Political Economy/Ecology of Streaming

[nickbee8]

[ Mod note: posts split off from the Let It Be Pre-Release discussion thread.]

There's alot of information in a book called "Decomposed, the political ecology of music" by Kyle Devine that looks into the environmental consequences of disc and data production and consumption(Shellac, Plastic & Data). Reflecting on data consumption I came to the conclusion that the energy consumption was dependent largely on the energy required to access the date times the time required to do so. Therefore, a download of five minutes would require less energy than a streaming for an hour of a half and obviously one download would require less energy than regularly streaming the same album over and again (as we do with spotify). Obviously, the production cost and energy required for many of the items we buy is greater than one download. Still, the world goes on spinning and so do our discs and the wheels of production...

 

[LuvMyQuad]

Interesting. Thank you.

 

[marcb]

There's alot of information in a book called "Decomposed, the political ecology of music" by Kyle Devine that looks into the environmental consequences of disc and data production and consumption(Shellac, Plastic & Data). Reflecting on data consumption I came to the conclusion that the energy consumption was dependent largely on the energy required to access the date times the time required to do so. Therefore, a download of five minutes would require less energy than a streaming for an hour of a half and obviously one download would require less energy than regularly streaming the same album over and again (as we do with spotify). Obviously, the production cost and energy required for many of the items we buy is greater than one download. Still, the world goes on spinning and so do our discs and the wheels of production...

Does this book take into account the impact of creating and maintaining huge data farms for music, books, documents, etc? Those things don’t live in the ether in outer space.

Environmental impact “studies” always seem to be one-armed...

 

[Bill B]

I've always felt that we should be very concerned about those things we use that are disposable or have a very short shelf life with regards to the environment (plastic bottles are a good example). With things that are supposed to last a lifetime and be kept for years (like plastic disks or vinyl records) I have a hard time worrying about the environmental impacts. Somewhere when figuring the environmental cost of a given product, the expected length of life should be factored in. Theoretically a cd will last longer than my car (or me for that matter) so, as far as I am concerned, it is justifiable to manufacture such things. I am not saying there aren't more environmentally friendly ways to store and consume music, I'm just saying I have no feelings of guilt when it comes to my music collection compared to many of my other purchases because I will get 50+ years of use out of it and maybe someone else will get another 50 years out of it when I am gone.

 

[esimms86]

As much as I love having physical media, I know, just like the rest of us, that its days are numbered. There are lots of issues with streaming, of course, and one of the big ones is the criminally low financial compensation for the artist. Downloads at least should provide a little better compensation for the artist AND give the listener something that they can (virtually) hold onto. Personally, I wish every artist was on Bandcamp with FLAC and wav available in stereo and, in some cases, surround.

 

[alansanchez86]

As much as I love having physical media, I know, just like the rest of us, that its days are numbered. There are lots of issues with streaming, of course, and one of the big ones is the criminally low financial compensation for the artist. Downloads at least should provide a little better compensation for the artist AND give the listener something that they can (virtually) hold onto. Personally, I wish every artist was on Bandcamp with FLAC and wav available in stereo and, in some cases, surround.

Or M2TS files (Atmos)!

 

[atrocity]

Plus how often - on disc - do you see an old mastering get replaced by a newer, worse version? Now...you just keep the old disc/file. In the future? Gone in the vapor...

There are at least three different masterings of the self-titled Whitney Houston album. One has pre-emphasis while the other two don't, but those two contain different versions of at least two songs. Outwardly, they're identical down to catalog number, bar code and printing on the disc.

The same situation also applies to at least one Michael Jackson album, though I can't remember which.

And, radically switching musical gears, I think the version of "Accretions" on the U.S. version of Shriekback's first album is unique to that release, making it impossible to buy for decades now.

 

[esimms86]

There are at least three different masterings of the self-titled Whitney Houston album. One has pre-emphasis while the other two don't, but those two contain different versions of at least two songs. Outwardly, they're identical down to catalog number, bar code and printing on the disc.

The same situation also applies to at least one Michael Jackson album, though I can't remember which.

And, radically switching musical gears, I think the version of "Accretions" on the U.S. version of Shriekback's first album is unique to that release, making it impossible to buy for decades now.

That’s what you’d call an atrocity!

 

[humprof]

Does this book take into account the impact of creating and maintaining huge data farms for music, books, documents, etc? Those things don’t live in the ether in outer space.

Environmental impact “studies” always seem to be one-armed...

To answer your question: I think so. (I haven't yet read the book, but I've read some good reporting about the book.)
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-hidden-costs-of-streaming-musichttps://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/environmental-impact-streaming-music-835220/
If you Google "Renee Obringer Purdue University Streaming Costs," you'll find links to other recent research about the environmental impact of streaming--especially streaming video (and especially streaming hi-res video).

 

[boxhead]

To answer your question: I think so. (I haven't yet read the book, but I've read some good reporting about the book.)
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-hidden-costs-of-streaming-musichttps://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/environmental-impact-streaming-music-835220/
If you Google "Renee Obringer Purdue University Streaming Costs," you'll find links to other recent research about the environmental impact of streaming--especially streaming video (and especially streaming hi-res video).

Any chance all of this streaming chat can be moved out of this Let It Be thread? It's interesting and all, but I keep opening this thread expecting to see Beatles news!

 

[kokishin]

Any chance all of this streaming chat can be moved out of this Let It Be thread? It's interesting and all, but I keep opening this thread expecting to see Beatles news!

IOW, "Let It Be."

Thank you!

 

[humprof]

Mods: apologies if you think this post veers too far into politics per se--something that's wisely proscribed on QQ. But discussions about the environmental impact (or, as Kyle Devine's book Decomposed dubs it, the "political ecology") of streaming have broken out in the past, however briefly, and I feel like what might be called the political economy of streaming--which would include things like low royalty rates paid to creators--is a valid and relevant topic of discussion, too. Certainly this interview with Canadian journalist, sci-fi author, and copyright activist Cory Doctorow about his new co-authored book Chokepoint Capitalism addresses the wariness and resentment that QQ members regularly express about the disappearance of physical media and the effort by media companies to lock us into "renting" access to their products.

Here's a long illustration, centered on Spotify, of what's meant by the book's key term. This excerpt may technically exceed the bounds of "Fair Use," but Doctorow himself is a longtime proponent of Creative Commons licenses, even if the (socialist) magazine Jacobin isn't, oddly, or at least not explicitly. (Here, at any rate, is a link to the full interview.)

The corporate doctrine for the last forty years, and the state doctrine for the last forty years, has been that monopolies are okay provided they’re not raising prices on consumers. So, monopolists have figured out how to corral audiences or consumers within a walled garden — that’s made partially out of laws and partially out of technology — to make it hard for you to reach them as a creator or as someone who wants to bring something to market without going through them.

That is the chokepoint. . . .

The entertainment industry is getting bigger and more profitable, and yet the share of income going to creators, both in real terms and proportionately, has just declined steadily over that same period. It’s because you have to go through a chokepoint with your copyrights in order to reach the audience. And whatever the person operating that chokepoint wants, you have to surrender if you want to reach that audience, including whatever copyrights you have.

There’s a good example in the book of how the extraordinary collections of long-lived copyrights in music that the three big labels have — Sony, UMG, and Warner — meant that when Spotify wanted to start, they could only do so with permission from those three companies, which gave them the power to bargain for whatever they wanted. They took big ownership stakes in Spotify. Then, they came up with arrangements for royalties that allowed them to get guaranteed monthly payments — a large portion of which they wouldn’t have to pay to any artist — and to suppress the price per stream so that the 30 percent of the market that they didn’t control would get so little from Spotify that they wouldn’t be able to make any money or grow or challenge them. This is a really classic example of how chokepoints ensure that whatever alienable right you give to workers will be taken away if the workers can’t take their labor to more than one place. . . .

[Giving] giant ownership stakes to the three major labels . . . meant that the better Spotify’s cost basis looked on paper, the bigger the pop would be when they had their IPO, and the more those label shares would be worth. And so, the labels said, “We would like a very low per stream rate,” which means that the inputs for Spotify are now artificially cheaper, right? They’re less than they would normally cost because the streams are less than they would be if they were sort of bargaining on the open market.

[The labels are saying,] “We will take a low cost per stream, but we want a guaranteed minimum monthly payout from you.” Sony may be getting $30 million a month from Spotify, but because the price per stream is so low, only $15 million a month is attributable to the streams that were played.

If you add up all the streams and multiply them by the fraction — the penny per stream — it only comes out to $15 million. What that means is that the other $15 million is unattributed royalties. And Sony can keep these; they can give them to one artist, they can give them to all the artists. They can do whatever they want with them.

This scenario also allowed the big three labels to come up with this arrangement where the way streaming royalties are distributed doesn’t comport with the way most people think their payments will be turned into royalties. Say you have this favorite high school band, the Honey Roasted Landlords. Every day, for ten hours a day, you just stream that band, meaning you’ve given Spotify fifteen bucks that month. You might think that Spotify takes whatever share it takes out of that $15 and sends the rest to the Honey Roasted Landlords’ label, and that the Honey Roasted Landlords get the rest of it, or most of it minus whatever the label cuts out for themselves.

That’s not how it works at all. What happens instead is Sony or UMG or Warner takes all the money they’ve been remitted by Spotify, and then they divide the attributable portion of those royalties by the number of streams that each artist has had. That means that even if you listen to only the Honey Roasted Landlords, nearly all the money that Spotify passes on to their label goes to Kanye West. It doesn’t go to them — it goes to some other giant star. That’s another piece of the scam.

(P.S to Mods: any chance posts #348 through roughly #358 of the Let It Be pre-release discussion thread could be moved into this one?)

 

[humprof]

Maybe this is only tangentially related to this thread. But the NPR Planet Money podcast recently started a record label--and a companion spin-off podcast, Planet Money Records, to document it. They were motivated, in part, by a desire to learn "the business and economics of the music industry from the inside." And "In setting up our own record label," they say,

Planet Money wanted to avoid the shady practices that are all too common in the music business. It's an industry where artists regularly get pennies on the dollar for the songs they create. That has always been the case, but the death of physical record sales and the rise of digital streaming has only made things worse for musicians.

Two episodes so far:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/10/29/1131927591/inflation-song-music-label-earnest-jackson

 

[Doug G.]

To put it gently, F the politics. Let people live.

Doug

 

[humprof]

I think these issues are less about "politics" in the commonly understood sense of the term, and more about the overall distribution of money and power--and more specifically, about the economic and environmental damaged wreaked by what bandleader/composer Maria Schneider refers to as the Data Lords who increasingly have us in their thrall.

Here's a couple of recent relevant Substack pieces, for anyone who's interested. (Non-subscribers may or may not have access to the full posts; not sure about that.) First, former NYT music critic and current NPR writer/producer Nate Chinen:
https://thegig.substack.com/p/maria-schneider-saw-it-coming"The streaming economy works fine for Tay and Bey. But when you pause for a fraction of a second to consider the economic model of Spotify or YouTube or Apple Music or whomever, you realize that it’s a hyper-extension of the damaging income inequality we see elsewhere in society, and a cousin to the problematic structures put in place by Netflix, Amazon and others."

Also, jazz writer & historian Ted Gioia:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/panic-among-the-streamersI feel like his critiques of--and warnings about--Spotify could apply almost equally to all the other music streamers, including the one I subscribe to for the cheap Atmos fix it gives me.

 

[humprof]

Not so much about the "political economy" (or ecology) of streaming as its "structure of feeling" (apologies to Raymond Williams--but QQ members who prefer physical media and/or owning rather than renting will know what I mean):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/magazine/music-not-streaming.html
Here's a "gift" version for non-subscribers/those who've used their monthly allotment of free articles.

 

[humprof]

Spotify openly declares it will squeeze anyone who's not a mega-artist even more than it already does:
https://www.therestisnoise.com/2023/11/new-hatefulness-from-spotify.html

 

[Marplot]

dick move, thanks for the information.

 

[proufo]

Planet Money wanted to avoid the shady practices that are all too common in the music business. It's an industry where artists regularly get pennies on the dollar for the songs they create. That has always been the case, but the death of physical record sales and the rise of digital streaming has only made things worse for musicians.

Go on tour! See if you have the followers! And if you don't, don't expect you can make a living out of a few reproductions on streaming services. No one owes the musicians that.

 

[humprof]

Go on tour! See if you have the followers! And if you don't, don't expect you can make a living out of a few reproductions on streaming services. No one owes the musicians that.

No musician I know expects to make a living from streaming royalties. (For that matter, no touring musician I know expects to making a living from touring, either--it's a losing proposition.) The point isn't about making a living from streaming, but about fairness and equity. The streaming services are making tons of money, but the vast majority of musicians aren't.