OK, that may have come off a little harsh, but the more you look, the worse it is. I’ve been a musician my whole life, professional for the past 10 or so years, and most of my friends have no idea how screwed we all are (yes, some of them are celebrities). They just accept the status quo and move on.

This week everyone was posting their Spotify stats on social media, and while I worked with several artists who had very good “numbers” and am proud of the engagement that all of us have gotten, I’m baffled by the amount of artists and music lovers alike who don’t know and don’t care what has happened to the music “industry.” I get it — it’s a complicated subject, and there are many people who take a stab at trying to explain it every day. We are all trying, and maybe some of us make progress.

Personally, I like to explain things in terms of metaphors. Metaphors can help people to grasp the absurdity of a situation like the streaming economy (e-comedy)? Anyway, thanks for being here.

Here’s a metaphor. Let’s pretend that all the stores that sell clothing told the designers they would no longer be able to sell their clothing in stores. The clothing would be available for free, and those who wanted to pay a flat fee to “subscribe” to get fresh, new, creative clothing would pay a fee. Anyway, the stores told the designers that they could make money selling tickets to their fashion shows, and that was it. The designers said, “OK! Sounds great!” All was well in the world.

That’s almost like what we’ve done in the music industry. I see people walking around with $300 headphones, with state of the art bluetooth ear buds and speakers and all sorts of other devices they can’t wait to get their hands on (or hands off!), but when it comes to what comes out of those devices, the music itself — they want that for free. What this tells me is the entire music industry is completely upside down. People are making money in all sorts of arenas related to the music industry, except for on the music itself.

Now I know there are going to be some people who are upset that I said that. There are billions of dollars being made due to streaming, and although Spotify and other streaming services continue to not make a profit and hand a large portion of their gains to record labels (who own pieces of the streaming services), there is no denying that there are many artists that have been discovered via streaming that otherwise wouldn’t have been. I’m very happy about that. The engagement is great. It’s the economics, the value placed on the music, that is the issue.

I’ve said in other writings that there is no free version of Netflix. The reason Netflix was able to become one of the most valuable internet companies of the last decade was because they (along with the entire film and TV industry) didn’t allow the early piracy of Napster and other platforms to scare them into making their product free. The music industry did do that, however, which has led to some very shocking events.

Here’s an unfortunate one: When iTunes ends downloads (see: purchases) in 2019, there will literally not be a music store anymore. There just won’t be. There will not be a centralized place for you to get any artists’ music. You can find it on their personal website or some other place, but things will change. There are debates on when iTunes will officially do this, but there’s no doubt it’s coming. For the past two years I’ve seen that iTunes links now open in Apple Music, meaning you can’t even link to the iTunes store anymore if you want to. People will just start playing your songs on Apple Music (who knows how they got there?!) and they’ll text you and say, “I wanted to buy it but it just started playing.” These are painful words to hear as an artist.

As I was saying, there are people (real artists, not just corporations) making money in music, but it’s not off of music. If you’re an artist and you want to make a middle class or higher than middle class living, you’re going to have to tour a lot. Touring is awesome, but to me it doesn’t count as the music industry anymore, not in the way that it used to. With the way things are these days, a musician is now making money in the “live events” sector, which means musicians are competing with people want to see basketball games and all sorts of other entertainment. It’s not really the music industry.

I have friends who ask about getting music on TV shows and doing other deals like that. Well, those can happen, but because streaming has driven the price of music down to zero, a lot of TV shows demand that they get your music for free, too, even if it’s aired on national television. I’ve heard of people being asked to put songs on the biggest shows on TV for free. The magical word is “exposure.” If you’re not willing to “expose” yourself to their audience, there are another 100 artists out there who are. They’ll just find one who will say yes.

Furthermore, there’s been a meme going around that uses the Spotify stat badge that artists like me get emailed after our plays for the year have been compiled. Instead of Spotify, it says, “Suckers.” Now it’s important to know that I’m not pointing the finger at any one person or streaming service. This is an industry-wide issue (crisis?), but it’s important to see just how f****d streaming really is. So here you go:

As the meme explains, if you want to make minimum wage, you need to get more than 1M plays. But that’s not even correct, because for 1M plays you’d probably make about $4,000. That’s not enough to live on for a year in America. Minimum wage, calculated generously at $15 per hour (which is what it should be!), at 40 hours per week makes you $2,400 per month. But you only get that $4,000 from Spotify if you’re not splitting the money between producers, co-writers or other members of your group. Artists make somewhere between .004 and .008 cents per stream, which means you get something like 1 or 2 cents per every 250 streams. We don’t know what the official rate is. That’s another conversation, but the ambiguity leads to some even more shocking numbers.

If you get 1M streams on Spotify and you do make $4,000, after it’s split up amongst collaborators and maybe a label and whoever else, you could end up with almost nothing, which a lot of artists do. Even the big ones. But it actually gets worse. Digital Music News reported this in September of 2018: “Songs streamed on the company’s ad-supported tier this year earned $0.00014123 in mechanicals per play. So, an artist would earn $100 in mechanical royalties after 703,581 streams.” Yep. Told you. Worse than you thought.

Here’s another headline: Fame does not pay the bills! Until we as a society figure out how to honor the sacrifice, work, creativity and experience of making music, this will not change. There are many potential ways to make a living or a piece of a living as a musician, however selling your music should not be off the table.

I’ve been excited about blockchain-based solutions to these issues. Resonate, Mycelia and RChain (three companies I’ve worked with) and others have made great progress educating people and coming up with solutions. But due to the recent crypto downturn which we all hope is temporary, these projects alone are not going to be able to save us now or in the future. We as the public must care about how we treat our friends, our colleagues and ourselves. Through a shift in public consciousness, these solutions will be welcomed.

It’s astonishing to me to realize how many avid music lovers and music makers just don’t want to get into any of this, and I understand why. It’s a big industry with a lot of history and a lot of power. The facts are difficult to get to the bottom of, but we could say that about the government, about climate change, about any facet of human life. Are we just going to sit around and allow ourselves to get ripped off? Forever? As Make Weird Music’s guest Sara Groves recently stated, “What happens on album release day? Oh, that’s the day your album is free!”

I for one am not willing to accept that. I know that we are in an evolutionary phase on planet Earth, with regard to many issues, but I believe that if artists can educate their audiences and make them understand how wrong it is to get paid $100 for 700K streams when their fans are paying $300 for new headphones every other year, that we can make some progress and build something new.

Music is the greatest self-organizing, healing, divide-conquering magical gift that humans have possibly ever invented (or come across, depending on your view about that). It’s important that we honor it, that we honor the people who make it, and that we reward creativity for the societal medicine it is. There’s no reason to force artists to starve because some corporation wants to get a bigger chunk of their revenue. 2018 has seen an increase of wealth going to the top, and our industry is part of that trend. I hope that if music has touched you in your life that you’ll be willing to take a stand and agree that musicians deserve to be able to make a living. See you in 2019.