There's also new music reviewed by Alexis, Alex and Dorian Lynskey: St Vincent's Cheerleader, Pistol Annie's Hell On Wheels and Friends' My Boo are under scrutiny.
Plus Dorian discusses his love for REM following the announcement of their split, and picks out three gems from their archive (while Alex picks out something that's not such a classic...)
Trying to do the right thing as an artist can be a confusing task – especially if you take your cues from tech writers and the anonymous comments on their threads. When Spotify launched it was hailed as the second coming for artists. Free, ad-funded music was the answer.
Any artist who decided to keep their music off the streaming service – questioning the lack of transparency when it came to licensing deals, and the fact that the major labels and Merlin, which represents a number of independents, had shares in the service – was viewed as reactionary. Didn't they know Spotify would kill illegal filesharing? And, even if the royalty payments were low, it would be great exposure for their music, which would, in turn, get downloaded legally once people heard it on Spotify. Artists who would only allow parts of their catalogue to feature on the site were accused of destroying Spotify's chances competing with illegal filesharing sites, while US writers complained Spotify wasn't available in their country and criticised labels for taking so long to agree licensing terms.
When Spotify announced it would limit its free, ad-funded version to 10 hours a month and five listens per track, it was heavily criticised, too. "Spotify limits free access – weren't they supposed to be the good guys?" read NME's headline. Tech writers accused Spotify of succumbing to the pressures of big record labels. Shame on the labels. Many writers gleefully reported that Spotify would lose a large part of its free-access audience, and those people would return to illegal downloading.
Then, last week, the band Uniform Motion published a breakdown of their earnings, and the fact that Spotify came out at the bottom of their revenue stream sent shockwaves across the tech community. How could Spotify treat artists so badly? Shame on it. (This may have been confusing for those artists who keep being lectured for complaining about piracy, on the grounds they should make music for the love of it, not to get paid.)
I've criticised Spotify for its lack of transparency, and for the conflict of interest caused by record labels holding shares in the company, but I hailed its move to limit free access in their attempt to convert freeloaders into subscribers. Why?
How about doing the maths? Spotify has not, so far, gone into profit. That has been widely blamed on the "unreasonable demands" of copyright holders (which would include bands such as Uniform Motion). At the same time, Spotify now gets accused of not doing right by the copyright holders.
Maybe, just maybe, part of the problem is that producing content (and marketing it) is quite costly – and advertising just doesn't cover the cost. Free and ad-funded is a business model that only works if you don't have to compensate the people providing the content – for companies such as Huffington Post, Pirate Bay, Newsbin2 and Napster (before it attempted to pay content providers).
At last week's Music Managers Forum and Featured Artist Coalition awards ceremony, Sean Parker – the man behind Napster – presented one of the main awards. He was introduced as "the man who could've saved the music industry". This introduction had a mixed reception from the audience.
Parker has now gone "legit" and is an investor in Spotify, which has just announced it has added around 500,000 new subscribers in the last two and half months, adding up to 2m subscribers worldwide – no doubt thanks to its US launch and the cap on usage of the free tier. It has also launched a partnership with Facebook, announcing: "This integration with Facebook will help everyone to discover more free music than ever before."
"It's a big day for Facebook, it's a big day for Spotify, and it's a big day for everybody who loves music," said Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify, at the f8 conference in San Fransisco, on Thursday.
But is it a big day for artists? "Spotify was created with probably the best of intentions, even if that was to build a valuable sale exit strategy, but has spread the fear into everybody," says one indie label representative. "Initially the story was that it would generate as much income as iTunes for artists. It's not. It is building but slowly. Accounting is dreadful. A lot of labels can't account properly because they don't have systems that can deal with sales with more than two decimal places. Spotify roughly pays £0.0041 per stream, which means 1m streams equal £410 to labels.
They then pay on average, across all artists, 8%. So the artist receives £33 per million streams. That's if they get accounted to. Very rough."
That is echoed by Kevin Bacon of Artists Without a Label. "iTunes is in a league of its own when it comes to transparency and the technical aspects of accounting," he says. "It is the only store that can hold its head high. The scalability of its platform gives the same detailed reporting for all its clients and not just the significant revenue generators."
It seems Spotify still has some work to do to win over artists. Limiting free access is a start.
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