I have a confession to make. My iTunes music library long contains pretty much exactly the 25´000 songs that are the limit to iTunes match. And I have no idea how I got there. Multiplying 25´000 with $0.99 a song is a rather large amount of money. I did spend a significant part of my youth in records stores and later purchased CD´s by the box load. Later still, I went on to buy on iTunes, but I am still puzzled by the economical value of a mid sized family car winding up in my possession.
Now I consider myself a fairly ethical person and am not usually tempted by shoplifting or pick pocketing, but I do confess to having pirated music. I have the greatest respect for musicians and find they provide an invaluable service to my ears and heart. I would definitely prefer more can live by their talent and produce more of their art, than run a cash register at Wal-Mart, perhaps, or drive a tour bus. But my ethics were and are the following: If I really want something musical, I´ll get it. If it´s not available for sale, I´ll hunt and gather.
I would in the past also replace scratched CD´s or damaged music files I already owned, as I had, after all, already paid for the intellectual property once. I always found it mildly insulting from the music industry to not offer a highly discounted replacement for a scratched CD to documented owners. But that might just be me. Lastly I would find a way to replace music I already owned on vinyl by a digital format without paying for it again. I would.
A memorable case for me was “Another Mother further” by a pioneering funk rock band called Mother´s Finest from Atlanta. Recorded in 1977, I remember I bought the vinyl as a 14 year old in 1984 and find it contains some of the dirtiest, if not outright filthy grooves, ever recorded. At some point in the early 90ies I abandoned vinyl for CDs and to my knowledge that album was never released on CD. It also wasn´t available on iTunes for the longest time, but I see that it now is. So without much shame, I anchored at the Pirate Bay and after several weeks of scanning the seeds for a vital sign of “Mickey´s Monkey”, or “Baby Love” the loot was finally mine. I am sure that those who had “that one album” that they had listened over and over again in their youth can understand that incredulous emotional connection of finding again what was lost. Maybe writing about this to hundreds of readers might lead to some sales for the band and get me back into integrity with those good people from Georgia. Thank you for the love.
But even with this comparatively mild case of being an “ethical pirate”, I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on music, and since switching to a streaming music service about a year ago, I now realize that my entire treasure of prized possession is all of a sudden worth exactly $9.99 a month.
I realized that with perhaps $20´000 spent over the 31 years over which I have amassed my collection, I used to spend about 650 dollars for music a year on average. This has now deteriorated to only less than 20% by paying Spotify. I have, more recently, started to pay for select recordings from Chesky Records and HDTracks due to the absolutely fantastic recording quality, impeccable mastering and the fact that I love anything binaural. Stereo imaging has become so important to me that this is money well spent, but still, there is an order of magnitude between what I used to pay for music and what I pay now.
But what happened? From the standpoint of the economics of things, this deterioration of my musical net worth is paramount to a black Friday on the stock market, and while I am surely on the receiving end of this penny stock economy, I did wonder how this is possible.
Granted, when selling a record or CD in the past, a the bulk of the price went into production of the physical media its distribution and cost of retail with the recording artist and right holders receiving a rather small fraction of that revenue. All these costs are now obsolete and Spotify boasts itself with paying out 70% of its revenue to artists in the form of royalties. The company is also known to not make any money, as are many other streaming services. They are in it for a better tomorrow for everyone, as they say, and from what it seems this better future might be just around the corner. But how does it compare in terms of money in the bank for those who actually have to get up in the morning, to practice their instrument, write a song and then go out to record their art in studios that need to get paid as well?
So I have decided to go on another of my quests. After piracy being on the decline with the onset of convenience through streaming music, how are artists and authors of music really doing in this new shifted reality. I have decided to research the dollars and sense of this new development and will let you know what I found here tomorrow.