Musicians on streaming: ‘Money for nothing and your clicks for free’
Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods. Picture by Jerome Wittingham
The Crow’s Nest, a music column by Russ Litten
Talking streaming with Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson, Paul Sarel of Bunkerpop, and former Beautiful South member David Stead
Back in the sixties and seventies, it was all fairly simple. You took a bunch of groovy looking kids, stuck them in a recording studio, made a record and tried to get the radio to play it. If enough people heard the tune and went out and bought it, you could maybe get on Top Of The Pops and have a hit single. Record companies loved this arrangement because they could recoup all the money they’d invested, give the band a few quid, and keep the lion’s share of the profit themselves. Bands loved it because they could get on the telly and have loads of adoring fans.
This happy state of affairs carried on up until the eighties, when CDs arrived. This was manna from heaven for the record companies, who could then repackage a load of tunes they’d paid to record years ago and flog them back to the public again in a shiny new format. Unfortunately, most of the bands concerned were still tied to the same percentage deal given for previous vinyl releases, which meant they were getting next to nowt. Bigger slice of pie for the record company, same old skinny crust for the artist.
‘Our 17,000 streams were only worth £88’ - Paul Sarel, Bunkerpop
Then along came the internet and muddied the waters even further.
I hardly ever pay for music now - or at least I don’t feel like I do. The fifteen quid I give every month to Spotify doesn’t really count as me paying for music, because I’m not nailing my money to any one mast. I’m a member of the biggest audio library in the world, and as such I can skip happily around from track to track, hearing everything but not really paying for anything. That’s how it seems to me, anyway. Maybe it’s because I’m not making a conscious investment in any particular artist or album.
That fifteen pounds is stretched wafer-thin across all the history of recorded music. And it’s all so easily available too, which breeds a casual contempt for its worth. Music is no longer something you have to queue for in a record shop. It can be on your phone via YouTube in five seconds flat. That’s wonderful for society at large, but leaves the people making the music at something of a disadvantage, commercially speaking. Once you can reproduce something digitally, it’s completely worthless.
Bunkerpop
So if hardly anybody is paying for music, how are musicians making money off their songs?
The Musicians Union have been arguing for around two years now that streaming sites such as Spotify should be looking to employ a fairer remuneration system for artists. Hull band Bunkerpop have decided that it’s currently a system not fair enough for their liking. They’ve shifted all their output off every streaming platform and placed it elsewhere. A statement on their Facebook page reads: “Bunkerpop are no longer on the streaming sites. We are still on Bandcamp though - a much fairer place for artists to receive payment for their endeavours. It costs a band / label like us about £220 a year to keep the streaming site alive. It’s just not paying for itself … we’re quite niche as it goes. We need 95,000 streams a year on Spotify to break even. Which we’ll never do. We’re teachers, bar managers, venue managers, youth workers, not industry experts.”
‘It’s like paying the rent, you’ve gotta live with it’ - Jason Williamson, Sleaford Mods
I spoke to Bunkerpop singer Paul Sarel, who elaborated further: “Streaming is a one-sided affair. Artists have to pay to have their music streamed and punters have to pay to listen. And when artists are also punters, then they’re paying twice! It’s great that there are platforms on offer, but a fair means of payment needs to come into play. Bunkerpop had 17,000 streams across all platforms, and only received £88. Something that is used 17,000 times has got to be worth more than £88, especially when you have to split it between five people. Imagine if you wore the same pair of socks 17,000 times - sooner or later you’d have to invest in a new pair.”
I wondered how other musicians viewed this delivery model for their music. I spoke to Sleaford Mods singer and writer Jason Williamson, who had a slightly more pragmatic take: “It is what it is, it’s not gonna change. It’s another one of those necessary evils on the landscape. I think musicians generally are trying to perceive it as a thing that should be like Bandcamp, but what people have to remember is Spotify was set up by someone purposefully with profit in mind. You could be here all day with the evils of that, the selfishness of that, but I don’t think it’s gonna change.
David Stead
“The geezer set it up to stream people’s music, to act as an alternative business model for bands to basically promote their wares online. I just don’t know how they’re gonna make it agreeable to the average musician on the street - for a few reasons really, like the infrastructure, the way Spotify’s set up, who it’s set up by and the interests that the website serves, which is mainly major labels. And they’re not gonna give money away, that’s just not how it’s gonna be. I think Spotify was the saviour of the large labels in the face of the creation of the internet, when people were just ripping other people’s music off. They didn’t need to buy it anymore, so these major labels needed somewhere where they could find profit again. And they found that in Spotify.
“But you can’t just simply say ‘Down With The King’, it’s a bit more complicated than that, innit? I find it a real complicated subject, and I don’t know if perhaps I’m too nihilistic, but I don’t think it will ever change. Spotify to me is just like the rent - you gotta find a way round it, you’ve gotta live with it. It’s really hard to be presented with questions about it, because … you know, I don’t mean to sound like your Dad, but nobody is doing anything for you, you gotta do it for yourself.”
‘You’ve got to put yourself in the shop window’ - David Stead, ex-Beautiful South
Money and how it flows through the music business has long been a bone of contention between artists and their paymasters. David Stead, former drummer with The Beautiful South, offers a sobering view of how the financial wheels of the pop machine turn: “The Beautiful South were actually in debt when we split up ‘cos we had had a massive advance on the last album. We’ve only just paid it off in the last few years. The record company didn’t recoup the advance because we weren’t promoting the album, and also because the means of renumeration went from from record sales to streaming. We’ve only just paid it off in the last few years, through the streaming model.
“This is how it used to work - the record companies would tempt you with a big advance. And the danger is bands think they’ve won the lottery, but what they’ve actually done is incurred a massive debt to the lottery. All that money has to be paid back. The classic example was Five Star - big advances, big houses and cars, and then a few years down the line the record company is saying they want their money back. They hadn’t sold enough records, despite having hits. All of a sudden the flash cars and the houses had to go back and Five Star were skint.
“One of the other things record companies do is organise TV appearances - they send posh cars to pick you up, book you into swanky hotels, lay on loads of booze and food. All of that is recoupable, you’re paying for all of that in the end. But bands fall for it. Rather than take it easy, stay in a smaller hotel or get a taxi, they just go with the flow. Because most bands wanna go mad, live out the role in their heads.
“As for streaming, I think if you’re a new band and you’ve got a great song, you should exploit that song to the utmost, within your morals - like, you’re not gonna do a Coca Cola ad or whatever. But you should put it across all the streaming platforms, I think, purely to put it in the shop window, so to speak. You’re almost paying for an advert for your band. I think that’s how you should look at it.
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“It’s different now. You can still make money out of being in a band, but you’ve got to be pretty huge for a long period of time. Record companies definitely sign less bands now. They used to splash money about to invest, and most of those bands would flop. But it wouldn’t matter, cos they’d have their big selling artists who were kind of propping everyone else up, making enough money to reinvest in new bands.
“But major record companies don’t want to take risks anymore. They don’t want to sign anything unless they know it can make them fast money, give them an immediate return. There’s no maverick bands out there on big major labels, it’s all very safe. And if any left-field bands or indie labels get big, the majors just gobble them up, like they did with Creation. Make them an offer they can’t refuse. It is an unfair system, massively weighted in favour of the record company, and the only argument they ever had for their big percentages was - look, we need this money to invest in new bands. But they’re not really doing that anymore.”