Ed & The Red Reds

NPR reports that Spotify is laying off another 17% of their staff… after laying of 6% in Jan, and another 2% in June… meaning they’ve cut 25% of their workforce this year alone… and raised the price of a subscription, removed the option to play tracks on demand for non-paid users, (you now pick a song and it shuffles it into a que of algorithmically-selected tracks… they have effectively re-invented the radio) and increased the frequency of ads for non-subscribers…

“Enshittification” is real, and I feel a little less batshit for screaming “DOOOOOOMMMM DOOOOOOOM!!!!” about this ‘subscription economy’ year after year now.

I want to humble(or not-so-humble) brag that I’m STILL managing a file library of roughly 40k songs in 2023, mostly purchased (though, if ye take to the seas, matey, I can’t blame yarrr).

Spotify’s stock was UP 5% per the announcement. And the people who get to keep their jobs… know what they’re making? Even the most measly of the 9k ish positions at the company are at least 107 k/year, (excluding lowly interns) and go all the way to 385k/year (not including bonuses!!!). Meanwhile, BLS reports that your ‘average’ working musician (does he/she even exist??) is making about 39.14 per hour on average. And let’s just PRETEND (ahahahahaha) that that they’re working “full time” (they’re not)… it’s still less than 75k per year… realistically less than 50k, far below the standard of living for 90% of the US in 2023. How about the record labels? Wont someone think of the record labels? They made 15.9 BILLION. That’s “billion” with a b. SIXTEEN B.I.L.L.I.O.N DOLLARS in 2022.

What I see is that the ‘industry’ of music sellers has well worked out the way to make modern streaming expectations profitable for them, and them alone. “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.” Which is essentially what David Lowery predicted. He quoted a statistic once that for every $1000 of music sold in the US, about $12 dollars goes to the person who made it. I’d be curious to see if that has declined under the new regime. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had.

Just want to say, if you’ve actually read this far, if you listen to music often… hey, it’s not too late. Consider- You can store your music in the cloud, access it anywhere you want, forever. It’s not hard. Dropbox, google, whatever. There it is! On every device JUST like Spotify. Yes, you don’t have the money to go buy every single offering that is instantly already “there” on Spotify. I don’t go so far as to condone ye salty dogs flying the jolly roger, but you have to understand that you’d pay an artist 100k x more by ripping their song off youtube, sharing it with folks on social media, then going to a show and buying a t-shirt than you could EVER put in their pocket with streams. Even if you set up a bot computer to repeatedly stream them on Spotify 24/7 for a year, you probably wouldn’t put as much in their pocket as a single t-shirt/concert ticket. It’s that bad.

Also: Owning the file means you don’t have to have your bank account silently siphoned away by your 50th subscription (“oooh, come on.. it’s not that much.” It is, actually). Spotify offers really no benefit at all to you. It benefits Silicon Valley and Record Execs enormously. Start a collection, why not? Streaming’s not going anywhere, you can always go back if you like. I bet, though, if you try it, you won’t think I’m such a crazy Luddite after all. You might actually enjoy it.