Farmelo knows from firsthand experience it takes time and money to make great records. As the return on investment dwindles, budgets and frequency of releases has to go down. Farmelo makes records for a living and he's acutely aware that budgets for studio time are still shrinking, even for established bands like Grizzly Bear. And when the band breaks up after a 10-year run it'll have three or four titles in its catalog.
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Before Napster most bands released an album a year some learned how to make better records from making them so often, but now the frequency is down to one album every three or more years.
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Sure, paying for recorded music is a purely voluntary act - you can hear almost everything for free - but most bands aren't producing anywhere near as much music as bands did through most of the 1990s. I would add that unless things change, the fans who rarely purchase recorded music will be the biggest losers in the end. It's as simple as that, and he's concerned that Spotify and other streaming services are cheating musicians out of income. But regardless, this doesn't make the deals the labels and Spotify are cutting somehow fair to artists."įarmelo thinks that if you value music you should buy it. Some rely heavily on record sales, some don't. Each artist has some ratio of income from live show tickets, record sales, merch, and licensing. Spotify is a closed system that discourages music purchases.įarmelo addresses the old "record sales were never a huge part of artists' income" argument this way: "Aside from being a dubious claim at best, any income is income and can make a difference. Music lovers don't need Spotify to check out a band's music before they buy it, pretty much everything can be sampled on iTunes or Amazon. Putting your band's music on Spotify doesn't automatically translate into exposure you're just one of millions of bands, and Farmelo claims that no band has ever busted through from Spotify plays. If your band has 40,000 YouTube views, that means something a Spotify royalty check for $13.16 won't have the same impact. Some say Spotify can be a powerful promotional tool for unsigned bands, but Farmelo claims that since Spotify doesn't release tracking numbers, bands can't show them to a club owner or record label, like they can with YouTube plays.
The fees appear to be minuscule it's rumored to be a tiny fraction of a penny per play. Granted, Spotify pays artists and record companies fees, but the exact rates are impossible to pin down. Spotify doesn't link to any sites where you can buy music it's a closed system. Only this time your collection is vast: millions of tracks and counting." Spotify users never need to buy physical albums or legal downloads of their favorite music, and that's the problem. Here's a quote from its Web site, "Think of Spotify as your new music collection. Spotify's approach is the exact opposite.
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Farmelo thinks the iTunes store is probably the best update of the old record store model, precisely because the record companies and musicians get a healthy percentage of the profit from the sale. Napster and other file-sharing sites started chipping away at that model in the mid-1990s, and created a generation of "consumers" who grew up with free music. I'm old enough to remember when record companies were freaking out about kids making cassette copies of albums, but producer and engineer Allen Farmelo doesn't think home taping really took all that much away from LP and CD sales, because 30 years ago there were masses of music buyers who wanted music with the best possible sound quality, and were willing to pay for it. Those records are, if anything, more valuable to me now then they were then. Is $10, or the price of a few Starbucks lattes, really too much to pay for an album? Is $10 really too much to support musicians well enough they'll want to record more music? I still play LPs I bought when I was a teenager, and I can't think of anything else I still use from that part of my life.
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