Spotify hits the US

[Duke Silver]

The iPad app is finally here! Looks pretty good so far.

[Smitty]

“Hey, Can You Spotify Me Some Cash?” – An Indie Artist’s Perspective


I feel the need as an artist who’s songs are on Spotify to clear some things up to the general music listening public. With technology advancing so rapidly I don’t think consumers have had the opportunity to educate themselves on how the whole “free music” thing is putting artist’s careers in danger. While free music is great for the consumer who is so over the whole “buying music” concept and the web traffic is great for the sites providing the content (who generally make their money off advertising) it’s not great for the livelihood of your favorite bands and songwriters. The truth is a Spotify royalty pays out about .004 cents per play to the average indie artist who releases and album through a site like Tunecore. There’s been a lot of debate over whether or not that royalty rate percentage is true so I thought I would share a screenshot of my own Spotify royalties from December 2011…

http://musicbybradleyjames.wordpress.co ... rspective/

[Duke Silver]

“Hey, Can You Spotify Me Some Cash?” – An Indie Artist’s Perspective


I feel the need as an artist who’s songs are on Spotify to clear some things up to the general music listening public. With technology advancing so rapidly I don’t think consumers have had the opportunity to educate themselves on how the whole “free music” thing is putting artist’s careers in danger. While free music is great for the consumer who is so over the whole “buying music” concept and the web traffic is great for the sites providing the content (who generally make their money off advertising) it’s not great for the livelihood of your favorite bands and songwriters. The truth is a Spotify royalty pays out about .004 cents per play to the average indie artist who releases and album through a site like Tunecore. There’s been a lot of debate over whether or not that royalty rate percentage is true so I thought I would share a screenshot of my own Spotify royalties from December 2011…

http://musicbybradleyjames.wordpress.co ... rspective/

Gut reaction:

-That is a truly pitiful royalty rate. Yikes.

-But, his label/distributor/publishing co/whoever are the ones who negotiated that rate with Spotify. Shouldn't his beef be with them? I don't think this is a "consumer education" issue as much as an artist education issue.

-I think Mr. James is misunderstanding how most people use Spotify. Those 4500 streams aren't necessarily 4500 lost CD/mp3 sales. More likely, they're a couple thousand people clicking a convenient link to check out his music when -- pre-Spotify -- they might not have had the time/inclination/cash to do so. In other words, the same people who would normally read a review and then sample your music on Myspace or Youtube. Back when I was in a band, we had a Myspace page that averaged around that same number of listens/month, and we never saw a penny from it. So there's a couple different ways to look at it.

-I've been using the paid version of Spotify for 3-4 months now. I haven't bought a single mp3 or CD since I started using it, but I've bought a shit ton of vinyl. I'd be interested in seeing the royalty rate on that.

[beantownbubba]

I'm not sure that's what James is saying, Duke. I don't think he's objecting to lost sales. I think he's objecting to the mindset that says that since spotify is legal (and artists/publishers/whomever allow their music to be played there) all must be well for the artists. I think he's telling music fans not to be so quick to pat themselves on the back just because it's "legal".

Given the economics of spotify (assuming James's case is typical), it's a gamble for the artist: current exposure in exchange for future sales, whether of music or concert tix or merch. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but the overall point is that "airplay" (i.e. streams or hits) does not equal financial success or even survival in the way that sales of singles or albums or radio airplay might have in the past; just because spotify is legal in a way that, say, napster wasn't doesn't mean that the artists are being treated "fairly" (whatever that may mean).

On the flipside, the cost of gaining the exposure of a spotify (or a myspace or whatever) is waaaay down given the DIY tools available so maybe a lot of waiters/teachers/bartenders/salesmen/students will have MORE flexibility to take a shot w/out spending 300 days/yr in a broken down van.

Verdict: The music business is in a great state of flux and nobody knows how it's gonna turn out. In the meantime, the old model has broken down, no new model has shown itself to be sustainable and those trying to make a living making music are caught in the middle.

[olwiggum]

It's better to make 20 bucks for some online spins than nothing from a person that went downloaded it from a torrent. Wonder what he thinks about that...

[tinnitus photography]

I see some parallels here between indie musicians and concert photographers such as myself (ie, ones that aren't doing this for a living, shooting for large papers/magazines or wire services). The power in the negotiation is with Spotify, not the artist or his/her record label. A similar tactic is rapidly gaining ground for photography releases from major artists (and in some cases, lesser artists like Band of Horses and Japandroids)...in the most heinous cases, the photographer is asked to surrender copyright of the photos at no compensation, leaving the band or band's management to use the images in whatever fashion they choose, without paying a wooden nickel. A bit less greedy but still restrictive are agreements that limit the photographer to use of the photos solely for the approved media outlet, as a one-time use.

On the surface this doesn't look so bad (and I've signed these myself), but the band is getting free publicity from coverage of the event, and the photographer is prohibited from any future usage/sales of these images, either for syndication to a different media outlet, or a future book, etc. The band knows they have the upper hand in most instances, and will force the smaller folk to agree to these terms. Shooters for larger publications won't be subject to them. I see this as a direct parallel to the Spotify / rate argument above. If you are Joe Schmoe, your bargaining power is limited to a 'take it or leave it' approach.

[Duke Silver]

I'm not sure that's what James is saying, Duke. I don't think he's objecting to lost sales. I think he's objecting to the mindset that says that since spotify is legal (and artists/publishers/whomever allow their music to be played there) all must be well for the artists. I think he's telling music fans not to be so quick to pat themselves on the back just because it's "legal".

Given the economics of spotify (assuming James's case is typical), it's a gamble for the artist: current exposure in exchange for future sales, whether of music or concert tix or merch. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but the overall point is that "airplay" (i.e. streams or hits) does not equal financial success or even survival in the way that sales of singles or albums or radio airplay might have in the past; just because spotify is legal in a way that, say, napster wasn't doesn't mean that the artists are being treated "fairly" (whatever that may mean).

On the flipside, the cost of gaining the exposure of a spotify (or a myspace or whatever) is waaaay down given the DIY tools available so maybe a lot of waiters/teachers/bartenders/salesmen/students will have MORE flexibility to take a shot w/out spending 300 days/yr in a broken down van.

Verdict: The music business is in a great state of flux and nobody knows how it's gonna turn out. In the meantime, the old model has broken down, no new model has shown itself to be sustainable and those trying to make a living making music are caught in the middle.

Then I guess I don't really understand his point. At this point in time, arguing against the unfairness of the current music industry seems to me like arguing against the internet itself. That cat is long out of the bag. Pandora's box has been opened since Napster went online. There just aren't enough people willing to pay for music anymore to pay a living wage to every single dude with an acoustic guitar, an independent album, and a 1,000 person fan base. And like you say, one of the benefits of the current model is that it allows him to get his music on the virtual shelves right alongside much more successful acts in his genre. Hopefully, as more and more people convert to the streaming model, the royalty rate will go up. But that's for the artists, labels, and music services to sort out, not me.

I don't know who this guy is, but his attitude of "the only real fans are the ones who consume my music the way I tell them to" rubs me the wrong way. Seems to me like he's guilty of the same entitled mindset that led to the "music should be free" revolution in the first place.

(kinda rushed this post, sorry if it doesn't make sense...gotta go to a meeting)

[Clams]

Fyi, with some limitations, as of today you can stream spotify for free from your smartphone or tablet.I'm playing the dbt channel, which I think is dbt and related artists, and it's pretty awesome. Yes I know spotify rips the artists off, but TVZ is singing For the Sake of the Song and it's pretty damn awesome.

[grapico]

After listening to some artists over the last few months..Spotify isn't a ripoff for some bands. It's about how you set your deal up.

[linkous]

I've had Spotify Unlimited (£9.99 per month in UK) for about 2 years now and I love it. I have my hifi hooked up to my laptop so its almost like listening to a CD when I play back songs, the sound quality is really terrific hearing music pumping through my floorstander speakers!
Its a great way of listening to albums before deciding if you want to buy, and I do buy lots of albums (that I would never have bought otherwise)after trialling them first on Spotify, so even if an artist only makes chickenfeed from my subscription they do benefit in the long run from people like myself.
Plus my 2 kids share my subscription and use it constantly, so that saves me a fortune on Itunes fees!

[Tequila Cowboy]

After listening to some artists over the last few months..Spotify isn't a ripoff for some bands. It's about how you set your deal up.

I'm curious about this. I didn't realize the artists had any say in the matter and that it was strictly up to the label.

[grapico]

After listening to some artists over the last few months..Spotify isn't a ripoff for some bands. It's about how you set your deal up.

I'm curious about this. I didn't realize the artists had any say in the matter and that it was strictly up to the label.

Yep. Didn't realize it either. There are a lot of artists and labels that make "good" money off of it.

[tinnitus photography]

After listening to some artists over the last few months..Spotify isn't a ripoff for some bands. It's about how you set your deal up.

I'm curious about this. I didn't realize the artists had any say in the matter and that it was strictly up to the label.

Yep. Didn't realize it either. There are a lot of artists and labels that make "good" money off of it.

links?

[grapico]

links?

No links. Conversation I had with a friend who owns a record label that Tequila Cowboy also knows. Got no dog in the fight and don't care if you don't believe me. Also, not everything you read on the internet is always true.

[cortez the killer]

Convincing.

[Mike127]

This is a really great op-ed from the owner of Thirty Tigers (Jason's current label) posted over the summer. The crux is that for all the hype you hear about Spotify, their market share in the US is still very low. If they ever get to the saturation point they have in Sweden, the payout picture is going to start to look a lot different. Another key point the Spotify naysayers miss is that a CD sale is a one time transaction and the artist doesn't make any additional money whether that fan plays the CD once or 10,000 times. Whereas with Spotify, every time you listen, it is an additional payment to the artist.

http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/5 ... cies-op-ed

I can say as a recent convert to the Truckers, I don't think I would have gotten as deeply into them as quickly as I did (if at all) if it wasn't for Spotify.

[tinnitus photography]

links?

No links. Conversation I had with a friend who owns a record label that Tequila Cowboy also knows. Got no dog in the fight and don't care if you don't believe me. Also, not everything you read on the internet is always true.

damn.



i seriously need to re-evaluate my thinking on virtually everything now.

[Tequila Cowboy]

This is a really great op-ed from the owner of Thirty Tigers (Jason's current label) posted over the summer. The crux is that for all the hype you hear about Spotify, their market share in the US is still very low. If they ever get to the saturation point they have in Sweden, the payout picture is going to start to look a lot different. Another key point the Spotify naysayers miss is that a CD sale is a one time transaction and the artist doesn't make any additional money whether that fan plays the CD once or 10,000 times. Whereas with Spotify, every time you listen, it is an additional payment to the artist.

http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/5 ... cies-op-ed

I can say as a recent convert to the Truckers, I don't think I would have gotten as deeply into them as quickly as I did (if at all) if it wasn't for Spotify.

Very enlightening read but I have to say that I do find it odd in light of this that one of the biggest critics of Spotify is Jason Isbell who Thirty Tigers represents. Bottom line is that I think the jury is still out on Spotify and streaming services, but the reality is that they aren't going away anytime soon. I pay for Spotify premium and will continue to do so but I also spend about $1.5 K in music purchases outside of that annually. I'm statistically an outlier though, not many folks buy downloads, vinyl and pay for streaming. I just want artists to get paid and I'll do whatever I can to make that happen.

[grapico]

links?

No links. Conversation I had with a friend who owns a record label that Tequila Cowboy also knows. Got no dog in the fight and don't care if you don't believe me. Also, not everything you read on the internet is always true.

damn.



i seriously need to re-evaluate my thinking on virtually everything now.

There was sarcasm in that last sentence. I thought that would be obvious.

[tinnitus photography]

And here I thought that the entire post was saturated in it!

[grapico]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304020704579276123352482930

Dollar-and-Cents Secrets of Music Streaming

In the good old days of the CD boom, the music industry was all about the first week. Prime the pump with endless airplay on pop radio and MTV, blanket major markets with billboard ads and buy acres of promotional space in big record stores, with a crescendo toward the release date.

Even as digital downloads have started to supplant CD sales, a strong debut remains critical, particularly for the big stars. Witness Beyoncé's recent coup selling more than 1 million copies of her latest album during its first week in Apple Inc. AAPL -0.68% 's iTunes Store—using strong online buzz in place of normal promotion.

But as the industry starts to embrace digital services that let fans rent access to vast libraries of songs for a flat monthly fee, major labels may need to adjust their approach to marketing music, and perhaps to which artists they sign.

Spotify AB, Pandora Media Inc. P -3.62% and a host of less-known competitors pay record labels and artists every time a user listens to one of their songs.

So instead of trying to sell a $15 CD at Tower Records, or even a 99-cent download on iTunes, labels need to get fans listening to a given song or album for years to come.

Spotify set off a flurry of back-of-the-envelope math when it recently disclosed on its website that its average payments amount to tiny fractions of a cent per song.

Some pundits quickly concluded that a Spotify user could never listen to a song or album often enough to generate the same revenue that a download sale would.

But that missed the point.

Data reviewed by The Wall Street Journal showed that one major record company makes more per year, on average, from paying customers of streaming services like Spotify or Rdio than it does from the average customer who buys downloads, CDs or both.

The average "premium" subscription customer in the U.S. was worth about $16 a year to this company, while the average buyer of digital downloads or physical music was worth about $14.

Other data from the same company showed that in the long run, even many individual albums eventually make more money from streaming services than they do from downloads.

Underscore that phrase, in the long run.

The acts were identified in the data only with generic descriptors. When they first hit the market, all the acts' albums made more money from download or physical sales than from streaming.

It took 34 months for an album by an "indie rock/pop group" to make more money from streaming than from sales. An album by one "modern male R&B rapper" reached that juncture after just four months.

In both cases download revenue flattened as sales flagged, while streaming revenue continued to climb as people kept listening to the music.

Notably, pop acts, which tend to rely on heavy marketing, were the least likely to see the revenue from streaming services exceed sales revenue. That is because online listening—and therefore revenue—tended to level off for those types of acts at about the same rate as their sales.

In Sweden, where streaming subscription has overtaken downloading as the most popular method of acquiring music, the difference is more pronounced.

An average premium subscriber there is worth about $17.75 to the company, versus less than $4 for the handful of people who still buy music.

The lesson for record companies and artists appears to be: making disposable hits may once have been a viable business, but new technology could demand tunes built to last.

—Ethan Smith is The Wall Street Journal's bureau chief in Los Angeles. The Upshot is a business column by bureau chiefs around the globe that offers timely analysis of the industries they cover.

[beantownbubba]

The lesson for record companies and artists appears to be: making disposable hits may once have been a viable business, but new technology could demand tunes built to last.

If true, this is astonishing - it turns the industry on its head. I agree that this is what the lesson "appears to be" based solely on the information provided, but I'm not quite ready to believe based just on this one article.

But even accepting the article's conclusion and everything in it as true, it's not clear to me that this is good for artists, even the quality, long-term ones we tend to follow here. If an entire label makes $16 off of a typical individual, how much does an individual artist make? Obviously it depends on how many artists, and how many popular artists, the label has, but even if the number is low, that's still a pretty small number per artist. And more importantly, neither label nor artist benefits from frequent listeners/buyers/fanatics: Every listener who pays at all pays the same amount for the service, so the real fans are getting the bargain there at the expense of the artists (and labels but who gives a fuck?). This is especially damaging for niche artists: In the world before digital, a good number could survive because fans bought every album. Now those fans can listen to every album, every hidden track, every ep, etc and the amount payable to the artist will barely change. In fact, the more music those fans listens to, the less each artist they listens to will receive, assuming those fans listen to more than 1 or 2 artists. The "model" still needs plenty of work.

OTOH, if artists really did get paid for the quality of their work (defining quality for this purpose as the music is listened to more as time goes by, or at least is listened to a whole lot for a long time by those who care*) that would truly be a watershed event and greatly benefit the artists we care most about. It would also be a reversal of a couple of hundred years of evolution of pop culture, so i wouldn't bet the farm on it quite yet. Tangentially, it would also mean that the role of record labels would change completely and a lot of people would be out of work (and an equal number of people like us would suddenly find themselves in demand): Instead of marketing to the lowest common denominator, or looked at most charitably, instead of constantly looking for the next big thing, success would be determined by the labels' ability to identify and nurture serious talent.

*Or as a college professor of mine used to say ad nauseum, "literature is news that stays new."

[tinnitus photography]

Let's talk about Spotify...

i have been an ardent consumer/user/proponent of it for a long time now; it's really easy to preview artists you've never heard of, create playlists to share amongst friends and stream wherever you are.

the downsides re: artist compensation have been clear for a while now, and i guess it's been a balance of marketing/revenue for a lot of people. (plus, the interface/search/etc really sucks for such a high profile app)


but w/ Ek's recent heavy investment into AI used for warfare, i think it's time to re-think what us as Spotify users are really supporting.
https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2021/11 ... rfare.html


also, i found this quote from a Forbes article highly ironic.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that Daniel saved the music industry.”

—Sean Parker, cofounder of Napster

fuck Ek. might be time to check out Tidal
https://tidal.com/pricing

[tinnitus photography]

bandcamp is kind of the gold standard for music streaming but is obv limited in scope and flexibility re: making playlists etc.

[Clams]

You can't put the genie back in the bottle. For better or worse, Spotify and others like it are here to stay. I use it and love it. Not sure what the answers are from an equity standpoint, but I don't think the streaming model is going anywhere any time soon.

[beantownbubba]

You can't put the genie back in the bottle. For better or worse, Spotify and others like it are here to stay. I use it and love it. Not sure what the answers are from an equity standpoint, but I don't think the streaming model is going anywhere any time soon.

Or, put another way, what is our responsibility, individually and collectively, to the musicians who give* us so much?

*Multiple meanings intended.

[schlanky]

Or, put another way, what is our responsibility, individually and collectively, to the musicians who give* us so much?

*Multiple meanings intended.

If I find an album that I really like on Spotify, I buy the album because I'm old school and like having physical copies.

For a whole lot of music I already own, I tend to just pull it up on Spotify since I don't have a lot of music loaded on my phone yet. DBT was second in my most-played Spotify band list for this year. I own every album, and have most on both vinyl and CD, so the tiny royalty of my DBT listening is bonus cash.

I have some Spotify playlists I've added to over time that do include a lot of music I don't own, but it's stuff I never would have bought (or likely even heard if not for Spotify). In this case, it's single songs as opposed to full albums. I've bought some single songs here and there that I liked enough to want to have on my iPod that I still use in the car.

Spotify has saved me from mistake purchases where in the past I may have bought a full album based of hearing just a song or two, then later figured out those were the only good songs on the album. I don't have any guilt over being saved from those mistake purchases.

Yeah, I do think it's crappy for people to just listen to an album over and over again on Spotify and never buy it. WesdaRuler had something on his Instagram months back about how many people are playing his album, but ain't nobody buying. Definitely a valid gripe. But in my case, I've already bought his stuff that I'm streaming.

--
ETA: This post was made before reading tinnitus's post. Yeah, those are some concerns.

[beantownbubba]

Spotify has saved me from mistake purchases where in the past I may have bought a full album based of hearing just a song or two, then later figured out those were the only good songs on the album. I don't have any guilt over being saved from those mistake purchases.

I think this is the fundamental problem w/ the old model and I share your feelings about it; being able to listen before buying is a huge plus for those of us who buy any significant amount of music and/or are curious about a whole lot o f music. In the way of capitalism and entrepreneurship, the recording industry created great incentives/demand for somebody to fix this problem and somebody did. Score that fans 1, suits 0. BTW, some might argue that the "hit(s) plus filler" model of album making was the fundamental problem, and it was a real one but to me it's secondary and in any case overlaps considerably with the "blind buying" problem.

On the whole I share your views, schlanky but I suspect we are a small and shrinking minority. I, too, have moved to listening to a lot of music I own on spotify in order to help generate royalties and while the sound is inferior to what I can hear on "the good stereo" the fact is I'm lazy and the good stereo is downstairs while I spend much more time upstairs.

But big picture, spotify is a fundamentally flawed model because it cheats artists big time which tells me that (i) it is very unfair in ways that raise or should raise moral/ethical questions for users of the platform and (ii) ultimately it will be replaced by something else, perhaps including silence if being a musician is no longer a viable proposition for enough people that the entire "music ecosystem" (no pun intended) collapses or morphs into something very different.

Just for yucks, anybody have any idea about what spotify would have to charge to generate enough revenue to fairly pay artists (leaving aside for the moment the question of the way in which spotify splits revenue between itself/its shareholders and musicians)? "Fairly" is of course a rather subjective standard, but just assume whatever works for you.

[tinnitus photography]

this is a good read from Fast Company:

"How Bandcamp makes more money than Spotify"
What the vinyl renaissance says about delivering true value—and not just in the music business.

In the mid-2000s, amid declining revenues from slumping CD sales, the music industry was offered two possible futures. The first was created in 2006 by Daniel Ek, whose new product, Spotify, streamed music from the cloud instantly, as if the music had already been downloaded directly on your device. Users could pay a subscription price—today it’s $10.99—and listen to as much music as they wanted.

The second came courtesy of Radiohead with the release of its album, In Rainbows, in 2007. Listeners could pay what they felt was a reasonable amount (the average was $5) to download the album, or they could purchase the physical album as a richly designed disc box including an LP, a bonus CD, and an art book—for $80. Ethan Diamond, an entrepreneur who had created an email platform called Oddpost that got absorbed into Yahoo Mail, turned this model into Bandcamp in 2008, a platform where artists would set their own prices and offer a variety of digital and physical goods, and the company would take a 10% to 15% cut of the sales.

Today, one of these companies commands a market cap of more than $26 billion and its app is probably on your phone right now. The other, despite becoming the world’s largest seller of independent music, may evoke little more than vague familiarity. But within this discrepancy lies a paradox: Bandcamp, as comparatively threadbare as it may seem, with about $20 million in net revenue in 2022, is almost certainly profitable—based on the fact that the company has stayed lean and taken on no new funding since 2010. (Bandcamp, which was acquired by Epic Games last year, is now being sold to Songtradr). Spotify, a platform with a mind-bendingly complex bricolage of machine-learning algorithms wrapped in a state-of-the-art UX, has been in the red for 14 of the past 19 quarters since it went public in 2018, and it has not posted a positive quarter since September 2021.

In the recent, yet now bygone, days of low-interest rates and growth obsession, Spotify’s lack of profitability was less concerning to the company—fashionable, even. But in an economic environment that’s led recently to bank runs and mass layoffs across the tech industry, it’s worth pondering what success really looks like.

For the past three years, as the founder of a research project called Components, I’ve analyzed tens of millions of Bandcamp’s sales, user profiles, and albums and tracks, and I have come to view the differences between these companies in two distinct ways.

The first is a fundamental asymmetry in the way people spend on each platform. While Spotify’s customers are capped at paying a maximum of $10.99 per month, the spending of any given Bandcamp customer is theoretically limitless—and affected by nearly endless variables. For example, one of my earlier analyses of the platform found that customers voluntarily paid more money to musicians from their own countries, as well as to those whose releases were associated with charitable causes. Some customers buy one track a year, while others spend thousands of dollars. Jazz listeners are more likely to buy CDs, techno DJs are more likely to buy individual digital tracks, and so on.

Bandcamp bakes heterogeneity into its platform in a way that Spotify’s one-size-fits-all service erases. So while Spotify has created a technically complex platform for simple transactions, Bandcamp has created a technically simple platform for complex transactions.


[Illustration: Rafael Garcia]
The result is that Bandcamp is able to reap the benefits of what’s known as fat-tailed distributions, in which a minority of individuals comprise the majority of sales—the same logic followed by venture capital firms, whose bets on one or two unicorns make up for all the other portfolio companies that go bust. As I found in a recent analysis, about 20% of Bandcamp customers account for 80% of the site’s total revenues. And within this 20%, the sale of physical goods becomes increasingly important. More than half the objects that the very top spenders buy on the site are physical. And among those objects, vinyl records are more popular than all others (including CDs, tapes, and miscellaneous merch) combined.

On average, artists who sell the most physical stuff make the most money on the platform, and among the different kinds of physical stuff they sell, the association is strongest with vinyl. Among the highest-selling artists on the platform, 30% of all the items sold (including all nonmusical merch, like T-shirts) are vinyl records. Among the lowest-selling artists, vinyl was roughly 5%. Downloadable albums and tracks move in the opposite direction, with top-selling artists moving fewer digital goods as they move up in the sales rankings.


Why does vinyl reveal itself as such a disproportionately important channel of spending? The music business at large has suddenly found itself asking the same question. In 2022, LPs and EPs brought in $1.2 billion in revenue, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, the most in
inflation-adjusted dollars since 1988, and double the 2019 amount. High-profile artists, including Taylor Swift and Harry Styles, have made the format central to their sales, with Swift selling nearly 1 million LPs of her album Midnights in 2022, and Styles selling about half a million of Harry’s
House. By the end of last year, a format the mainstream once deemed moribund to all but crate-digging aficionados accounted for nearly 8% of money made in recorded music, a figure that has been growing.

Many of the explanations commonly offered for vinyl’s resurgence seem unsatisfactory upon closer scrutiny. Framing the trend as merely a retro craze raises the question of why we haven’t seen a similar spike in 8-tracks and cassettes. Focusing on the collectibility and scarcity of vinyl doesn’t solve the equation either: Both qualities were primary features of NFTs, and we watched the NFT market bottom out the same year that vinyl sales hit their multi-decade record.

The most persuasive explanation often cited by vinyl’s advocates is that it’s “tactile.” In using the word, buyers indicate something profoundly important about vinyl’s rise and point to the second reason for Bandcamp’s success and Spotify’s struggles: the value of experience.


The media theorist Marshall McLuhan defined tactility in the 1960s as more than mere physical touch, framing it as “that very interplay of the senses, which we call synesthesia”—the way we see and hear a bird chirp at the same time, or the multisensory operation of driving a car. (To McLuhan, the revolution in electronic media, including television, was largely owed to its ability to convey the sense of existing in an active, multisensory environment by proxy.)

When fans call a vinyl record “tactile,” they are implying that streaming is not—or at least it’s less so. While vinyl, with its album art, liner notes, and ritual of being played on a turntable, commands all the senses, Spotify has mostly presented streaming as an ears-only, always-on channel designed to be played in the background from the moment a user wakes up to when they go to bed. While the former presents recorded music in an active, multisensory form, Spotify’s is passive and unisensory.

Why does this matter? Because the tactile space is the one where all the stuff we assign irreducible value to—from attending live concerts to sex to playing basketball—resides. And all those examples have what the philosopher John Dewey, one of McLuhan’s most important forebears, referred to as “aesthetic” properties—they are marked by a beginning and an end, cohere into a unifying whole, and reach a consummating moment. The tactile space is where we find meaning, fun, and pleasure regardless of economic conditions. And understanding this is crucial in order to apply the lessons learned from vinyl’s rise to additional parts of the music business (e.g., countries without a strong vinyl tradition and genres that don’t work well with the format) and other industries altogether.

Paying $20 for an Imax ticket to Oppenheimer, for example, makes intuitive sense in a way that the same amount paid for a onetime stream on Disney+ wouldn’t. Imax is having a strong year thus far, with revenue up 38% year over year for the first half of 2023. Disney+, meanwhile, has been losing subscribers. The company recently announced that it would be investing $60 billion in more tangible elements of its business, such as theme parks and cruises. Within the tech industry, game studios, which offer users a tactile, finite experience, have made money while startups selling productivity apps—designed to suspend a user in a never-ending state of performative busyness, and wildly plentiful 10 years ago—have all but dried up.

Fifteen years of low interest rates allowed Silicon Valley to offer consumers relatively little tactile pleasure. Venture capitalists had enough “easy money” to subsidize companies—like Spotify—built on illogical microeconomics that created products people used because they were free or nearly so, not because they were loved. (Reports of childlike joy emerging from 3D virtual world Decentraland have so far been scant.) Some of these VC-backed companies may survive the downturn because they’ve got leftover cash reserves or funding from a fresh hype. Others might consider embracing a new understanding of economics—and who their customers really are.

[beantownbubba]

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