By: Nathan Thai
The shape of music has changed over the past 50 years, from the now vintage vinyl record to the once ubiquitous compact disc, which has so far seen no need for a physical successor—because the newest form of transmitting sound is completely digital: online streaming.
From its advent, online streaming has been massively promising but with equally massive downsides. Being able to stream your music online is convenient; it clears up storage on your phone and your shelf. It can be accessed anywhere for free, which means fewer people will resort to piracy since every screen becomes a legal music player.
Yet, though online streaming is a blessing for the consumer, it generates more drawbacks than profit for many if not all music artists. After doing some research, I unearthed the serious bones of contention that artists and industry professionals have with music streaming services: low royalties and a consequently high entry barrier, overexposure, and depersonalization.
Royalties are low. Real low. Don’t be fooled by the revenue these companies bring in—market shareholders like Spotify hardly pay artists enough to scrape by. According to Digital Music News, Spotify paid artists $0.0038 per stream in 2017. To put it into perspective, that’s 263,158 streams to make $1,000. A quarter million streams for only a thousand dollars means the average musician isn’t going to be making bank, let alone a living. Because it requires such a large following to make just a thousand dollars, many artists are unlikely to find success.
Furthermore, if the music industry becomes something that is not profitable for the artists involved, artists might stop making as much music. Fewer people will want to make music for a living as well.
Being able to stream whenever and wherever encourages more streaming, and overexposure to music turns it into a brainless habit. With so many songs and playlists at your fingertips, it’s always tempting to put on a playlist to help you focus. However, this leads to one of two things: your productivity wasting away or your music turning into background noise. Try listening to song lyrics and reading a textbook at the same time; most people can only focus on one. For those same people, listening to music can be very distracting. It dampens their thoughts, and even though this can be helpful when dealing with life’s challenges, insight is unlikely to come from a preoccupied brain.
Much ado about online streaming is how it leads to depersonalization—or rather, the transition from ownership to unlimited access, from exclusivity to inclusivity. Because most online streaming sites give people access to music free of charge, many of those people are less likely to purchase albums. This not only hurts artists’ incomes but undermines consumer loyalty and fan culture. Why spend money on something that could be free? Rather than build their own personal library, people will defer to use a library someone else built.