The Future of Music Is Free:How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming

Musician and writer Damon Krukowski explains how streaming services are failing artists and listeners, and what we can do to fight back.

In 2012, I wrote a piece for this website breaking down the payments my first band, Galaxie 500, was receiving from streaming services, which were just starting to become a dominant force in the music industry. Spotify had sent songwriting royalties of $1.05 for the 5,960 times our single “Tugboat” was played that quarter—split between the group’s three members, each of us had made 35 cents. Not exactly a promising new source of income.

For years, disruptive digital businesses have countered complaints like mine with assurances that everything will be different in the future, once millions and millions of people around the world adopt their application. Well, here we are. Spotify now claims 140 million active users, 70 million of whom are paid subscribers, and the total consumption of audio streams in the U.S. jumped by an estimated 50 percent last year. But while it’s clear that some are earning significant paychecks from streaming as a result—“Happy days are here again,” Billboard gushed last March, reporting the fastest growth for the industry in decades—most musicians are not.

The basic reason is simple: According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music. That makes streaming more concentrated at the top than current album or song sales. Of course, the most popular releases have always dominated the music market, but it seems these new services increase that disparity rather than reduce it. The rising tide is lifting only certain boats.

What is to be done? Spotify, Apple Music, and the other corporations seeking to control music consumption aren’t likely to change their trajectory. So what follows are some thoughts about ways we might adjust—as both creators and consumers of all music, not just the top 10 percent of it—in order to counterbalance a system built for the benefit of a small minority. There are no quick fixes, which is also the point: It’s the dream of quick fixes—and fortunes—that got us into this mess. If we’re going to find our way out, it’s going to be through slow collective effort, based on a better understanding of what we’re being offered now and exactly how and why that’s failing us.

An Issue of Scale

Tech startups are always faced with the same question: Will it scale? Digital media provides immediate access to a global set of users—an unimaginable opportunity in the analog era, but one that we now take for granted. However, as venture capitalists have learned, it’s only the rare idea for a product or service that can successfully function at such a huge scale. And it’s precisely those ideas that have come to monopolize our digital environment. It’s survival of the scalable.

But does everything we want from music necessarily scale up?

Consider live music. If you’ve seen the same band in both a small club and a big outdoor festival, you know how different each experience can be. That’s true for the performers’ experience as well. And not all aspects of live music can survive such a shift.

You don’t hear a lot of bands talk about this, but in the final act of the compelling new Grateful Dead documentary, Long Strange Trip, there is a remarkably frank discussion of the band’s experience playing massive shows in the late 1980s and ’90s. “In the stadiums you have no contact with your audience, it’s just not possible,” says bassist Phil Lesh. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann adds, “There were 60,000 people there, but basically you didn’t have any touch with those people—they were hundreds of feet away from you.”

The Grateful Dead—the quintessential live band to its many fans—had slowly scaled up the size of their shows to a point where they could no longer maintain the same connection with their audience. Many of their diehard followers stopped buying tickets to those stadium shows altogether and just gathered in the parking lots outside instead. There, they could continue the rituals they had developed together at a smaller scale.

As a devotee of punk and post-punk in the ’80s, I never thought I would say this, but those Deadheads who partied in the parking lots may have been showing us the way. If what we value in music is lost at the scale it’s being offered to us, we need to find other ways to get what we want from it.

So, on a practical level, you might want to think twice before plunking down big bucks for that next festival ticket. If you want to see the headliner on a huge stage, from hundreds of feet away, together with tens of thousands of others, then, OK—Coachella may be your best bet. But if you want to see those bands in the small type on the poster—who may not get paid much more for a festival performance than they would for their own headlining set at a club, where you could see them better, they could see you, and you would pay a whole lot less to boot—maybe you should just hang in the parking lot.

Adjusting our purchases to the scale that makes sense for what we’re really after is one way to work around the Spotify/Apple Music model. Just as at a big festival, if what you want is what only these huge corporations can offer, then your subscription money is well spent. But if you’re using a streaming service to listen to anything other than the most-streamed tracks, your money isn’t supporting what you’re hearing.

Context Is King

With more and more users, streaming services have access to huge amounts of data, increasing the predictive power of their recommendations. But while streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history, the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all. Streaming is so heavily weighted in favor of the most popular tracks because that’s how the model is designed to work: Nearly everyone using the service is meant to use it nearly the same way.

Imagine the opposite—countless different individuals asking to stream countless different albums from different eras, all at the same moment. It’s easy to picture, because this is the image of streaming services that we are sold. But the reality is something else again.

Consider the dominant streaming video service, Netflix, which now has more subscribers than all cable providers combined. While Netflix has grown more popular, it has diminished its content to the point where it recently hosted only 25 movies made before 1950, as Zach Schonfeld pointed out in Newsweek. “It’s the sort of classics selection you’d expect to find in a decrepit video store in 1993,” Schonfeld wrote, “not on a leading entertainment platform that serves some 100 million global subscribers.”

The streaming music catalog is currently in a much better state. But it could only be a matter of time until these companies lose interest in the 90 percent of music that doesn’t return even 1 percent of their gross. It seems likely that they will eventually jettison these less-played tracks for different content—just look at Netflix.

Or look now at how badly their applications already serve entire genres of less popular music. Spotify lists recordings by song title, album title, or featured artist name. But that information is so limited it leaves out even the other performers on a recording, a crucial aspect to classical and jazz. For that matter, performers are kind of important to rock, too! Not to mention songwriters, producers, engineers, publishers, record labels—almost all the labor that goes into making recordings is erased from the databases used by the major streaming services.

Why hide all that information, all that context to each recording? Digital services are so good at handling massive amounts of data—just think how much Spotify knows about each of us. And yet they can’t bring themselves to specify which of the radically different Miles Davis Quintets played on which album—is it the one with John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones, or the one with Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams?

One reason for this glaring omission of musical data may be a reluctance to acknowledge all the copyright holders actually connected to the recordings they stream. In fact, this is the basis of the lawsuits Spotify has faced (and is facing) from music publishers, including a $1.6 billion filing from Wixen Music this December.

Incredibly, one of Spotify’s existing defenses against such accusations of unpaid royalties has been a lack of information. “Spotify has acknowledged lapses in obtaining mechanical rights due to the difficulty of identifying and locating the co-authors of each of the tens of millions of copyrighted musical works throughout its streaming platform,” The Hollywood Reporter’s Eriq Gardner explained last fall. How the same company building a reputation as the best and biggest at handling music data can claim that they can’t cope with all that music data strains credibility—especially if, as Gardner also reported, their fallback legal argument may be that they don’t owe songwriters any royalties anyway.

But there seems to be another, deeper motive for streaming companies to eliminate existing context for recordings: They want to replace it with their own. The rise of playlists, recently analyzed in a superb piece written for The Baffler by Liz Pelly, makes the platform itself the primary context for any music on it.

Information is so lacking for the individual tracks on playlists, some of the most listened to are by musicians who don’t even exist. (And who therefore won’t be asking for royalties, or suing when they don’t arrive.) These so-called “fake artists”—in reality, commissioned works owned by Spotify—eliminate the problem of researching even the bare bones of identifying data, like artist and title.

When Bill Gates proclaimed in 1996 that, on the internet, “Content Is King,” he didn’t foresee that content creators would be bypassed by the information platforms to come. Indeed the same Gates article goes on to declare, in a much less quoted passage, that, “For the internet to thrive, content providers must be paid for their work.” At the time, Gates predicted that micropayments would eventually solve the practical problem of how to link online users and creators financially. We have that technology now—but we also have massively capitalized platforms monopolizing access to content, with no interest in encouraging those micropayments.

But Bill Gates was right all along—content is king—and what’s more, content belongs to its creators. It’s only the deliberate erasure of context that removes the control we have over our work. And context doesn’t disappear on its own. It’s always there for us to declare, maintain, and restore if removed.

So make noise about context, because when you do, you are valuing the labor that goes into making music. Tell us who played on that track, who wrote it, who produced it, who put it out. Discogs has become a great repository of information like this for existing records. And Bandcamp makes room for all this info in a streaming platform, no less. Music publications and blogs have always been an excellent source for contextual information too.

Can simply sharing information with one another combat the power of companies like Spotify and Apple? I believe it can, and does. There’s no better evidence, perhaps, than the forces that continually rally against it.

The Future of Music Is Free

One of the most telling instances of the threat to power represented by sharing information was the arrest and prosecution of Aaron Swartz, the internet activist who took his own life five years ago. Swartz’s “crime” was downloading academic papers from published journals in the MIT Library and distributing them online for free. His Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, written in 2008, is a clarion call for sharing information as a political act.

“Information is power,” it begins. “But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. [...] Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it—their shareholders would revolt at anything less.” To fight that greed, and free the power of information for use by all, Swartz advocated piracy. Because, he said, “Sharing isn’t immoral—it’s a moral imperative.”

Maybe Swartz sounds hopelessly pie-in-the-sky to you, like an ’80s Deadhead in a stadium parking lot. But the federal government didn’t think so. On the contrary, they took him very, very seriously. And so do I. For that matter, I take those Deadheads in the parking lot seriously too. What they have in common is that they took a stand outside the corporate structure and, from that vantage point, saw it for what it is: a structure. A model. And hardly the only possible one.

The masquerade of streaming services is that they seem like a model of sharing. Spotify is even “free,” if you consider listening to ads and having your tastes monitored as free. And yet, these services are run by large corporations “blinded by greed,” as Swartz put it—the antithesis (and very much the enemy) of truly free sharing.

Streaming services’ surface resemblance to sharing is no coincidence, because they can trace their roots directly to Napster, the original pirate in the field. Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning was never political like Aaron Swartz, but his peer-to-peer software was also revolutionary in its opposition to intellectual property. Fanning was taken to court for it too, though in a civil procedure rather than criminal—as a result, he didn’t face jail time like Swartz. But his creation was destroyed, bankrupted in 2002 through lawsuits brought by the major labels.

Apple stepped into the space Napster created with the launch of its iTunes Store the very next year. And here we are, sharing music much as Fanning envisioned—but with the crucial difference that it is not peer-to-peer, and not truly free. You might say Apple, Spotify, and the major labels who invested in their success have stripped away the context of Napster, leaving us with just its content. A content that they now assert control over. And profit from.

But that content remains ours. It’s created by musicians, and listeners. And we can use it elsewhere. In fact, we can use it to build competing models. We’re doing this already, each time we share music with one another through a different system. Bandcamp is one healthy model, earning money for artists without stripping their music of its context, or their control. And so, I would say, is simply sharing music with one another for free.

I know that sounds pie-in-the-sky again. But consider this: On Bandcamp, I run a page for Galaxie 500, and a page for the records with my current project, Damon & Naomi. On the Galaxie 500 page, we charge a price for all downloads. On the Damon & Naomi page, all downloads are free, or pay-as-you-wish. And even though the Damon & Naomi albums are generally less popular than the Galaxie 500 ones—and have never sold as well in physical formats—guess which Bandcamp page earns more? The free one.

There’s another current model that makes me think musicians might find new solutions to our financial problems by, paradoxically, giving up on earning royalties from streaming. This past year I became something of an accidental podcaster, producing a six-episode series for Radiotopia and PRX called “Ways of Hearing.” And in the podcast world I found a thriving digital audio format, distributed entirely for free; the Radiotopia network’s 16 shows collectively garner 18 million downloads per month.

It’s not that podcasters and podcast producers aren’t concerned with developing sources of income—like musicians, they are constantly engaged with the issue of how to earn a living from their audio files. But unlike music makers and record labels, podcasters have no hesitation sharing their work for free, simply because that’s been a given for their format from the start.

While podcasting makes full use of Apple and Spotify—and any and all other available channels—for distribution, it doesn’t look to them to provide financial solutions for their industry. Because all these downloads are free, podcasters are instead finding multiple other ways to support their work. Not that the specific strategies they hit upon necessarily apply directly to music—nonprofits like Radiotopia use a public radio-style combination of grants, sponsorships, and listener donations, while for-profit podcast networks like Gimlet rely on ads and brand partnerships. But what is striking is how they and so many others in the booming podcast field are dreaming up ways to make digital audio work, without full dependence on these massive companies.

Another World Is Possible

The actions outlined here may seem very small in comparison to the power of a corporation like Spotify, whose upcoming IPO is expected to be valued at as much as $19 billion, much less that of the biggest tech company in the world, Apple.

But small movements can read from the stage if you’re in a small venue; small type on the cover of an LP speaks loud and clear if you’re staring at it while you listen to the record. The small gestures we make directly to one another are real. And sharing is a beautiful gesture. It might be the most fundamental gesture behind all music.

So share your money deliberately when you spend it on music, and it will be a real gesture with a real effect. Share the context of your information online, and its content won’t be stripped from you. And share your music—for free. It’s a powerful action, powerful enough that the biggest corporations in the world feel threatened by it. Let them.