The Radiohead Problem

I'm spurred to write after a conversation with an old friend. His daughter is entranced with the work of Jane Siberry and has actually contacted her over Facebook. Turns out Jane Siberry has gone the route of offering her music up online in a “pay what you want” model, and my friend said his faith in humanity was renewed seeing people pay more than their share for her music, even after she'd been out of the spotlight for a while. Admittedly, Siberry's music has gotten more abstract and experimental since her days of Top 40 hits with “Mimi on the Beach” and “One More Colour”, seeing her branching out into classical and spoken word pieces. It's nice to see her work still being appreciated, especially given her more experimental track lately.

That got me thinking about the model of selling of music in today's environment, and of copyrights in a digital age. I don't tend to think about how music is sold or distributed online much outside my job, since I have a more old-school ideal when I buy music, preferring a physical CD over anything else. I realize I'm a bit of a relic in today's age, with teenagers and 20-somethings (even 30-somethings) entirely consuming their music digitally, online or downloaded into their computers or phones. Heck, I'm probably out of date even with my iPod now. How does the digital model work for a musician in today's music business?

Jane Siberry's approach is what's been come to be known as “the Radiohead model”. Though Radiohead weren't the first musical artists to try a “pay what you want” model, they were the first high profile act to try it. With their album In Rainbows, released digitally in October 2007, actually made the band more money than a physical release would have. They released the album in the intent to challenge the singles-oriented style of commercial radio and allow all their fans to experience the music at the same time, and prevent a leak of the material before a physical version could be sold. This resulted in less actual album sales at the time of release and more money coming into the band. Interestingly, the album hit #1 in sales in the UK and US once it was available for sale physically, after two months of the music being available, their fans bought the album anyway. Radiohead has continued this model up til current day, with their latest album, A Moon Shaped Pool, released digitally first.

With Radiohead, they have the privilege of being a critically acclaimed band with a devoted fan following. Much like Jane Siberry, who has her own fan base, but obviously much smaller in size to Radiohead's, there are always going to be fans to buy her music, whatever format it's released on.

It's a style issue mostly. There are some musicians who just want their music heard and will release it for free, seeing any money that comes their way as a bonus. But, more often than not, a musician wants to be paid for what they produce. Ideally, I think most artists would love to just produce music as their main source of income and give up on the “day jobs”. As a writer, I know that's the ideal for me. Also, as a producer of “art” of a sort, I also want to be paid for the material I produce, and have control over how it's used. My news articles I've published professionally, I have been paid for. My poetry, I know I'd be pretty pissed off if it was used by anyone or published anywhere without my permission and without attribution. I have the right to control how my work is used and consumed.

Enter Dave Lowery.

Dave Lowery you best know as the head man for the legendary alt-rock band Camper VanBeethoven, then later with Cracker, who had a couple of minor hits, “Low” and “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)”. Lowery has been an outspoken critic of the royalties being paid to musicians for online play, and a critic of how the mainstream record companies compensate musicians for their material. In the radio world, a musician gets paid every time a song is played on the radio, depending on the format of the station playing it. Usually it's not much a play, but if your song is on the Top 40, it's getting played every day over thousands of stations across North America, that adds up very quickly. So, if you're Beyonce and the legion of writers that write her music, you get paid thousands of dollars every day, day in day out. If you're someone like Dave Lowery, you're paid less, but you still get paid. And Dave Lowery is saying that artists are even worse off than they were under a non-internet, non-digital music industry.

Consider the traditional radio model. A radio station has the right to broadcast anything with a proper copyright on it. That is, music that is commercially available to be bought can be played on radio, so, no bootleg material, nothing released that didn't have the consent of the people that own the music. Consent involves the musician (though in most cases in major labels, the musicians don't actually own the rights to their own music, their label and management does), the managers of the musicians, the song writers, the record label: all of these entities must be considered and, often, paid for what they do. Then, if you want to put this on another medium, say, have a stream of your radio station, then there are streaming fees to pay. If you want to put it on YouTube, then there's fees there too. If you want to transfer it from another medium, say from your CD to your iPod, there's a tariff paid for that. And, if you change mediums, it negates what you can play too. For example, you can't broadcast a song from a YouTube video on terrestrial radio without violating copyright. Then there's the digital platforms, like iTunes or Spotify, they have their own set of copyright regulators, software developers and CEOs that need to get paid. And there are laws like this in every country, so you gotta pay in Canada, in the UK, in the US, in Australia and every other country music is being played. As Lowery points out, the percentage that Apple gets from a song play is often 30%, and all they do is provide the music to the consumer. If you're not Beyonce, you get pennies at the end of the day for your hard work and creativity, and that's if you're lucky enough to even get played on commercial radio! If you don't want to play music that sounds like Beyonce, or Nickelback, or Sam Hunt, you get screwed over.

It's a Catch 22 for any up and coming artist. Do you keep making music that you like in order to keep some artistic integrity and hope people buy it? Or do you make something more palatable to commercial radio and earn some money so you can eat at the end of the day? If you stay on the integrity path, sure, there might be something at the end of the rainbow for you, like Radiohead. They were able to leverage their fanbase and critical acclaim to get themselves off the major labels, make music they liked and still earn a living as a musician. Most artists won't be that lucky. What's a musician to do? Offer up their music for free in the hopes someone hears them and to get their sound out there? Or offer it up for some money so they can see something back for their hard work, knowing that most people are going to look at it and wonder, “Why should I pay for music I can get for free off a bit-torrent?” Hipsters will put you down for earning money from your art, telling you that you've sold out. Is there something noble about starving for art? Like the construction worker, the fast food employee, the bus driver, they all have to go home and eat at the end of the day. Does it matter that the musician is making something that isn't immediately visible and valued as a table, a trip in a bus or a hamburger?

What's the solution then? Without big name advocates on the musicians end to change how music is distributed so more money ends up in their hands, there's not a good end to this. Some platforms are helping, like Bandcamp, CD Baby, and others. But, as Lowery states in his much read essay “Meet the Old Boss, Worse Than the New Boss”, that still puts a barrier between you, the person who wants to listen to the music, and the musician themselves. You have to be on Facebook to get more traffic towards you as an artist. And Facebook gets a cut. You'd be crazy not to put your material on YouTube, then YouTube gets a cut (and possibly even some copyright leverage for themselves). There's places like Art of the Song, offering up more than a pittance to the musicians, but it's a hard slog. The system is rigged against the musician.

There's also what I call the “Gutenberg's printing press” problem. Back when all written material was actually written by people, back when not everyone could read and the only people who really did were scribes in monasteries, those that owned the ability to produce something could control how that something was produced. When Gutenberg produced the first movable type, it created an explosion in printed work being distributed to the people and an upswing in literacy. The printed word became less labour-intensive, more material could be produced, a wider variety of material could be produced (ie, things that weren't Bibles) and more people could produce it for cheaper. As it got even more cheaper, then more people could print and more material can be distributed. Take that up into the current age, where essential EVERYBODY has a printing press. I've got a computer and I've got a blog. I can write what I want and publish it on my blog and everyone can see it. But, how many people actually read my blog anyway? It's great that everyone has a voice, but that doesn't mean my voice is being listened to, or that it's important. In fact, more often than not, what I have to say isn't important, save for a handful of people who care what I have to say. If I want more people to pay attention, then I've got to invest in getting my name up in search engine queues, pay for marketing teams to get my name into the hands of influential people or count on my readers to share links on whatever social feeds they have. That costs money and time that I don't have.

If you're a musician, today's computers have essentially given you your own “printing press”. You can get an open source sound editing program like Audacity, and with a bit of technical expertise, start recording music in your bedroom. Get a Bandcamp page and your music is on the web. Then the same problem arises. Who's listening? Every musician is doing exactly what you are doing. And the consumer has been conditioned to think that music isn't something you pay for, it's something you grab off of the web for free.

There's no magic fix for this problem. But more people like Dave Lowery are needed to make any sort of change in how artists are paid for what they do. It's going to take a lot of folks on the calibre of Jay-Z to go to bat for the little guy. And folks like the poseur in the coffee shop snidely running down a band for “selling out” aren't helping. Neil Young's dubious digital music player isn't helping. Kids not willing to pay a decent sum for a song (or, god forbid, an actual album), or coughing up 50% of their dollar to Spotify to listen to a song aren't helping. The only advice I have is, if you like a musician, then FUCKING BUY THE FUCKING MUSIC. Don't copy it. Buy the fucking album. It's the only way an artist can feed themselves, even if most of your money is going to someone other than the artist.