Deep listening: A look into the business of music

My better half and I, with quite some rapaciousness, have been attacking the BBC iPlayer and Netflix and consuming the dark detective series that seem to be highly ubiquitous on the streaming platforms. “Bad Blood”, “The Frozen Dead”, Killing Eve” rank as some of the favourites. The extreme severity of their subject matter is perhaps the way they help to blank out any ruminating on current state affairs as you watch them. A great way of eating up the hours, an eight hour series is a perfect engrossing time killer.

One thing the music fan and musician in me noted was that aside from the relatively new self-produced content that these subscription-based platforms have produced, you have to pay additional fees for famous certified all time classic films and series. So – to use a quick Mafia orientated example, you’ll get no Sopranos or The Godfather trilogy without coughing up some cash to either rent or buy these two masterpieces.

However, somehow in the world of online music, a world that I addictively inhabit, this value system of renting or paying for the high-quality classic works on top of material you get with your monthly subscription rate is non-existent. EVERYTHING IS INCLUDED. And when I mean everything – I mean pretty much the whole history of all significant, and sometimes not so significant recorded music. If you jump onto a service such as Spotify you can listen to your own local pub band’s self-funded and home recorded album and then at no extra cost listen to a classic masterpiece by a twentieth century icon such as Jimi Hendrix.

Jimi Hendrix has over 8 million monthly listeners, your local pub band might have less than thirty. Jimi Hendrix’s albums have defined music across the world for generations, your local pub band holds down a steady weekly gig with a grateful and enthusiastic crowd in a tiny pub with a devoted worldwide audience or twenty or thirty close family and friends. Here we have two very different products, of very different status and value, but there they sit side by side, accessible for the same tiny monthly subscription rate.

It is thus obvious that for the avid music fan, the 21st century is an absolute field day. With a pair of high quality bluetooth headphones or a speaker, both designed to maximize the sound of a compressed digital file, a smart phone and for that tiny monthly subscription fee to one of the music streaming services you can run rampant through the whole of recorded music history, through major genres and famous eras and create your own playlists and sink into a sonic paradise of your own devising.

But more than that, thanks again to the modern wonder of the internet, whilst listening you can truly engage with the art, its production, its creators, its social and artistic context, reviews and opinions and even videos of the performers. You just simply jump onto your web browser and read about the artists themselves and the creation of the records. You can study reviews of the albums and see whether or not you agree whilst listening to the music being written about and then get on Youtube to watch the artists in action live, being interviewed and also read other music fans comments about their work and even engage yourself.

This is what I call “Deep listening”, and this is what we will be doing on a weekly basis with this column. A savouring of music as you would a painting, play, film or sculpture.  As a creative, professional musician I have done this for years on a daily basis – whilst on tour, at home, cycling, walking, riding on the bus in order to deepen and broaden my appreciation of the art I practice and to constantly develop critical and creative thinking.

But before we plunge joyfully into this limitless musical treasure trove over the forthcoming weeks, a caveat. Roughly speaking Spotify pays the owner of a recording (usually a record label) £2.71 for 1000 streams with the artist getting a small percentage of this. 100,000 streams would equal £271.00 if signed to a label the artist might get just 20% of this – a paltry £54.20

Looking at the figures another way, of the £9.99 per month month charge, the allocation of the income is approximately:

• £4.58  Record companies
• £1.99  Taxes
• £1.96  Spotify
• £1.00 Song rights
• £0.46 Artists

Last year I played a sold out show in Paris to 120 people, a mainly older audience, in a classy arts centre. I sold 30 CDs after the show earning £408. The cd sales from just one show grossed the record label and myself significantly more than the equivalent of 100,000 streams on Spotify!

The economics of streaming has turned out well for those artists that are featured heavily on the radio and in clubs and can generate seven and eight figure streaming numbers – namely hip hop and pop artists.  But for the worthy minor genres such as blues, jazz, opera, classical whose figures are in the thousands and increasingly newer indie and rock bands whose figures are in the hundreds of thousands, we are effectively giving away the music on Spotify and financial survival depends on live ticket sales and merchandise sales.

So, do try and support the musicians you love by making the effort, buying tickets and going to their gigs – and if you see an exciting merch offer they might be promoting online, do try and support their cause by purchasing something. For all the life enriching music they provide, artists need to be financially rewarded in order to keep providing it.

But for now, ready yourself to listen deeply over the forthcoming weeks as we take a journey through some quite incredible music.

Join us in the next part of our ‘Deep listening’ series, when we will be discussing classic jazz that you can use.