TRASHFUTURE - Trashfuture Unwrapped feat. Dan Boeckner

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

It sure is great we solved music piracy! How did we solve it? Well, by enriching two Swedish men and ensuring that only a handful of artists see any revenue from their music when it’s streamed. We are, of course, discussing Spotify -- and we’ve brought on Dan Boeckner (@DanBoeckner) of the bands Wolf Parade (@WolfParade) and Operators (@Operators_Band) to discuss it. As mentioned on the show, Operators has a Patreon where you can get access to new music and a fan community -- sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/operators If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome back to this very special Christmas edition of tunes Britannia with me Keith James. We're talking about our favorite Christmas singles of all time and I'm pleased to announce that I've actually got a very special guest on the line someone who may be very familiar to many of you in Essex across the country. Johannes vonk from Johannes vonk on the how are you doing thank you very much Keith I can tell you I'm very well it's a beautiful day here in Rotterdam in the Netherlands and it's great to be on your show and speaking to some of your fans I know that the clockheads meet Johannes vonk

we have lots of fans over in the UK we have many happy memories touring in the UK we've been to you know all these towns like Leon see Skegnes Dartford we have great memories in a lot of these places so it's really great to know that there are still people out there interested in our music well it's great to have you here honestly and I understand that you've put out a Christmas single you've you know you've gone back together with the clockheads after all these years and you've come out with this Christmas single why now what's brought it on yeah yeah we so we decided to get the clockheads back

together this year to do this Christmas single because it's been such a tough year for everybody and we think that people need cheering up you know something and we had this idea many years ago in 1986 we wanted to do a Christmas single but we didn't have the time we didn't have the energy and this idea it sat on the back burner for all of these years and then the clockheads broke up unfortunately after we lost Mohammed in that tragic jet ski accident but this year we decided with the year to get it back together to make this single and we were able to get Mohammed's widow Martina van den Waalt

in on the on the recording so that's great it's kind of like he's there in spirit you know and we just really hope the people like it that really is a great story behind this track I know that it's called stand on the Christmas honk and we'd like to get it on for you so without further ado after more than 30 years off of the airwaves this is Johannes vonken the clockheads stand on the Christmas honk featuring Martina van den Waalt is coming to holland oh yeah stand on the Christmas honk it's Christmas time with Johannes vonk stand on the Christmas honk

go put on your Christmas clock stand on the Christmas stand on the Christmas honk hello welcome back to this free episode of TF it is me your host Riley I forgot my own name briefly for a moment there I'm joined by everyone every single one house full that may Charlie Palmer every cast member who's ever been a member of the cast even if they slinked off we have them here they're all in the studio yeah breaking tier three lockdown rules it's a Christmas special where all your favorite characters are back and we're going to talk about all of them and who mark Thatcher Merry Christmas everyone I hope you're having a nice

a nice bride to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior right and and joining us to celebrate Christmas because this is going to be full Christmas episode no tech company discussion here it is wolf parade and operators Dan Beckner Dan how's it going I'm good I'm good I'm I'm bunkered down in in Montreal where it's now a sub zero and will remain this way until probably early June so God I miss Canada it's the best thank you for coming to our office Christmas party thanks for inviting me it's great yeah that's and hey who's that over there it's Nate and Milo wearing a lampshade on their head and with a necktie worn also

quite let's say in an unusual way and they're working on a Christmas song yeah Nate and I really drunk we're making out it's great all of all of the fans predictions about us have come true our creative process has been thrown for a loop but we we are trying to have a Johannes vonk themed Christmas song out to you sooner rather than later so we're working on it just spending hours EQing free say slave free sleigh bells samples yeah it's harder than you you think I I'm also in the process of mixing down like a Christmas song for patreon for the operators patreon the Devon I wrote and yesterday like most of

the last part of recording was taken up by downloading sleigh bells samples and then filtering out like as much high-end as possible it's good to know that that's a even even a successful and accomplished musician also goes to the same stupid process that we do because we're just sort of like what is Ableton and how does it work but we're doing the exact same thing right now I love the idea that you've accidentally made a really bleak Christmas song by sampling stuff from the group sleigh bells oh fuck I misunderstood the instruction it is a super bleak Christmas song like we we wrote it and then once it finally

started settling into a mix I listened to it back last night I was like so it's really fucking sad it's very grim the best Christmas songs and you know what there is a certain little a little Swedish company out there that wants you based based in Milan what if that yes there is a little Swedish company out there that wants that activity of painstakingly mixing down different sleigh bells so you can create the perfect holiday mood they want you to be doing that 24 7 so you don't starve that's right we are talking about Spotify it is the Spotify special we thought we

take a break from our usual uh like tech company thing of doing like Amazon of doing black rock of doing a lot of highly financial stuff for an industry which is much more relaxed and much less exploitative the music industry yeah welcome to your trash future wrapped you you listen to a honk ball hoof to class at 400 times that's right disappointing you allowed yourself to be here to be defined by one genre and the genre is Johannes vonk that's right the best genre so i'm gonna i'm what i'm gonna do is i have Spotify's mission statement in front of me oh boy dan oh no i'd like to start with

you after i say this and tell me do you think what percentage of bullshit is this okay so here it goes our mission unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by their creators now you're an editor how do you change that statement to be more accurate or also just like less clunky i love the idea it's a million there's there's a finite number of artists and if you fail to meet their metrics you just don't get to be an artist anymore so it's like listen Greg kin band your your hit song

jeopardy is not getting enough likes or streams on Spotify you're no longer a musician it doesn't exist anymore so it also it defines a ratio between fans and artists of one to one thousand which is very cool that's right yeah every time you unsub from the patreon one of the trash teacher hosts gets taken out back and shot like all the other right so yeah what do you think of that i would give that statement um like ten Pinocchios i think cool boy it feels like the operating clause here is live off their art and uh we have come to discover that that is not always a thing that spotify delivers if at all ever

oh Spotify does allow some people to live off their art but it's Joe Rogan and the obamas and apparently a production studio in Stockholm that makes plinky plunky coffee shop sad girl music and i'm not saying that the sound misogynist it's just it's a style they've determined is really really lucrative and they also pay them like one one hundredth of what they pay normal artists so hilarious in that regard hey don't wear men dismiss women as plinky plonk Dan i'm interested what is your what is your kind as an as an actual you know

creator unlike we sort of you know you studio idiots what is your experience with Spotify actually being to sort of give it a personal tinge before we go into all the facts and figures uh well i've been playing music professionally for 15 years so like i was one of maybe one of the part of the movement that really uh how do i say this like benefited extremely from the first wave of uh of of internet um sort of openness and the ability to promote sort of underground artists you know i'm talking about like like the early 2000s pitchfork

explosion but then having seen the just fucking drastic decline of record sales and the way that uh the way that spotify has actually changed um even the even the touring industry it's it's been really bleak it's it's not great i mean i was thinking about this just ask a quick question dan that when you're you're when wolf parade's first album came out in 2005 if i'm not mistaken in order to buy or stream music online your only option was the itunes store it was or it was like one of the only major ones and uh i'm just wondering like how

has that changed over time like how is that how is the the impact of people being able to buy the music whenever listening to music whenever uh like measurably affected you know you if i if it can be so crass the bottom line well i think i think once streaming was introduced all of those you know like uh personal download you know purchasing off itunes store that completely dropped off so uh in the in the in the beginning it was it was really good for us you know if we didn't have sort of a distribution network that would allow us to say get the record into a store in florida

for instance you know uh someone could just download it buy it you know from from itunes directly with streaming that's that's completely gone so um and i think the the thing is to remember here and the thing that we're going to sort of sort of go into about this is that this is really the story of the enclosure of an entire sphere of activity by a platform company that has been again able to just like you know borrow i'd like you know three cents for a billion dollar loan or whatever and it's never had to make a profit ever

and then the sort of squeezing of that space so just for a little table setting here in 2019 streaming generated 11.4 billion dollars in revenue it was actually the majority of global recorded music revenue overall it was 56 and gold and sax predicts it'll go to 37 billion by 2030 and most but most of that growth is going to come from like Spotify universal music stony and warner fighting amongst themselves um and the interesting thing i think here right we we talk about internet

openness early on that spotify was founded specifically by these two guys daniel ek and martin lorenzen in sweden because they wanted to create a legal digital music platform this is a quote from them to respond to the growing online challenge of music piracy in the early 2000s and therefore allow artists to live off their art and yet it sounds almost as though this because this is really a tech company has never said to the total opposite of what the case is it's never happened in the past um where it was actually more viable to have

like a comfortable living off of being a musician when piracy was much more right than it is now yeah right yeah i mean uh i remember in the in the years leading like the let's say the 24 months leading up to the release of the first wool parade record everyone i knew was who are huge music fans uh everybody in the sort of community in montreal was obsessed with downloading bootlegs off limewire you know which we were all being told was

destroying the music industry linkin park num.exe exactly yeah yeah or like an early release of the spoon record or something like that you know and and looking back on it i think that just drove fandom and it drove people to go to shows and purchase legally purchase the record or just buy merch basically i felt i felt like it was more of a it was more of a fan oriented appreciation of the band as opposed to a sort of algorithmically generated stream that just goes

into your ear and at the other but you also you had to seek stuff out online wire right and like even even up to the early days of torrenting we're supposed to find you just kind of get stuff serve to you exactly yeah and part of part of that getting stuff is you know wrapped up in spotify is a fight to pay any kind of livable mechanical royalty rate so so a lot of a lot of streaming is based on whether you actually search for the thing or not you know no algorithm has ever given me the

simpson's pornography that i was looking for i just found it funny because it wasn't until i read some of the source materials that riley put together for this episode that i noticed it sort of explained a question that i had had which is two bands that were mentioned in some of the source materials one was rather this one that was mentioned in the article you sent me was galaxy 500 and their song strange which to me it's a good song but it doesn't really sound like the rest of their catalog is their top spotify song by a huge margin

similarly one of pavement songs harness your hopes which i think it's like a was like a b-side or it was like on the when they re-released one of their albums yeah it wasn't on the the initial release of the album that is from what i think was terror twilight but i can't remember which album it was yeah yeah it was like an unreleased b-side and i guess it's because of the fact that like it somehow got worked into the algorithm and now it's their biggest song similarly by like an order of magnitude and it's not it's not a story like you know you hear

bands where like something will be placed in a in a show and so like you know a random song becomes really popular i think blonde redhead had that happen but in their case like in galaxy 500's case it's i don't think that people are that's giving them as much revenue because of the fact that it's being suggested as opposed to people you know digging in and looking for their music which is just wild to me because it's like you can as a fan if i didn't know anything about the industry if i looked at those numbers i'd be like well i'm glad they're doing

well damn that's a lot of streams but then you find out they're not really getting paid for any or what they're getting paid is such a paltry amount that um i remember seeing i think you may have shared this Dan but um what is allison millon either millon from from stars mentioned that they had had something like 10 million streams over the course of the calendar year and they were basically i remember of the band was eligible for the like canadian income relief yeah due to covid because they weren't making any money from it

yeah absolutely i mean my my partner uh and writing partner and operators devil like uh uh she just posted something very off the cuff about her royalty statements for one of the songs that we were collecting on this year you know like uh and i had millions of streams and you know she's like i got x amount and the just flood of comments of people defending spotify's spotify's uh payout system was mind boggling you know like they want the treats they love they love the

treats we love we love the treats i i never want to have to think about music i'm getting i mean look you can either get paid or you can get paid in clout by being at the top of the beast mode playlist exactly i know which one i would want personally and that but that's the the anger that's the same anger that comes from i think a lot of the you know the elon musk guys which is like no i like it it's cool don't don't tell me i can't have my future just because it's inhumane or like unsustainable don't tell me that shit i mean i i promise i'm

not just bringing up canadian bands a story that i can recall is is that seriously when i was uh 16 17 um i remember i was about 17 i remember hearing the new pornographers for the first time and it was somebody was playing a mixtape in a record store because they didn't have uh their first album mass romantic in and getting that album in 2003 in indiana was basically impossible and i was finally able to find it on like an ftp server that i knew through a friend who had uh had an mp3 rip of it but i like went on to become a huge fan of theirs i think i've bought every

album of theirs you know physical copy i've seen them live before i don't know it was just i really like that song mass romantic i don't know obviously it would have been a hell of a lot easier nowadays to find it but also i'm not saying like oh like okay you know the because that it made it harder that there was some more special fan connection but it does it it seems like if you're an uncritical consumer of the sort of spotify model everything about it is being told you're being told this is all you need to do you don't ever need to do anything maybe maybe mass romantic is easier to find

now on purpose but i think it's harder to find by accident which is like very strange is one of these little ironies of spotifiers that you're not going to really overhear stuff in a record store anymore and like if you want to listen to like the new pornographers there's every chance the algorithm will just put it under a spanish techno playlist because of absolutely sing me spanish yeah fucking right that's an ideal with that problem i was going to say like just as a quick point like isn't one of the like main things that kind of spotify cells which is you know i see this tweet all the time

about how like the uh the like to um what's it called like it like fresh find mondays or something like that basically it's like a playlist a curated playlist for each user which uses like the data of what your kind of favorite songs are for the week to like recommend you things that are similar um and like the thing that i hear from or i see online sometimes is like oh like this playlist is really good because it's basically like recommending me um different versions of like the same song right it reminds me of the mall i mean i mean i mean yeah kind of but like i

i've i've listened to like a couple of those like recommended playlists that spotify curates like at the gym and stuff when i just can't be bothered to find things and like it's fine it's kind of just like the way that i consume it is very very passive and there's like not really any intention to it and like it will do it what i find and i don't know whether this is the same with anyone else but what i find is that like it's very rare that i'll find a song that i actually like rather than one that i can just like tolerate or just like one that kind of just like passes me by like the way of discovering

kind of new music that you actually want to be invested in seems to not be the way in which Spotify actually works it's saying would it surprise you to know that that's intentional yes yes yes i mean like what what i'm also more surprised about is the fact that there are so many songs that sound like linkin park and jay-z's namonko that's right we could somehow gain the algorithm to make that the spotify sound instead of building a high-level um no so there all of that is actually intentional and

again so the the question here of how to talk about Spotify is there's lots of things that are make it quite like a lot of other sort of monopolistic um monopolistic content companies which are you know it's losing tons of money it tries to recommend to as large a base of users as possible um as similar a number of things that are as similar as possible to everything else they've ever taken in ever and um a lot of it behind the scenes is let's say very easily influenced by money um and so what i want to talk about though is a

few of the things that make it a little different so one of the things that i think is really fun about spotify is who owns it yeah swedish guy and an italian guy two swedish italian men the swedish italian men so the two founders the two swedish italians that own it own 30 percent then the next 10 percent is owned by a company called 10 cent holdings i don't think it's related to their holding um and that's a chinese investor kind of like a soft bank but specializing in technology entertainment and like kind of china spotify then three asset management

companies bailey gifford morgan stanley and t roe price and then the funny bit is that um universal and sony the two record labels are the next biggest owner also spotify is their biggest customer and universal and sony her spotifies biggest supplier that's incredibly legal surely every business is an uroboros now that's how it works yeah it's just a human centipede of wealth extraction from creative content like oh yeah so it's like the way to understand this right because when sony and spotify negotiate i'm sure they're all like yeah then on the one hand you know they are squeezing each other because like

the growth in this in streaming is going to come from like spot the platforms eating the lunch of the rights holders but equally they're all kind of have the same interest which is their professional wrestling and then the musicians are the canvas that is constantly getting a body slammed onto it where because the and this is not there's even more complication here right is 10 cent holdings owns 10 percent of universal which then also owns three and a half percent of spotify

owned nine percent of 10 cent music entertainment which is in turn part owned by universal's main rivals water and sony pinning strength string to different things on my big wall yeah it's actually running out of string you're basically knitting a sweater at this point it's like it's like polyamory but corporate and at the at the end of this chain there is somebody who's spent you know like 75 percent of their yearly income to like quote-unquote properly record an album and like maybe buy a van

or like buy a visa papers for the united states so they could go play in New York City and they're looking at a royalty statement that has like negative mechanical royalties on it you know like like that's the back end of all this but the competition is supposed to push the prices down i don't understand how that works it's supposed to be better for everyone didn't you see up there daniel x said he wants people to make a living and the only people he also recently say that musicians should just accept the

fact they have to put out at least one album a year if they want to eat something along those lines he did he did he uh and i remember i remember when that statement came out i was talking to arlan a drummer from wolf parade who for years has been he's been like we're just like music musicians are basically the canary in the coal mine for what labor is going to look like for a lot of the rest of north america you know like you are doing you are investing a lot of your own capital into creating something and you are

doing a thousand little jobs and getting paid uh just fractions of a cent on what whoever you're selling them to is making you know uh so just does it digital peasantry so daniel acke getting up and saying musicians need to he used taylor swift as someone who is uh you know a beneficiary of spotify self-criticism well that's cool maybe if everyone was a little more like taylor swift then all musicians could be rich did you think of that just the most galaxy brain dumb guy

shit yet the way i see it you know people used to go out and pay good money to see the bear naked ladies and these days people only want to go on only fans and look at bear naked ladies that reminds me of is there's like a sort of just complete just brain worms conservative talk radio show host in the uk called julia harley brewer and she recently she recently tweeted out that was like if workers want a better job then they should just become the boss sounds like we think of this see she's describing

albeit union she's too stupid to realize that's what she's done i mean it really does come down to is like yeah there's going to be defenders of this model and of the platform because it's like well it's so easy for me to get the music that i want so why is anybody complaining which is effectively the same thing as you know seeing people like doordash or uh seamless or drivers in the us you know who are getting next to nothing for the work they put it and be like well i've been eating some really great meals lately i don't understand why they're

complaining so much and moreover i assume this process won't come for me because it hasn't yet yeah yeah um so i have a little more of the financial fuckery here i don't have too much financial fuckery on this one but there's a little more of this fun stuff because remember how earlier i said that morgan stanley was one of the big owners yeah so this is according to a six k form that spotify filed um which was uh subsequent to his last two fiscal quarters ago so that was june quote we have signed license agreements with certain music labels and

publishers and podcast agreements with creators included in these agreements our minimum guarantees and spend commitments of approximately 3.6 billion over the next three years the largest beneficiary of that agreement was universal music group which also owns spotify which also owns it um and morgan stanley has also been named as the chief book as like the chief um bookrunner for warner music groups ipo and um g's ipo as well and also agree to loan 10 cent holdings 1.1 billion dollars in order to then buy 10 percent of universal on flotation we love deals don't we

there's just so many deals flying around so many deals happening at once i think musicians should just be excited to part like this is the real music it's all about the disclosure they don't make it's jazz baby that's right that's right it's the spaces between the investments they call it the harmony of the spheres that's right invisible hand just plucking a walking baseline um is what's really happening here right is that there are these three there are these like three oligopolists universal uh sony and warner and they

are basically just their job is just own rights to music and then they license those rights to spotify and if you remember netflix netflix kind of did the same thing or is this platform that bought rights to popular shows like friends or what have you from other networks um that then basically started squeezing them once they realized that they could just do this themselves because netflix was going to put them out of business if they didn't like jack up the prices for their rights and because this is there is going to be a

massive knockdown drag out battle between the monopolist or the one of the platform oligopolists that spotify apple music title blah blah blah mostly spotify and then on the other hand the label oligopolists so those three the basically they're fighting to see who can hyper exploit musicians more essentially um and so on the on the exploitation bit right we talked a lot a little bit earlier about how if you're a musician make it and you're not sort of constantly making music 24 hours a day and also marketing it and also promoting

it and also like taking in a lot of data so that you make the perfect spotify sounding music you won't be able to live off your art um how spotify pays artists is a little bit counterintuitive and i think a lot of people don't know about this um where basically right um as far as i understand it and dan i welcome you to correct me if i'm wrong here you pay your subscription or the advertisers you know pay the advertising fee and then spotify pays all of its artists not on the basis of who's listening to what so if i'm listening to all wolf

parade or all johannes wonk in the clog heads and i pay my you know 10 bucks a month um it won't go to the to the artists i'm listening to in the proportion i'm listening to them it goes to the most popular artists on the platform so you get money in terms of what percentage of the listens are you overall yeah that's right it's pro-reddit so yeah that it it sucks that's insane i had i fuck man i thought i knew this shit but i had no idea so basically if some if if we actually we don't have johannes wonk in the clog heads on spotify but if

we did and it was like we will and it was like a runaway success one month that would effectively if we took up a larger per percentage of the the streams than normal that would mean other people were making less yes that's right that's insane and and the amount of money that you make like if i listen to only johannes wonk in the clog heads then point zero zero zero zero zero one percent of that goes to you and 75 percent goes to i don't know bts that's right awesome bts they deserve everything they get that's

sure okay that is sure all right bts they they're they're accepted from all other all the conversations about how this platform like that's right because it's what you do do not transcribe this episode do not mention that all we can say is that jungkook is a very cool guy we all like him yeah i actually didn't say bts and if you thought you heard me say that you're mistaken yeah bts is a trope you were saying a bs s broken that's right broken social saying i mean can i can i make a point as

someone who's both been at the receiving end of this particular group of sounds but also will never mention this name i did yeah in any capacity you know i only now have one testicle as a result of my posting um i mean these are also like dan mentioned dan talked about uh like how like fan like the nature of fandom like is changing um as a result of kind of like technologies like specify and like these types of stands who again i will not mention the name of really sort of like exemplified that right because

they are also the ones who like have kind of made it their mission to get like i don't even want to say game the algorithm but kind of just like you know um pump up that's where fancams came from right that's why if you do if you see a viral post there'll be a bunch of videos of bts underneath it and they can get those plays yeah and there was a whole thing about like you know we'll support like leftists on twitter as long as you like stream um stream seven uh which like lots of them did and i feel like you know this is also

this is kind of really indicative of like how technologies like Spotify have kind of like fundamentally like changed and um like almost made mechanic the process of like liking music or liking an artist yeah it's part of a i think it also goes back to out just the general outsourcing of promotion you like activate these fan bases right you know uh and i think with with the rise of Spotify some this weird side effect of it has been the outsourcing of that type of labor directly to the band whereas like if you

sign a record deal and you're paying you know 50 percent of your royalties to that record label every time they sell something before this paradigm you would have a staff of people who are promoting your record who are trying to engage people trying to sell your record basically and now it's essentially like well get online and start posting and you're not going to get paid for it yeah and if and if you know if this thing is a failure if you don't sell as many records as they as they had hoped it's

a lot of that blame is definitely offloaded on artists as well you know it sounds a bit like they've kind of done to music sort of what they've also done to comedy which is that essentially any actual content creation that you do so like being on tv or like uh in comedy's case like playing clubs and stuff you effectively do for a pittance in the expectation that you can make that back doing like other live work like it's basically a promotional activity you do for free in the hopes that you'll sell tickets and merch yeah exactly

exactly and that you know that economic uh system kind of flipped uh in the last 30 years for for bands and that like your biggest chunk of the money pie used to be record sales and touring you tour at a loss to promote the record and then it flipped to the record is just a promotion for your tour and now there's no touring and all that's left is streaming yeah so and now everyone's free training to be in cyber security exactly that's right or a disinformation expert

Dan I remember you just in a conversation you and I had that you said that you you even noticed it that the touring numbers like the ticket sales attendance that merch sales etc when you were touring were you know commensurate with the same success you'd had previously but that you could absolutely notice a huge drop-off in the record sales so like what would notionally be a successful tour for an album you just weren't seeing that anymore because it had been replaced by streaming almost entirely yeah that's that's absolutely true I mean

you know wolf parade wolf parade's a good example uh our last tour we were on average playing for playing for crowds and venues twice the size of what we were playing in uh 2010 for the expo 86 tour but our record sales are a third of what they were in 2010 so so like we're playing for twice as many people in New York and we're selling you know tons of merch at the merch table but overall record sales are down like yeah I'd say two thirds and I think it's it's worth here actually just sort of remembering what

Daniel why this company was founded and what Daniel X said which is that it's supposed to stop piracy so that artists can continue to live off of their art but what has actually happened is and again because I think a lot of these companies justify their own existence by asking you to completely forget even like 10 years ago history yeah right absolutely where remember there was the all the campaign campaign after campaign against people just sharing files on the basis that the musicians will all go broke

you'll destroy the whole concept of music it'll be gone it'll they'll be like you know no one can afford to do it anymore and you know it's sort of the same thing it's instead of like now that like actually it's cool when we do it instead of a million internet internet people you know downloading linkinparknumb.exe it's two guys and then like three banks that all own each other this is so much better banks banks love rap and rock remixes what can I say the one percent are hoarding 99 percent of the linkinparknumb.exe

and the working people of this country are left with nothing but jiggerwatt slash faint that is no good the thing is right is everyone hates the beneficiaries of this current system and always did yeah well it's hilarious to me because I think about bands because you know I was I was in university from 03 to 07 and I think about the bands that I was into at the time that I discovered because of file sharing and I mean like just just thinking off top of my head like yeah I mean wolfberry was one of them also spoon

blonde redhead innerpole bands like that I mean I went to school in Indiana so was like we had like a massive music scene for performance we did for record labels for some reason but not for not for for performances and you know I was thinking about this that like those are all bands that I went on to buy buy shit from I bought their records I saw them live that kind of a thing whereas you know the kind of bands who had the in my from what I can tell had the the sort of studio or the label backing to do things like big court cases and stuff to stop file sharing

things along those lines I'm thinking of bands like Metallica or Green Day they're doing fine from streaming but the bands that wound up being hurt by the sort of like piracy defeat valve if you will wound up being the bands who were from what I can tell were gaining some degree of fan base and you know sort of like following from the fact that people were were sharing their music but then also there was this sort of implicit I'm gonna say obligation but just interest in then seeing them live we're buying the record I mean

TV on the radio wanted to be really popular but when they were like not that big of a thing in 2003 2004 I found out about them because of of FTP communities like where people had you know pre-Torrent where people had you know there they were hosting servers at home and you could get albums that way and like it's wild to me I think about who wound up being able to navigate that and you know not every band has the kind of music they can sell to like you know to be used in like a FIFA game or something like that it's the equivalent of I don't know if any of you guys were ever into hardcore

or you know like the sort of underground like heavy music scene but it's the equivalent of hardcore or like death metal tape trading where these FTP servers could realistically make a small regional band into like a national touring outfit that could support itself. I wanted to look about this right we always talk about how right when we talk about these tech companies that are sort of just destroying and sucking the lives out of different sort of kinds of social life right we say don't don't forget it wasn't better before it wasn't better

before it's just worse now don't be nostalgic but in this case it was better before it was was better this is a case where you should be nostalgic for that because that was that was it was a way to get the same effect essentially like this is what they took from you but this is Interpol turn on the bright lights.exe yeah and it sounds like it's a fucking changing of the guard or anything like that it's not like you know like a certain style of music or a class of musician rose to the top or got

you know or conversely got outmoded it's literally the same fucking people who were making most of the money are still making most of the money. Where is my illiterate Russian P2P server that's what I want to know. The only difference really is the same people are still making most of the money it's just a different company of muscling in on them. The only difference is that everything is slightly worse and also there are two Swedish men now. Swedish Italian and the meatball coalition.

I mean also also when you were like downloading stuff from LimeWire it'd always be like that fun moment where you weren't quite sure if you were getting your like jar rule album or not and you just don't get that with Spotify anymore right. Well because that was an actual thing where like there were artists who got big by gaming LimeWire where they would upload their music and put it under the name of something that was really popular so loads of people would download it and be like oh this is cool actually. Well that still happens on Spotify.

Well I wanted to talk to Riley if you want to transition just talking both about the algorithm and their financials but I mean one thing that people always say that I've seen people say is like well why doesn't Spotify pay more in royalties and I mean as I understand it the reason why they did a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange and not an IPO is because like their fundamentals aren't that great. Yeah so it's basically right like there's a life cycle of every of every sort of big tech company like this where

they're willing to lose money almost forever. That's like table stakes at this point like that shouldn't surprise you because the model is to grow and capture as many users as possible so get as many people dependent on you for your thing and then jack up prices later. So Netflix now is the heroin dealer business model. Netflix has flipped into jacking up prices mode and so what happens is if you if you because you need the that you have the money that you've gotten you initially invested in you to like get you there if you need a little more you might decide

to list on the stock exchange so you can sell shares so you can keep going but once you are publicly traded then you release your earnings and shareholders demand demand you increase your earnings somehow they demand revenue. Yeah you can't just keep self-dealing to Warner and Universal. And so what happens is once and is that things get weird once you list publicly and so after 2018 Spotify has had tons and tons of pressure on it to try to like not just just to freely spend billions a year on a loss making enterprise for the foreseeable future. They've had one profitable quarter just like a lot of

these have but other than that it's never been profitable it's never had a profitable year and so they have all of these crazy new ideas as to how they're going to actually make the company profitable and wouldn't you know it and most of it involves screwing over musicians. Oh yeah are we are we going to talk about discovery mode, Spotify discovery mode? You and me baby we ain't nothing but musicians so let's pay Spotify a bunch of money to make people listen to us when they don't realize they've been bought. Dan can you tell us a little bit about discovery mode and why it's different from Paola?

As far as I can tell it's not substantially different than Paola at all. The only difference is that instead of like an emissary of the record label going to like a radio station in Cleveland with a fucking duffel bag full of cash it's you the artist are taking a reduced royalty rate which is fucking laughable considering the rates they already pay. Half a cent to quarter of a cent. Yeah and so discovery mode is basically like you give up some of your royalty rate to Spotify to allow them to promote you on playlists but in the fine print it basically says they don't guarantee that this is going to work. They will take your money. They don't even guarantee that they're going to playlist you on

specific playlists. So this this rollout came after like after a sort of day of action on the internet about I think it was from it was from the United Music Workers Association. Basically you know a list of demands saying pay artists more and Spotify turned around and did this. What if we paid them less which which I think just proves that like you cannot negotiate or shamed. You can't negotiate with or shame these people. They don't fucking care. It's back in the beanstalk ass economy which is like hey everyone can get these magic beans and maybe it'll work or maybe you've just made no money from this song that you really hope. It's like it's not even it's not even like you're paid an exposure. It's like you're paid in

you might get exposure makes it you can make some great shoes from it by. Yeah. Yeah it's funny to me because years ago before I started podcasting and when I was I was in school I was you know working in New York. I worked for a guy who ran a chain of restaurants and I was just helping him with figures and he used seamless which is sort of like it for British listeners American delivery or in reverse and they do a similar thing where like you could opt to take even less of a cut of the profit you would get like they would take up charge of much bigger commission but they would guarantee that you would be like top first page listed when people search for different you know style of cuisine for example but it was completely unsustainable

because obviously restaurants make such small margins to begin with and you know especially in a place like New York where rent is obscene. You know you basically could only last a couple of months before it really started to bite and you had to go back to the reduced promotion but like less commission taken and you just the idea of their notion was oh well we'll sell we'll get so many people to be big fans of your restaurant that then like you know it'll be worth it in the end because they'll become repeat customers and like it really is magic beans when you get down to because it's selling you this idea that people will become such devotees that it'll be worth it in the end but it's like that that's not first of all that's not guaranteed and it seems that even

if that does happen overall you're probably not going to see an appreciable increase in in the overall royalties or revenues unless like it's just like a one in a million occurrence that you happen to become massively popular which I don't really see happening yeah become the next Rick Astley on Spotify it is um it's all it's like a tontine right so any listen you get that's money someone else doesn't get so you're basically it's the opposite of collective marketing yeah exactly it's it's interesting actually one of the one of the like economic things that I find really fascinating about the way music has gone is that it's completely different depending on what kind of artist you are like if you make music for people who are under 50 like you're

fucked right it's this shit you're just you're gonna get like you know 10 cents a year from Spotify there's no touring anymore you're fucked but if you make music for old people you can make amazing but like last year or like a couple years ago Bradley Walsh British fucking game show host released an album of like rap pack covers which was like mediocre and he was the top selling physical album in the UK because the only people who were going to buy it were like over 60 and they don't know what Spotify is doing fine yeah they're like they're absolutely like they are the fucking like you know like they that Cliff Richard is cruising around in a fucking escalate off the back of record sales I'm taking notes right now I need to uh I need to explore other genres

other demographics make an album about like different laxative products that and that could be a good a good go for you have you considered doing a co-promotion with Depends or one of those showers yet has a door you can step into yes yeah the walk-in bath a concept record about Alzheimer's pills yeah yeah that's right it's just one track but you can listen on repeat so the point of discovery mode right is that Spotify's main thing it tells people to sign up to it especially the people who pay the premium fee is like hey you know we can give you more of what you like you love discovering new music you want to be the person who has all the new music you want to stay on trend whatever so we're going to keep serving that to you and you can just sort

of buy your place in that queue of getting served to people and it's not just discovery mode though it's also playlists the Spotify has like I don't know a few hundred in-house playlists that are now like basically a record an a and r uh unto themselves right we're wrapped of their playlist rap caviar is the world's most influential playlist with seven billion plays um and that you can like you can you have to you the artist have to then pay a lot of companies to lobby Spotify to put you on rap caviar if you're a rapper yeah this is this is a thing that I've I've gone through let's say three releases with now uh the the two operators records and the last full parade record where when you sit down with the label at a marketing meeting a huge chunk of it is now taken up by

um discussing how likely it is you're going to get tracks on these playlists and what tracks those might be and that usually isn't the track that you've picked as the radio single because they're thinking about how these tracks fit in algorithmically with uh you know user data and and the rest of the stuff on this playlist which is at that point completely imaginary so and the funny thing is is you spend all this time doing it and there's almost no return back to the artist like there's so much labor and and and uh contemplation over these playlists and I think for bands like like wolf parade or or operators it's it's just fucking pointless you know because there's productive labor right which in the productive labor is making the thing it's creating the thing

that had the commodity with the use value that people can use the song the linen coat whatever and then there's the unproductive there's the unproductive labor which is the like the advertising or the guarding it or whatever that only is imposed by like the logic of scarcity and so and because these playlists are kept like artificially scarce because Spotify needs to be so huge because it only works if it's a monopoly then it imposes all of this insane amount of unnecessary labor on everyone because anyone who wants to be a musician because basically just because it's able to have you do your job for it before you know it you're making music that you think this like you know the yeah the meatball collective and morgan stanley are gonna like i mean i just love the idea that

effectively this is just a much more professionalized version of like pay paling someone who runs a big facebook page a hundred dollars to like post something you want their fans to see it is it is exactly that that's basically criminalized if you do that on facebook but if you're a huge business it's just the normal way of going doing things and that's your publicly traded it's impossible to commit a crime there's another thing though where this is actually from a forthcoming book by kori doctoro and rebecca giblin and he sent me this chapter because he knew i was researching this this bit and i pulled this out right how many of you are familiar with a group called epidemic sound i only know because i've read the show notes but an appropriately named

collective for our time so this is from the book one investigation found over 90 of tracks featured on spotify's ambient chill list came from these mystery viral artists all originating from swedish production house epidemic sound leading from one wet market and we were in china no you know what this is you know this is this is a dark kitchen well yes hold on because we will see this that leading artists such as brian emo and bbio have been dropped out also does brian emo now i'm brian elmo don't tickle me or i'll make a seminal album do not change the name yeah i swear to god anyway the suspicion is that spotify has actually negotiated lower than normal royalties with epidemic sound and then prioritized its music to fat and margins

a spotify music insider confirmed as much to variety describing the practice as one of a number of initiatives internally to lower the royalties they're paying to major labels could save big money rolling stone estimates that spotify would have to pay out about five million in royalties the top ten fake artists it had been paying them industry standard rates so it's basically slowly an ambient chill probably one of the playlist where you can tell least if you're listening to the real thing um it's like music where people be fucking with someone they met on tinder yeah they are slowly replacing it with like like a genuine ronak swatch yeah you see back in the day we used to have majestic casual and now it's just all this shit

kevin kline yeah they finally killed lo-fi hip hop beats to chill relax and study too for this yeah eight tracks dot com remember hey people might be expecting crusty the clown show or itchy and scratchy but you know what i'm sure a worker in parasite will be perfectly good for them actually this ties in with something i also read about spotify which is a similar thing where there are these guys who are making thousands of dollars a month by creating mixes of just like white noise and stuff and uploading it and like saying like sleep sounds or whatever because people will like search for that stuff and listen to it and obviously it costs like nothing to produce and they just upload like hundreds of tracks like this to spotify of just all of the new tf playlist

yeah that's right these are the people who are in the comments when you complain about spotify they're jumping in being like well i made six hundred dollars last month with my songs on spotify but what they're not saying is that they're saw they're they're spending most of their time uploading like generative ambient playlists you know which is work like i'm not i'm not going to say it's not work but uh i think it's interesting it's like the way spotify rewards people on the platform it doesn't reward you know uh it doesn't reward touring musicians necessarily it definitely rewards uh people who put white noise playlists i didn't realize that spotify had its own version of the adobe ponytail dad so that nat and i often encounter where whenever you go on the adobe forums

and complain about the way adobe works or ask how to do something there's a bunch of guys who don't work for adobe but just like simp for adobe who are like immediately in the comments like well why would you even want to do that it's actually good that adobe doesn't let you do that i i love defending this huge corporation for free oh my god yeah it's also it's it's also interesting because like it's another example of how like spotify follows a particular kind of platform logic which tends to reward like very either like very low produced stuff or like reproductions and i think like you know so i'm a sucker for like the white noise playlists because like i have like the attention span of a baby um but no yeah i know right but like

there's like there's like this thousands of like white noise playlists which are basically the same thing even though again like talking about comment sections what's very funny is that like you'll have commenters on like reddit who will actually be very serious and saying uh no well like this white noise uh sound is different because it like operates like a different type of frequency or something like which is like besides the point but it's like one of those things where like you know it it's just like indicative of a kind of platform logic which will always sort of like reward like sounds that are like reproduced and whether that's kind of right reproduce white noise or again like algorithms that basically try to or they work

they're like value comes in like recommending things but you already like which you're more like you know so you end up kind of not really actually getting to explore or like invest in music or a new artist or like even local artists which is like a big you know problem of spotify but you end up just sort of getting this like minor gratification which sort of gets you for your day rather than anything like and everything's a copy of a copy of a copy right yeah right it's the if you want to look at it from like the just the logic of capital right from any kind of production it's that the incentive of capital is to replace labor with itself right to automate more things more things more things to make the actual job of making a thing less skilled and more commoditized

so if you want to think of like the whole this whole process the making copies of copies or the epidemic sound thing right what this really is is it is spotify enclosing all of what music is right and then slowly using its own power to like replace the people who made the stuff that got you on to spotify with people they can pay less money to just kind of keep giving you the product and all of a sudden you look around and the product is way worse quality because it's been completely commoditized or created like automatically which we'll get into and I'm not sure where I'm supposed to get my linen coats from if there isn't a playlist that's algorithmic generated lots of very similar linen coats that I can try on in sequence but at that point you have no more

control because what music is is just determined by this one company and this one company has realized that they can just tell you what it is and you have to love it I just find it funny because it strikes me that this is you're basically your standard spotify subscription costs about as much as a subscription to Columbia House did back in the 90s where it had like the CD club thing and it's you know you could sign up for a thing and you'd get CDs per month and then you could you know either opt to keep them or send them back and it's like except at least with this with Columbia House you were there were physical copies of records being sold and they were being paid that I think the same royalty rates are close to it as opposed to you're basically paying

that same amount but you're getting the musical version of like the kids YouTube videos that are just like these horrible amalgamated things of like you know of like just Batman slapping the shit out of Wonder Woman while like a weird high-pitched baby scream is happening in the background a neutral milk hotel's heads get put on the bodies of the Cooke's the John Cooke's there's an idea sofa song but in Korean so uh there's uh there's a right and if you look at this right so let's think about the net effect on culture and one of my sort of favorite writers about this whole universe of things that the

relationship between Spotify and culture and advertising and music is the baffler's Liz Peli and she talks about a great sort of aesthetic flattening so I have a quote from her here said over the years it has become clear that the platform rewards music that does well in the background as opposed to in the foreground music that can remain a background experience like emotional wallpaper as one independent label owner described it to me this has led in general to an aesthetic flattening the more vanilla the music the better it works in Spotify there is at least there's a least common denominator effect in play both in terms of the type of the artist you find success but more generally just in terms of the types of songs that can survive in this environment

the the data-driven and playlist environment by design favors the sounds that sound most seamless most unobtrusive the most passive the most unlikely to cause a skip or have you noticed them or songs that fit into its prize genres of playlist like chill yeah that's right so it basically just makes songs that sound like sort of songs does it's it makes songs that sound like all other songs that sound like nothing that you sort of don't notice but that occupy your ears so that you your tinnitus doesn't bother you did you enjoy the John Lewis advert I have like a certain like it's not really a theory but it's more kind of like an observation which is one of like maybe these playlists do so well because they're like if you go on Spotify so many of the

playlist don't actually like describe the music that is being curated but it's like almost instructive of what you should be doing while you're listening to the music so like things like beast mode are designed for you to kind of not just be going to the gym but be by like lifting weights there are like 120 bpm trading crypto kind of playlist there's like you know there are playlists for like you know things that you should do while you're cleaning the house and stuff like that so it's kind of like so so many of like the top playlists besides being ones which are designed for kind of clout or um yeah or like vibes and stuff like that they're also just like things that are designed to occupy you while you do tasks and while you do work right so again that's actually more advertisers

so the Spotify has distilled music into about seven different moods and some key activities like clean melancholic caloric sanguine yeah yeah i love it when i i get the news that Spotify has included me in one of their popular playlists but i'm then disappointed to learn the playlist is called luring kids into my van so basically right as you were saying what happens there and you're you're sort of astute to notice this is that Spotify then says okay dead all um advertise and are cleaning the house playlist and i mean that's an oversimplification but not by much right where they have they have these moods and activities that they've worked out because they look at the playlist that users make themselves and again for doing the labor for free and then they aggregate

all of that knowledge and again this is also in Liz Pelle's writing as well she's very good about this they aggregate that knowledge and then in Spotify for brands they then sell brands the opportunity to associate themselves with whatever mood they want to associate with or whatever activity they want to be associated with so you know you will get you know adverts for you know black rifle coffee company while you're in beast mode while you're in your wall crime i was just thinking about that though because it's like i do recall this debate happening in the you know night late late nineties early two thousands about sinks or you're about a synchronization for for ads and stuff and whether or not bands should do that but it's wild to me because

this seems like it's basically giving the advertisers the benefit of that association with music without the payout to the the artists or consent like yeah Jesus i didn't realize it yes so i didn't realize that that was a thing that you wouldn't even be notified about no of course not like your record label you know if your record label owns your masters your songs are going on spotify whether you want them there or not that's it and our cast is on spotify and yeah we we i think our hosting platform i don't even know if you can opt out of it i mean maybe maybe spotify will cut us an exception and get rid of those you can you can opt out of it yeah i think it's very funny to be bitching about spotify on spotify actually deal with it spotify

i'm holding my iphone right now yeah exactly exactly well i mean but but yeah that's the thing that kind of surprised me about it is just the extent to which it's it's not no longer even really a question of whether you opt to associate music or any creative product with a brand at this point but the payout is also like you said dan is not consensual and then also like the payout is reduced to the point where it's basically imperceptible at least that's what it seems like to me yeah yeah pretty much it i'm so glad we fought internet piracy and we have this now home typing is killing music listen to my new playlist cleaning the Jungkook uh i was really i'm really glad that we can support our favorite artists now by you know um relentlessly streaming

the beast mode playlists so that uh trap will bring back its lead singer i mean look right i haven't listened i i i haven't like listened to new music for uh a number of years and i'm not invested in any artists however without the spotify algorithm um i would have never heard the song e-girls are ruining my life by savage savage gasp and corpse husband i don't know if any of you had have listened to this song um i know that devin has i don't know about any i would encourage you to check it out um of course the lyrics the lyrics are pretty fun i want to read some i just want to read a couple of lines out where it goes she's a freak little bad hoe gasper i told me to kill it i said let me grab my death note she pulled me in like a lasso saying that she know me even

though i don't know her though like i you know without the algorithm i would have i would have never i would have never like got any about so who can say whether it's good or bad and that artist is getting very little money from streaming revenue so you do need to buy their bath water if you enjoy that song i think they do have an only fans i think and i think music is a way to get people on to the only fans i think corpse husband has an only fans where he reads creepy pastas corpse husband only fans where he fox's dad so the um the uh so that the actual spotify sound right the aesthetic flattening that's happening uh peli describes it as a muted mid-tempo melancholy pop music that can fit easily into a mood or affect oriented playlist

citing an unnamed pop producer's song that people ask uh claim rather that people often ask for a sad girl spotify song in the studio this often means a whispery vocal emo which lyrics and a low-key hip hop inspired beat its seamlessness and its chillness reflect music that has become entirely instrumentalized for the platform um and so basically what's happened is i hope you didn't like music that wasn't that i hope you don't make music that's not that because in either case because it's one of these things right where the the point of the monopolies is bigness and the point of and you only work if you're big if you can do one thing huge right and so that means what you have to do is you have to find let's say 15 percent of people who are listening

to spotify like that kind of music your billy eyelashes they have to be like well we have to sort of put this we have to make everything just the average of this and we have to let it be known to our labels who are our biggest opponents and also our owners and also our biggest suppliers that this is the kind of thing that we're going to want and we have the power to make it more and more popular and the more popular this is the more we can sell ads and so and also just the more we can keep serving people the stuff that they like because we're not really serving people the stuff that they like we're serving people the stuff that we want to serve them because we know that that's kind of the easiest thing for us to pull off and so i know i'm not i'm this isn't

meant to be like making fun but it's just it dawned on me that if you were a band who signed with like like a say like a minor label or something but you went through the same processes to get on spotify and even if you were listed on one of these playlists you might overall for that album make less in total revenue than the guy we saw on the youtube stream who did that video about i think my dog's a democrat like that like how shitty country music but that's made solely for youtube it's entirely possible that you know that guy got like 10 million views isn't that something like $50,000 i mean it's also producing a type of artist but like so i'm looking at like the top new artist of 2020 right now and like it's guys are always people like dakiti bad bunny i've

never heard like any of these except for one which is tizzy slide drake um as as jewel bovin um and then we get to like the artist like the weekend and stuff but like i feel like the top three artists at least from like how i'm looking at the moment these are all like youtubers and twitch streamers who have like made some music and they've got like a huge fan base who are just kind of like propelling their sales and everything so like even like even like it feels like with the spotify with like the spotify system um it's really also rewarding people who uh do like the promotional work themselves like cross-platform right or at least kind of like these other platforms kind of are much more instrumental to how well an artist does on Spotify rather than like

make just making music absolutely it's rewarding people whose main source of income does not come from spotify yeah and therefore like the importance of a new artist is like to be a performer in general rather than like you know just like making music and like trying to kind of like make some kind of a living from it don't focus on anything and certainly don't take any time off that's right yeah because you've just got because you've just got to keep on posting and you've got to keep on making content um to make everyone happy well it's the um it's the idea you know the the whole point right the whole point of the entertainment industry the culture industry the ad industry uh everything is to make is to sort of take the distinction between

consumers and producers of culture destroy it and then um have everyone be contributing to that all the time even in their leisure time so the whole idea right also that you can be someone who is a musician who isn't also rich right like this is something that i think we talked about with natalie ola a few months ago with her book steal everything you can steal as much as you can rather right which is that one of the there are many things that contribute to this cultural flattening and part of them is the platform company's ability to determine to just try to be bigger and try to make everything the same quick so it can be bigger but also part of it is that you're most likely to be a musician if your industry connected or already rich yes and

that's that is kind of something uh the music community it's a conversation the music community does not want to talk about and has not wanted to talk about for the last i don't know ever since streaming kind of popped up and became such a huge part of this job is uh the sort of huge class classic class discrepancy in uh in music making so you know it's easy to be a low streaming experimental noise artist living in brooklyn if you don't have to pay your own rent you know and it makes that makes it very difficult to organize musicians uh in in any way like i i honestly i don't know this is a bit of a sidetrack but i i think until until everyone involved is willing to have like a pretty uh frank discussion about class in in this job uh it's going to be almost

impossible to organize against something like spotify i mean i think about that too also because of just the extent to which i remember this being a thing in the 2000s that it was it was considered such a wild shock i remember hearing from friends um who were in bands that for example in places like canada it was possible to get a grant from the government to record an album i don't know if it's still possible to this day but i remember it is yeah there's uh we've got you know millions and millions of dollars in uh factor funding uh kebac has its own sort of siloed grant system called sodec and it helps a lot of people keep the lights on you know because we had this conversation with um alex capranos from france ferdinand when he talked about like you know he's he got into like

his band got big when he was i think in his early 30s and he said when he was in his you know late teens early 20s playing music it was before they'd completely eviscerated the you know what we call job seekers allowance now in the uk and he i mean it wasn't it wasn't luxurious he was able to live off what they called dole enough to be able to not have to be working you know 40 60 hours a week to make enough money to be in a band and that was able he even said he was like i'm really grateful and that was like instrumental to my success and i think about that kind of thing that you know people think okay well you have you have Spotify surely you have these platforms you can make money as a musician it's like well maybe when you get to a certain point but that's not guaranteed anymore

and in most cases it's not going to happen and if like you said if you don't have money to fall back on especially if you have like a year like this where you can't tour and thus the big source of it sounds like the big source of revenue gets taken away the people who can kind of weather this are people who've got money to begin with and it's like well if that's not you then the the industry solution apparently is don't be a musician anymore yet or work yourself to death i mean this year is gonna this year is just going to be a different type of flattening of music in general those the people who survive it are definitely going to be the people that for the most part have some kind of cushion you know and and that is going to cut out a lot of voices from different classes from

people who who basically had to sell their tour van to make rent or whatever you know sell all their equipment so it's to the point now where if you want to like push the boundaries of what's possible in music you basically have to like your dad has to work at Raytheon yes at this point it is right like you may need to be an extremely literally Lana Del Raytheon well i mean it's thinking being extremely successful you'd like twitch streamer and then be like well now now that i've achieved the success of getting a million followers on twitch and i have enough money to survive i can finally begin my with my true dream which is being a musician i think i haven't been able to work on forever because i have to spend my every waking hour streaming because it's it's a reliable

source of income apparently and other stuff this is me spending years building a successful podcast and fictional dutch synth pop band so i can just be a stand-up comedian why is it so hard so many people tweet at me about theory i just wanted to make jokes in a dark room and the funny like the thing is remember right of it all goes back to production of things people want and it seems as though this is producing nothing of what anyone wants it's making a lot of what spotify wants a lot of what universal wants but very little actual music mostly the music seems like the last thing anyone's thinking about here and that kind of makes everything worse for everyone except the two swedish guys spotify is like the late 80s gauze plan of capitalism basically is what

you're saying essentially yeah that's what we're it's it's yet again you know it's what the west imagined the soviet union would be like and yet somehow worse so there's a a few more things right lo-fi beats to enjoy the comesamal too there's a few more things right because they're path to profitability net remember what netflix is pat this is i'm going to put my tinfoil hat on now right i put my tinfoil hat on is netflix's path to profitability was in housing stuff try basically trying to get it get popular by like being able to you know get the rights to a bunch of shows that no network knew that it needed and then get people onto its network by that way and then use that

money to make its own content and now it's movie studio spotify kind of has to do the same thing because mostly it just exists to channel money from investors to rights holders and to swedish men and and that's more or less it and so what it has to do is if it's going to be profitable it more or less needs to start making its own content and i don't think it necessarily wants to be the one music label because it doesn't want to have to pay all that labor interestingly and this is where the tinfoil hack was on they've recently filed a patent and then you and i've spoken about this or quote the manual detection of music plagiarism sorry the automatic rather detection of music plagiarism a software assisted detection for text plagiarism that allows and it's based on

sorry software assisted detection of text plagiarism and so what you do is you submit your stems or your masters to this thing and then it analyzes them and detects if you've plagiarized someone else oh just just hand them your masters it's fine and the person they got the person they got to make this was an AI expert called François Pache whose specialty is making music using AI's well that definitely does what it says on the tin no further discussion needed no further questions here oh it's uh they're protecting uh they're protecting creators from uh from copyright infringement oh that shit annoys me so fucking much because it's like all this shit we're like oh yeah copyright infringement is really bad for people who make

stuff so we're just gonna like no it's not it's bad for fucking huge corporations it's not bad for people who make stuff it's actually it's much worse the protections they put in place for people who make stuff like if ever you upload anything to youtube heaven for fend it has even like a millisecond of copyrighted music in it or something because like even if you've made an hour long video of original content they will give a hundred percent of your royalties to like warner music or whoever because that one second of copyrighted music that you used as a transition is worth more than the entire hour of content that you made yeah that's it it's almost as though this is about economic power yeah that couldn't couldn't be that the really disturbing thing about this about

this algorithm is it's it's not just a tool that they're uh sort of offering to embed in the system or that a tool that they're going they're telling artists they're going to use to uh protect their copyright or whatever they're actively pushing it as a songwriting tool and in their press release they're basically just jizzing all over themselves about how songwriters can use this in the songwriting process so you're sitting down your writing song you're recording into Reaper Ableton you've got Spotify's plagiarism algorithm listening to everything that you're doing and giving you what they call a similarity value back and not just for the whole song but for tiny individual melodic phrases a chorus right down to like three notes of a hook

do you mind i don't know dude people have used that before what basically what we're saying is we've created a platform that require that it emphasizes everything being similar to everything else and trains you to write songs like an algorithm but equally if you make something that's too similar then it sends a shock to your caller i'm just laughing i know i'm riffing off a joke you made on twitter dan but i'm loving the idea of like you know Spotify helpfully suggesting legal action for the Ramones to sue the Ramones because of their first album and their second album their third album all sounding the same we're detecting we're detecting a similar chord progression uh so basically what they're saying is hey um to protect us mainly

from uh legal liability you need to train our ai for free all of you and it was made by the guy who also has released a multi artist commercial album using ai yeah well no problems there it's a bit like when like google home like listens to your conversations or whatever it doesn't remember them it doesn't tell anyone what you said it just listens to them just because it likes listening if like google home this would be like if google home watched you doing your job and then tried to take your job from you yeah i mean he sounds like you're describing google home to me so what we're saying is you will come in to to record with your band one day and all of the other members of your band will be Spotify but wearing their faces that's right

what are you saying i am the same guy from before i am not a sweetish man i am not a swedish man who is also italian you know it's it's me your friend who isn't swedish isn't italian we've known each other for years i cannot stand aber or pedophilia here is a list of facts that only i would know yeah that's right you know again are they actually do i have any any reason other than my deep cynicism about um companies i think you've outlined a few yeah well it's what i think let's see it so four spotify is trying to create an ai song generator so we can stop paying artists entirely is um

that's their business that's the necessity of this platform entertainment business model two they're not profitable and desperately need profitability three they appear to have hired a guy who's mostly famous for doing that and four they're requiring everyone to use it to train this thing so i'm sure i'm sure it's not oh i'm sure it's fine um yeah it's gonna be great so um look i have a couple more things here and then we can uh we can we can a we can say that this episode is is wrapped and go back on our favorite moment because it's Spotify you know they do care they're giving back to artists oh good in 2020 good segment yeah in 2020 this in the year of like historic difficulties in making money as a position

basically what they are saying is hey we're going to give you back a little bit of money so they are partnered with 20 verified organizations around the world they've called it the music relief project after the very successful comic relief project i'm sure i assume offering financial relief to music community members who are the most in need um and they uh they they made donations to verified organizations of up to 10 million dollars um which is pretty cool they donated up to 10 million for market capitalization is uh what like 100 times that um some like enormous amount um and uh additionally they've said yeah they've also um uh uh introduced a feature in april where uh peep artists could um support themselves and by

you know raising money for their bands and crews and so on by partnering with cash app yeah and uh they have to get a payday loan on my negative royalties they enable fans to donate an additional million dollars that's like 11 million dollars hmm that's cool i mean sure surely well there's only a million artists in the world remember they've already clarified that so you just have to divide that by well a million so that's what is that 11 dollars for everyone that's 11 dollars for each artist it's lunch it's fucking hilarious because the month before they released that in march 2020 uh the u.s. government like mandated the mechanical royalty rates for streaming platforms uh we're going to increase under this new copyright legislation and

uh every streaming service except for apple just completely flipped out about it except for the fact that in that legislation uh there is a lower royalty rate uh in like built in for people who have bundled or discounted plans so that's like your spotify family plan whatever if you entered a fucking promo code when you when you get your spotify so any any of that they like that they like the idea of playing less royalty so what they did was that they retroactively applied that reduced royalty rate to the entire year while fighting the royalty increase in general in court which resulted in a lot of artists getting negative royalty statements for the first time in their lives you oh Spotify five dollars the fucking brutal were they actually were they

actually chasing you for that money or were they just saying we don't owe you any money technically you owe us money i i think it's technically you owe us money i don't see how they could possibly like prosecute that but like but yeah to go from march 2020 pulling that shit which which is still in court and then in april being like oh we're saving music it's just we're saving music by buying everyone like a slightly upscale sandwich probably it's just like lucille blue it's a sandwich what could it possibly cost 11 dollars and and also uh you know the hey they're um so they're they're giving back they're also giving a half a million dollars to uh ins to troubled venues around the country um troubled venues i could beckon keep them open for

literally thirds of days right so i think that's that's kind of my that's kind of my my sort of my journey through through Spotify then do you have any do you have any sort of um and anything else you want to say any final thoughts on um this the streaming revolution that has saved us all from piracy uh yeah i mean i i think okay i think pre-pandemic the music industry was a house of cards basically you know and and i think the pandemic has just accelerated what was going to be the inevitable monopolization of like huge huge chunks of this industry so with Spotify donating five hundred thousand dollars to venues like it's interesting to me

because you know mark geiger the the founder of lalapalooza co-founder of lalapalooza also around the same time um started this thing called uh uh i believe it's called save lives one word two caps cool yeah okay very cool and that is a uh initiative by endeavor music the William Morris endeavor music division so his plan you know and i think this speaks to this like large monopolization that's that's coming out of the pandemic is to give quote unquote relief to venues but that relief comes in the form of a 51 controlling interest for mark geiger you know so so he is essentially trying to create a monopolized chain of like at risk properties and venues uh sort of consolidate uh mid-level touring in north america to

just one giant system and it was really generous of tony soprano to bail out all of these venues i'm sure he's got no vested interest in any of this and none of this will come back to harm anyone i'm very excited to go see wolf parade at the geiger center the geiger bowl but geiger the geiger geiger tapping bowl i want to go and see wolf parade at davis katino's outdoor activity store i would love to play that we'll put on a great show there oh yeah in the tent you you can come out of the tent that he's in and the crowd can say don't try to fucking reminisce with me that's all right um yeah i think so i think if there's anything we've learned here as well right it's that um uh the the culture industry is one of the

you might say purest examples of um cap of just capital just giving everybody except itself a gigantic middle finger um in in terms of the provision of a product that might not necessarily be what you want and isn't what the people who want to be making it be want to be making but uh oh boy do the sio idiot scions of the executives of raytheon sure get to decide what everyone listens to anyway um so i think with all of that i want to say hey dan is there some kind of a patreon people can find you on uh there is um i have replaced all of my income streams with patreon because none of them exist anymore so uh i have a patreon uh it's called biblioteca it's basically the operators patreon so it's devilica and myself and uh we do two to three pieces

of music a month and then uh we've got a discord that we've been streaming streaming movies on and hanging out with patrons uh and honestly it's been it's been pretty fun it's been rewarding but it also completely saved our asses this year so yeah check it out uh thank you everyone for listening thank you dan again for being on it was great talking to you and uh we will see you all on the patreon on thursday or on the free episode next week later thanks for having me on everyone bye back for some young dirk van bier christmas time is coming christmas time is coming christmas time is coming sir holland oh yeah stand on the christmas home it's christmas time with your hannis fun stand on the christmas home go put on your christmas clock stand on the christmas stand on

the christmas home tonight oh yeah prasmas tricks and then hot too it's party time and we've made fondu kids are waiting for the bells to ring for strip waffles and caroling christmas time is coming christmas time is coming christmas time is coming sir holland oh yeah stand on the christmas home it's christmas time with your hannis fun stand on the christmas home go put on your christmas clock stand on the christmas stand on the christmas home tonight oh yeah and there's just one thing you gotta keep in mind it's a harmless christmas tradition it's a harmless christmas tradition it's a harmless christmas tradition it's supposed to be said from a chimney stand on the christmas home it's christmas time with your hannis fun stand on the christmas home

go put on your christmas clock stand on the christmas stand on the christmas home tonight oh yeah and the very very christmas dwell on you bring your hannis fun and the blockage