Taylor Swift vs. Spotify: Why Music Should Not Be Free

Everyone knows that the music industry is in the midst of upheaval. It's been the story ever since the rise of Napster and the decline of CD sales beginning in 2001. For 13 years, we've all been searching for the right answer.

It can't be free. Artists have to get paid somehow. Maybe not all of them—there have always been those who don't have what it takes to write a hit song or develop a cult following—but good music that people enjoy has to be worth something.

This week, Taylor Swift's move to pull her music entirely from Spotify wasn't a huge surprise. She had already penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal this year saying that file sharing and streaming have shrunk album sales drastically, and that it's her opinion that "music should not be free, and [that] individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is." Swift wanted to keep her latest album on delayed-release, or at least only available to Spotify's premium subscribers, which Spotify didn't want; hence the impasse.

Despite the overall decline in revenue, there have been plenty of notable milestones in the music business this century. Apple launched the iPod in 2001 and the iTunes Music Store less than two years later, changing the way people purchase and consume music. Napster, Rhapsody, Sony's digital arm, and other competing services attempted to remake themselves in Apple's image and failed. Others came in and did it correctly; now you can choose between Amazon, Google Play, and Apple when buying music, and get a solid experience in each case.

Then there's streaming radio. Pandora, Slacker, and other Internet radio sites became very successful, but at the expense of musicians, who made very little in comparison (although it was still better than zero, which is what they made on file-sharing sites).

Some already-famous artists have made important statements in this ongoing battle. Radiohead released In Rainbows in 2007 and told everyone to pay whatever they wanted. Trent Reznor gives away entire albums on occasion. Last year, Beyoncé surprised the world with a previously unannounced 14-song album minutes before midnight on iTunes; it has gone on to sell several million copies.

But it's the not-already-famous artists who I'm worried about.

Spotify and the Rise of On-Demand Music
Internet radio is one thing, but the rise of on-demand music is something else entirely. That includes Spotify, YouTube, and similar services like them. And the future of recorded music hangs in the balance.

Spotify initially looked like the holy grail of music sites—streaming for free, or a low monthly fee without ads, but also letting you choose all of the tracks yourself, instead of a randomized (if algorithmically curated) stream from Internet radio sites. Things changed significantly in 2013 when Spotify began to let you add songs and albums to your overall collection, and not just to specific playlists—effectively turning it into a giant free iTunes app. The thing is, it turns out that if you're a working musician and songwriter, making real money from these services is next to impossible.

Spotify's argument is that it will be able to increase royalties to artists over time. The service says it pays almost 70 percent of revenue back to artists, but clearly there's not enough total revenue to support them now. It appears that's a long way off, if it's even possible. If you're a musician, and you get just $16 for a million plays of your music—and a million plays generally means you've broken through somehow and are recognizably popular—how could you survive on that, and further develop your career and your art?

The biggest problem here is probably Spotify's free, ad-supported version. The vast majority of listeners pay nothing for music. The same goes for people listening on YouTube, with ads playing before each song. When you subscribe to Spotify's premium service, or to Netflix, at least you're paying something, although it's still miniscule.

Trent Reznor even said just yesterday that in effect, music is free whether you like it or not, so you need to give it away. With minor variations, this is also the general argument from Radiohead, Amanda Palmer, and longtime industry firebrand Bob Lefsetz, among others. Everyone's already decided it's free, and you can't put the genie back in the bottle, so it's better people take music from you and not BitTorrent. And hey, at least they'll give you their email address. You don't want to fight with the people who want your music.

So plenty of pundits have already declared paid music dead by now, that streaming is the future, and that recorded music itself is worth zero. In addition, countless venues expect musicians to play gigs or get their songs placed in indie movies for additional "exposure" in lieu of monetary compensation.

Thousands of musicians would like to disagree with this. They need to pay rent and buy groceries. I personally know several dozen of these, all of whom have been writing, recording, and performing for the better part of two decades, and sometimes longer.

You can't eat with exposure. You can eat with money.

The Argument Against Free Music

The Argument Against Free Music
Some other famous musicians like David Byrne get this, and have written excellent treatises on why streaming music is a problem; I can't begin to rehash his finely detailed arguments in this column, but it's definitely worth reading. A point that Byrne makes very clear is that artists like him are already well known and established. People already value their music. It's the ones who are up-and-coming now that have little to look forward to.

We live in a society where people pay for works of art, for books, for sculpture, for craftsmanship on Etsy—all of that is worth money to them. People generally understand it takes months of work to make things, and artists and authors somehow should be compensated for that. So why do so many think that doesn't apply to music, and that they're entitled to it for free? When people are taking something, generally that means they want it. Why is $4 for a Frappuccino okay, but not 99 cents for a song you can listen to as many times as you want from the cloud?

I myself have subscribed to Spotify three times, and have cancelled my membership twice out of guilt. I just subscribed again a few months ago to see how it's doing. The service itself is great, with a well-designed UI and nice music discovery options. But frankly, it's weird to me to see new albums from artists and just add them to my library without paying for them.

Maybe it's hard to understand unless you've been on the other side as a musician. Radio is one thing, but the convenience of calling a song up whenever you want it should cost more than an infinitesimal fraction of a penny to the artist.

Record and Promote for Free, Tour for Money?
If things keep going in this direction, I worry about what kind of music we're going to get going forward. Aside from trust-fund kids, who is going to have the money to get their music out to people? Everyone can release an album these days, thanks to GarageBand and SoundCloud, but most of them are bad. How do you get the really good ones to rise up and get noticed?

One answer could be that you become a self-promotion machine on social media. A piece on the topic that I found really thought-provoking ran in The New York Times recently by Alina Simone. In it, she lamented the demise of "quiet music," or the ability to work on songs without the burden of marketing the heck out of yourself all day. "What I missed most about having a label wasn't the monetary investment," she wrote, "but the right to be quiet, the insulation provided from incessant self-promotion. I was a singer, not a saleswoman. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur."

In addition, people pay for art and often only think about the artist. What they don't think about is the engineer, the backup singer on track seven, or the artwork designer. The money isn't all going to the artist. Beyoncé may not need your 99 cents, but all those other people do. Major labels are one thing, but with a straight-up indie project, very few people are making stuff that involves no one else's labor whatsoever.

Yet everyone hates musicians who complain about giving away their music. People hate the famous ones because it looks like an unnecessary money grab, since they're making so much money from touring, and the same people hate the not-famous ones because, hey, they're not famous, so they must suck. Musicians are villified when they express frustration with the current system. Many are afraid of the backlash; there's a culture of fear around this. Anonymous commenters on the Internet can be incredibly self-righteous about what they're entitled to have for free.

Maybe the bar was set back when Napster first came out and everyone began downloading music for free. That was when none of the labels had an answer for digital music, aside from horrendous DRM-ridden software and suing everyone they could find. But just because people decided not to pay for music doesn't mean it lacks inherent value. Free sites are free because they're ad-supported and because your data is valuable to marketers. With digital music, there's literally nothing, aside from the recording; people just take it.

The first week of sales for Swift's album 1989—1.3 million, or more than any other album in a week since The Eminem Show in 2002—underscores her point in pulling her music from Spotify. It shows that people are still willing to pay for music, given the right incentive.

I don't know how sustainable that is going forward. I wish I had the answer here. But the idea of recorded music being free will never sit well.