Post 4: Music’s Latest Oppressor
Musicians have dealt with their fair share of oppression over the years from getting ripped off in a record deal to having music stolen but there is a new oppressor that emerged in the 90’s: The Internet. The thing is, we’ve been through incidents such as Napster, which was a pirated music website that had heavy controversy with Dr. Dre and Metallica suing at a time for having their music on the site illegally. So, what are we dealing with now? We’re dealing with the commodification of music. Music is almost out of the control of the musicians who make it.
To understand why this is such an important issue, we have to understand critical moments in the evolution of listening to music during the past 100 years. Up until the invention of the phonograph in 1887, the only way to hear music was by seeing live musicians. Shortly after the invention of the phonograph, it became commercial. Soon, record stores followed and besides attending concerts, the radio and vinyl was the main way to hear music. But this isn’t just about the history of the medium we listen to music with. This is about the access to that music. It’s thinking about that there was a time when you’d have to go to the record store, pick up the physical copy, possibly listen to the record in a booth, and actually pay for it. Or you’d hear something on the radio and have to go buy it to hear it again or wait for it to come on the radio again. We lack that interaction with music in a physical means which reinstates music as a tangible, purchasable form in this world but not as an object for commodification because of the access to the full experience of the music with liner notes and etc. We also lack the reinstatement of paying for our music. Not paying Spotify, for our music.
We’re too comfortable with our blind consumption of music because of our access to it. looking at the chart below with the information that Spotify has an average 286 million users active monthly, it should be a wakeup call that you are paying Daniel Ek and Martin Lorenzton, owners of Spotify. If you have 1 million plays on Spotify, you’ve made $4,370. That doesn’t even factor in the all the things the money gets funneled through such as going to the label an artist might be on. Given not every artists instantly get 1 million plays, it’s unlikely to even make that much in the first place. This devalues the artists work in a monetary sense and especially with Covid, it can lead to a straight decline of artistry given the lack of income through touring or performing and the statistics of streaming services and history of bootlegs and piracy.
Since it’s nearly impossible or at least very challenging to combat piracy except without a court battle or digging through the depths of the internet filling copyright claims, the only way to counter this oppresion is to support the artist directly. You instantly cut the problems out of the equation in a personal way where you can support the artists you like. You get to turn the love around and give back to the artist while the artist is giving to you by allowing you to own the music, physically or digitally. You’re also allowing the artist to keep surviving and creating. The audience-artist connection is dependent off each other. They both feed off each other and without that, which refers to the audience-streaming service connection, the music becomes commodified and an object to “rent” from a third party, an object for commercialization, and loses its objective as art. Surprisingly, there are ways to include the artist in the audience-streaming service connection such as finding good platforms such as Bandcamp that better support artists directly. It even prevents you from playing music on the website if you’ve listened to it a certain amount of times without paying. It forces you to be aware that music is something that isn’t free and is a service.
Music comes from musicians and most importantly, people. To help support music and continue the growth of music is to support the growth of humanity and individuals who speak on that humanity through their music and art. To support the people is to own and return the love of the art, of the experience of engaging with music, and of the very humanity that inspired the music.
