“Streaming,” writes Glenn McDonald regarding the modern-day music industry, “in a sense, solves more problems for artists with small aspirations than it does for major-label stars.” In his book You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song, McDonald provides an entertaining lesson on the history of recorded music mostly focused on the digital age and his recent decade as Data Alchemist at Spotify. Given minimum order sizes in the ancient days of physical media, it was risky to press LPs or CDs that would often wind up collecting dust in struggling artists’ apartments. Not so much now. Myspace may be a punchline in the wake of (the bad joke that is) Facebook, but it’s still a thing, has evolved, and led to Bandcamp where we can also support up-and-comers. The author’s enthusiasm for such access oozes onto every page. After all, for short subscription money, we have almost all the music that exists in the world, everything, everywhere, all at once, and it “offers surprise limited only by our own curiosity.”
Recorded music revenues peaked in 1999 with the subsequent crash – looking at you, Napster – shrinking the industry to about one-third of that size. With the album era over (vinyl snobs & fetishists notwithstanding), the good news is it’s been growing over the past decade given this twist: rather than consumers of yesteryear spending haphazardly for a release (say, on vinyl and then perhaps replacing that scratchy disc with the CD version), they now “pay continuously for music they bought once or twice (but more often never),” writes McDonald. He goes on to explain in helpful detail how the pie gets divvied up between performers, publishers, labels, and streamers (which, evil empire reputation aside, operate only on about a 30% gross margin). As opposed to a hypothetical user-centric scheme – for one solid month you only stream “All Out of Love” by Air Supply and therefore those lilting soft rockers from Down Under get your whole $10 fee – it’s actually shared on a pro-rata basis, whereby everyone’s payments get pooled together and then split up according to the total streaming from that particular month. So of course, support your favorites but know that Ed Sheeran’s still getting ever richer regardless.
McDonald is a Bostonian, my age, and hates jazz, so perhaps I’m just bent toward enjoying his whole vibe. Regardless, he’s given all of us permission to accept both the realities of this era, and its boundless opportunities (thus the book’s title). In addressing hot-button consumption ethics, he says flatly that the movement to buy albums instead of streaming services would be as dumb as having MovieFone on speed dial. He goes on: “Complaining that you’re not listening properly without buying LPs and playing them in calibrated listening rooms is like complaining that you don’t form lasting friendships without sharing month-long stagecoach journeys.” Amen, brother. His book is enlightening and entertaining, what David Letterman once called infotainment, so maybe buy it for the music lover in your life, or point them to McDonald’s mad scientist platform Every Noise At Once. If you’re inclined to support the arts, get tickets for a local show, gobble up some merch, wear it around, tell people about it. And stream it. Hit Subscribe, ring the bell, leave a comment. All that good stuff.
If you have anything to say about this – or book recommendations – kindly post below (rather than emailing me) to spark conversation. Thank you!