When you work in music for long enough, you begin to see the same conversations surface, the same arguments made by different people. They might be worded slightly differently and may come from a somewhat different perspective, but the crooks of them are the same. You would think that more voices talking about the same subject is a good thing, but in recent years, we have been subjected to a bed of nails effect, one that sees us as empathetic towards problems but apathetic toward doing anything about them. One of the most talked-about things in modern music, and subsequently, one of the biggest victims of this apathy revolution is the death of the record store.
We know that streaming services don’t pay artists fairly, and we have known this for years now. It’s something that artists have spoken about on multiple occasions. In 2023, during his video for Spotify Wrapped, Weird Al Yankovic took aim at the streaming site and the amount it pays. “It’s my understanding that I had over 80 million streams on Spotify this year,” he said, “So if I’m doing the math right, that means I earned… $12.” …read more >
