those royalties and their respective $0.003 or so of value each are still owed; Spotify just won’t pay it. That money, if not withheld by Spotify, will go to the more popular acts already taking in the majority of streaming revenue. Bands like Snõõper and Dumb will soon find themselves fortunate to receive any money from the service, and whether they cut a check or not Spotify will spit in their face and tell them to go fuck themselves.
Spotify’s business model, which rewards only itself and the elite tier of artists who can leverage their popularity into a decent sliver of the streaming pie, has long been criticized as deeply problematic; nearly a decade ago it was reported that the top 1% of artists earned 77% of music industry revenue, and like most measures of inequality I can’t imagine things have gotten more even since then, especially as 84% of music industry revenue now comes from streaming per Krukowski. Taylor Swift, this year’s most-streamed artist, will earn ~$130 million from Spotify this year. While that number is objectively A Lot, it also feels surprisingly low to me. Not that Swift needs the money or that anybody should make that much in a year (or ever), but under the rules of the game as they are, as the biggest and most culturally dominant icon this year, I would’ve guessed she’d have taken home around $250-400 million from this revenue stream. There’s only so many $11s to collect and redistribute though, I guess.
Campaigns around Spotify have prioritized changes/increases to the payment model/rate, as Krukowski notes. What Krukowski doesn’t note in his piece, though, is how Spotify has reacted to those changes. Spotify will no longer be available in Uruguay in a few months. The reason, as reported in Music Business Worldwide, is vagaries in changes to Uruguayan copyright law which may require higher artists payments, making its business model unviable if that happened.
It’s understandable that a business would retreat from a market due to such uncertainty and changes, but the flip side to that is how dependent Spotify’s business model is on exploiting those from whom it derives its value, and how far it will go to avoid doing anything so mild as pay out additional fractions of cents to artists. I don’t think such a business model deserves to continue operations. While I’m sure America is a more important market such that Uruguay-style changes to American copyright law might not cause Spotify to exit that market, at this point campaigns to reform or improve the current system seem misguided at best based on their likely outcomes. Spotify is no friend to artists.
Update 12/5: The day after I finished writing this, Spotify announced it was laying off ~1,500 people—approximately one-sixth of its employees and the third layoff round it’s conducted this year—in a move CEO Daniel Ek has noted is meant to help the company become more profitable and reduce costs. Spotify has never been consistently profitable—its profit last quarter was its first in over a year—and it continues to struggle to identify a way to make its model work even when paying the majority of artists a pittance. This has never really surprised me; what it offers consumers for $11 a month is a bargain, and squeezing out surplus when you can’t obtain more from those who use more of your services is certainly challenging. Nevertheless, the model only works for those already positioned to make the most, while the rest struggle for crumbs.
I suppose this is the part in the essay where I should say to cancel your Spotify subscriptions and stop doing free advertising for them by sharing your Wrappeds. Well, I’m a few days late on the latter, and, honestly, I can’t endorse the former either. Streaming is super convenient for the end user, and there’s a lot of music I would never have listened to were I not able to do so without an upfront cost or without convenient access from my personal devices. That is good. I’m not a person who operates without ethical flaws, and one of them, perhaps, is that I subscribe to Spotify and do not plan to cancel my subscription. Using Spotify is ingrained within my life and I don’t feel compelled at this time to extirpate it. I will say, though, that you now know that using Spotify does not support artists if they cannot leverage their stats towards some other revenue stream. Using Spotify only satisfies you and the company, and not the artist for whom Spotify is an intermediary. Act accordingly.
So, I realize what I’m doing now is poor argumentative form, but whatever; right now, you might be thinking, Ryan, what are these other revenue streams artists have? How can I support my favorite artists if using Spotify to do so is the equivalent of pissing into the wind?
The best options in the current music landscape involve paying artists as directly as you can. That would be through merchandise, ideally through a dedicated online webstore or in-person at the merch table (where hopefully the venue is not taking an extortionate cut of sales, another separate conversation). Bands do get some cash from ticket sales, but everything I’ve seen regarding that suggests they break even at best on those. Returning to Snõõper, when I saw them earlier this year at the Empty Bottle, it was $15 and fees a ticket for them headlining a 4-act bill; I’m sure some of that money also went to paying venue staff and maintenance/upkeep such that it’s hard to imagine much if any upfront profit. They did have a variety of physical media, t-shirts, and probably some other stuff for sale, and I got none of it as it wasn’t my style, I already have probably too much stuff in my apartment, and I’m not one to buy something I don’t want to support them, even knowing they almost certainly could use the money more than me. I did purchase their album digitally on Bandcamp earlier, which is their cut of $9.99 more that only clutters my hard drive if I actually download it.
Speaking of Bandcamp, it has been one of the best ways for musicians to make money off of their art. I use ‘has’ there intentionally vaguely though. As you’re likely aware, earlier this year Bandcamp was sold to Songtradr, a B2B music licensing company, following its acquisition by Epic Games last year. Songtradr immediately laid off half of Bandcamp’s staff, including the entirety of the employee union’s bargaining team, with the remainder of the employees reportedly focused primarily on keeping the lights on. (I can’t find the source for that last part now, sorry.)
It’s not clear what Songtradr’s long-term plans for Bandcamp are. Bandcamp had reportedly been consistently profitable for a decade prior to Epic’s acquisition, so the opening salvo of layoffs seems less of a necessary restructuring for stability, and more a work of enshittifcation meant to temporarily boost profits for the new owners, before they discard it as a shell of the company it once was. While at the time of writing it’s not yet been a full business day since the last Bandcamp Friday, when the service waives its 10-15% cut of sales and passes that on to the artist, no one seems confident there will be another one. As a pandemic initiative meant to help put a bit more money in the pocket of artists whose live performances were cancelled en masse, it might be understandable to end them now: while few people’s economic position is much better at this time than before the pandemic, we’re also close to the point when things have been ‘reopened’ for twice as long as they were closed. That doesn’t make the potential and future losses feel any better.
When I was first getting into music in high school and college, I didn’t have a lot of money I could justify on supporting artists, not even a subscription to Spotify. (I knew the payments were a crock of shit back then, but I digress.) I mostly pirated what I listened to, justifying it by promising that once I started making decent money I would begin paying for music. By the time that happened in 2018-2019, the music industry had changed such that no one was really making money outside the biggest artists. Streaming and touring had become the only games in town. And yet, Bandcamp remained a—perhaps the—beacon of hope for some semblance of fair business practices and decent compensation for one of the most powerful forms of art out there.
Since the pandemic started, I’ve committed to spending at least $200 a month on Bandcamp, and I’ve stuck to it. That’s both a fair amount I’ve paid, much more than your average listener, and not a whole lot when you come to think of it. For the artists on the other end, that money is hopefully at least a little bit to help out, perhaps enough for a meal or a drink to commiserate their situation. That beacon might be going out soon. It was always foolish to put so many of our collective eggs into the one basket of Bandcamp, and we’re seeing the results of that play out one opaque business decision at a time.
I don’t see the situation getting any better in the near-term, and not only for the reasons noted above. I’ve written before that, for many people, Spotify is the music app. YouTube, and its recommendation algorithm that can actually push more interesting stuff onto listeners, is a close second, yet pays out royalty rates that are even worse than Spotify, if you can believe it. Joshua Minsoo Kim, a music writer and high-school science teacher, recently tweeted about how his students largely don’t know what Bandcamp is, see full computers largely as tools for work, school and/or gaming, and don’t even use the web browsers on their phones because they can do most everything they need or want to through a handful of apps. The notion of paying for music itself beyond subscribing to a service to rid yourself of nuisance advertising is already a boutique activity. Paying for music and materially supporting artists, as something you could do, let alone should do, is practically extinct. The quip that music wants to be free has never been more true; the enormous challenge of compensating the artists who make it has never seemed more difficult. I can only hope that a sea change in consumer attitudes and/or the political economy enables such a change; needless to say, I’m not optimistic at this time.
So, sorry to bring you down at a time when the perpetual cloud cover of winter sets in. If you would like to materially support artists this holiday season, below is my latest set of recommendations:
Last issue had 27 entries, probably the most I’ve ever done in one of these, spanning 5 continents. I missed South America not because there hasn’t been anything notable from there, but largely because this hadn’t gotten up to stream on Bandcamp by the time I hit publish on that issue. The great curators at BBE put together this survey of Brazilian jazz legends Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, over 6 decades of music across 5 slabs of wax or 3 CDs. A literal lifetime of work cutting across all corners and pockets of the genre, the 37 selections here are surely but the entry point into their vast catalog. I don’t have much more to say other than this deserves much more time and attention than I’d be able to give it here. Get digging.
As you know, I love krautrock, I love psychedelic music, and I love indie rock out of New Zealand. While there’s overlap between those, the three have never really been synthesized together in the way this project from members of The Bats, The Clean (including the late Hamish Kilgour), Tall Dwarfs, and Toy Love have. Tall Dwarfs in particular have connections to the Elephant 6 collective, which is a bit like what this sounds like if those guys had a taste for motorik beats and/or connections with Stereolab during their respective heydays. I’m not sure what future this project has with Kilgour no longer with us, sadly, but if this record is all we get, it’s no less worth treasuring.
Bandcamp Fridays have always been a good source for goodies, but even then finding a gem like this is rare and hard to beat. A private press record originally released in 1978, the kind that record crate diggers dream of unearthing, shows Dorothy Carter’s mastery of the hammered dulcimer and zither throughout. It’s New Age-y, a bit of a predecessor to the freak folk of the 2000s, droning, and more. As usual with archival reissues like this I encourage you to read the release notes, at minimum, for more info. It’s truly unlike anything I’ve really heard and well worth becoming acquainted with 45 years after its creation.
A few issues back I highlighted a 4-way split LP from Honest Jon’s featuring experimental percussive collaborations between contemporary producers and Sengalese mbalax drummers. Philip Sherburne at Futurism Restated clarified the drummers are family members of the late Doudou Ndiaye Rose. That’s also explicit from the title of the LP that HJ’s put out from contributor Lamin Fofana in a similarly understated way on Friday. New material presumably originating from the same sessions, the first three songs are a suite of material that could have come out on Príncipe or Nyege Nyege. The final one is a more mystical-sounding standout exercise in mutant African percussion not far from what Shackleton did on The Majestic Yes, also from this trip and sessions. This release strongly implies the others on that compilation have additional LPs coming out in the future, which makes me feel as excited as I do listening to this. I also have another dozen+ releases from Lamin Fofana’s back catalog to get into as well which is also really exciting.
If you don’t believe me to be terminally online, first of all, thank you. Next, the music folks I do consider to be that way really enjoy the work of Danish artist ML Buch. Her music has a bit of an uncanny valley sheen to it, wrapped in a day-glo package of folk music that feels a bit like the epitome of 70s AM radio. Buch’s singing makes the whole thing sound to me like Avalon Emerson dropping the beats and centering the guitar on her album from earlier this year, or perhaps more esoterically Eleventeen Eston’s 2014 album Delta Horizon. You don’t need to get any of the above references to enjoy this nice package of artificial sunlight.
Chuquimamani-Condori—fka Elysia Crampton—has put out this record of experimental work landing somewhere between postmodern collage and explorations of her Aymara heritage. A lot of the same folks who stan ML Buch really liked this one too despite coming from the opposite end of the online-experimental. It’s a very personal, affective work not suited for the dancefloor … honestly I feel a little uncomfortable writing about it from my perspective. Great nevertheless.
The light airiness of a lot of Brazilian music lends itself well to ambient background listening if you’re not paying close attention, but I can’t say any of them are as ambient as this record from the Los Angeles based guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento. No relation to Milton that I could find, though collaborating with Arthur Verocai and Airto is enough of a pedigree in and of itself. It’s a solitary pandemic-era record primarily of him working with a variety of guitars, and probably as good a reminder as any that I might want to slow down my listening at times. He’s got a record with fellow Los Angeles jazz musician Sam Gendel out next month as well, and surely that will also be worth your time.
Charlemagne Palestine, here I could write ‘the iconoclastic composer associated with New York City’s downtown arts scene’ as a cover for my lack of knowledge about him despite being someone I should know more about, released this pair of performances of the titular piece through Blank Forms. Playing the carillon in a minimalist style more associated with the instrument from which its keyboard controller is derived, the first is a studio recording, the second a live eulogy for the late Tony Conrad, at the church where the two met. The latter definitely has some unexpected accompaniment highlighting that. If you think compositions for bells as only liturgical or the occasional viral novelty akin to baseball stadium organ work—think again.
I’m not sure what to make of this one. Eschewing the typical doom and heaviness associated with the group name and title, Nuke Watch appears to be the Beat Detectives duo expanded out to a septet, including experimental saxophonist of the moment Cole Pulice. The result doesn’t fully feel like a septet, with an uneasy, deconstructed New Age-y feel to the sound which feels askew from but perfectly suited to both The Trilogy Tapes label and how the original milieu of nuclear war-wary artistic types must have felt at the time, expressed differently. At a time of prominent Russian saber-rattling it does feel fitting in a different way than a dark post-apocalyptic one.
Post-punk and metal don’t typically mix, with the exceptions proving the rule. Cel Ray have an unreleased song about treats with a breakdown verging on metal. Chat Pile have crossover appeal, and coming from the noise rock side I was surprised by the number of Big Dudes in all black in the crowd when I saw them live in September. You’ll have to cross the Atlantic over to Scandinavia to see the most comprehensive fusion though. The Finnish group Musta Huone take this hybrid sound in peculiar directions—you probably won’t be surprised to hear they got a Album of the Week from The Quietus, which is where I learned of them—and the result is a peculiar yet intriguing mix I need to spend more time with.
Experimental rock isn’t much of a scientific discipline, but the quality control of Wrong Speed is exceptional enough to merit attention to all its publications. Originally the duo of the Ineson brothers behind 90s underground rockers Nub (not familiar), the band is now a quintet that continues them refining that 90s palette of sounds into something worth digging into. Tbh I’m writing this towards the end of the issue and it’s not really sticking with me as much as my first stoned listen did, but it picks up a bit towards the end of the record and fans of patient rock from the 90s will find plenty to enjoy here.
Russell Ellington Langston Butler has kept their middle initials abbreviated on prior releases. What remains the same is the emotional power and personal experiences packed into their productions. These NYC house-style numbers are suffused with a sense of melancholy that reminds me of The Other People Place, while being deep and groovy in their own sense. I’m not especially familiar with the NYC house sound and, more embarrassingly, am not familiar enough with Frankie Knuckles’s personal collection to know how Butler’s day job digitizing that might have affected this sound. Nevertheless, the sounds within undoubtedly pack a big punch in small, half-empty rooms or other melancholy nighttime spaces.
Last issue a touched on (described?) a so-called ‘hardness war’ I’ve perceived in techno as of late. Rhyw’s work his Fever AM label has been at the center of it, and his label partner Mor Elian gets back into that fray with this 2-tracker. ‘Eso Eso’ is in the same vein as the opening number from Pangaea’s recent LP, while ‘Teke Teke’ has an uneasy undercurrent with some of the more tasteful klaxon-esque noise I’ve ever heard on a release. Profits through the 6th on this record go to a number of charities including Doctors Without Borders.
Touching on tribal, deconstructed club a la AD 93, new age and other tropes from dance music over the past decade, this one-off single from now-Tampa based producer Akasha System was a nice little hidden gem to come out on Friday. Here’s hoping it has a bit of a longer shelf life ahead.
Swedish producer Peder Mannerfelt’s work has long had a nebulous, hard-to-categorize feeling in dance, combined with an at-times in-your-face, ‘graphic design is my passion’ directness that helps him stand out from the crowd. His latest EP for Voam is a good addition to his catalog, bringing a bouncy, twitchy energy to techno that would surely sound good over a small room’s sound system.
Piezo and his ANSIA label maintain a steady drip of exceptional club work always worth checking out, and this collaborative single with Aitch and Primordial Ooze as Cortex of Light is no exception to that. It’s a queasy record meant for small, dank rooms, not telling your mother what you get up to, not too dissimilar from a bit of the territory The Bug has explored on a tighter budget, that sort of thing. You would think someone dropping such a devastating one-two punch of EPs in Cyclic Wavez and Odd Hooks this year might rest for a bit, but Piezo says to expect a lot more music from this project next year; that he’s even more energized now after that is getting my own excitement up. This is also a charity record.
There’s another 10 records on my list for this issue which are tantalizing to consider, but I’ll call it an issue at 15 this time. Thank you for reading and listening to this point, I hope there was something within that you enjoyed. Have a wonderful December.