I will fully admit to being a teenaged idiot and rampantly stealing music off of Napster.
It was new, it was easy (so long as your mom didn’t pick up the phone), and it came with an instant hit of serotonin. It made you feel like a Full And Complete Fan as well as like an archaeologist; I still have some of the tracks, too, on old hard drives. If I do enough digging, I can find a bootleg live recording of the actor Jason Schwartzman, then the drummer of my favorite band Phantom Planet, singing a raucous version of “Rebel Yell” live at the Troubador in LA, which would, a few years later, become my favorite club venue in the entire city I’d call home for 15 years. There felt like a degree of authenticity you could acquire, a way to prove how thorough of a fan you could really be, if you spent enough time scouring the indecipherable file names and putting in the hours of “work” it took to download the track.
And then the music industry died.
The correlation between Sean Parker’s Napster (early-days Facebook investor Sean Parker, yes) and the complete death of the music industry as we knew it is a straight, bold line. It led to massive decreases in sales for the music industry, around 33% in the year 2000. Now, I will not argue that the music industry at the time wasn’t an awful, bloated, mess. Anyone who bought a CD pre-Y2K can tell you how incredibly un-fun it was to save up weeks’ worth of babysitting money just to spend $16.99 on a CD filled with one good song and 11 tracks of crap. Artists, who were usually signed to multi-album deals, were given ample time and money to spend making a gangbuster first album, then set off on tour, only to be required to record and put out a second album as soon as the touring stopped. That led to the dreaded “sophomore slump,” and many multi-platinum bands’ careers being killed before they even really got started (::cough:: Hootie & the Blowfish ::cough::)
The music industry’s pivot to try to quell the theft of music was both pathetic and delayed, leading to the absolute expectation that music should be free and plentiful, no matter how much labor went into creating it. The best warriors anyone had were the guys in Metallica, seemingly incredibly old dudes (Lars Ulrich was, in 1999, younger than I am now) who were global megastars and could never be fully financially impacted by the software revolution. They had already made their pretty pennies, and sixteen year old fans with goldfish brains, like me, could not fully comprehend what they were trying to get across. Lars and the like just looked like rich idiots mad that kids were pilfering petty change. Much like we’re seeing now with the reaction to Ron Perlman or Mandy Moore advocating for better streaming royalties, consumers do not like when rich people try to point out how they are not being fairly paid by their boss for an aspect of their work.
It wasn’t really until the launch of the iTunes store, in 2003, a full four years (!) after Napster and file sharing at large became a fixture of how we consumed media, that there was even really a dent in Napster’s choke-hold on how we acquired music. And even then, record labels were miffed that they couldn’t charge almost $20 for a full album of (likely crappy) music and that individual tracks were going to be sold for 99¢ a piece. Bear in mind, the federal minimum wage in 2003 was $5.15– imagine working four hours so you could buy 45 minutes of music on a single album. You can literally read the press release for the debut of the iTunes store still online– the part about “subscription fees” feels particularly ludicrous if you were born post 2003, and have never filled out a postcard to get 20 CDs for a penny from Columbia House.
Now, if one consumes music at such a rapid rate that even 99¢ a song would bankrupt you, two years later, you could stream endless amounts of music on Pandora, as long as you were willing to sit through ads. Since then, the main way people even learn about new music is from streamers like Spotify. Which seemed great! Until you realized artists themselves weren’t really getting paid anything from that ad revenue. Pharrell and his label sued the ever-loving fuck out of streaming companies, because he only earned $2,700 from 43 MILLION streams of his horrible earworm “Happy.” I don’t care how you feel about corporate music and that song in general, but you know that 43 million plays of a four minute song should garner a whole lot more than $2,700.
The artist representation group Global Music Rights (or GMR) is the only reason anyone gets paid when their tracks get used in YouTube videos, played on streamers, or via other digital media. Spotify claims it pays out $0.003-0.005 per stream but it doesn’t, really. What they actually do is collect ad revenue by territory, take its cut, then parcel out the remaining dollar to artists based on how frequently their tracks were played in that territory. If 20% of all the plays in a territory in a quarter were Harry Styles, well, then Harry gets 20% of the revenue. Indie artists get kinda screwed here, as they just can’t compete against extremely popular juggernauts like Styles, Swift, or anyone else who is so new I don’t know their names.
GMR had to come into existence because, unlike screenwriters and actors, musicians of this type do not have a union. (There is a musicians union, but it’s only for instrumentalists, like people who play in orchestras.) GMR and other rights or royalties companies are basically groups that collect money on performers’ behalves. It’s not a union, but it’s better than nothing.
Again, you will often see two arguments against GMR music online: the first being, “Don’t they want the exposure of being used in my video?” to which, of course, some people do and some people don’t. Beyonce does not need exposure. You are using the influence of Beyonce to get people to pay attention to your DIY, Beyonce is not using your crafting video to gain a new fan. Obviously. Secondly, people will ask, “Why does Beyonce even need the money at all?”
Obviously, Beyonce has the money and influence to get the rules passed and it is entirely for other artists’ benefit that she did it. While it may feel like this was never the case, almost every single artist you can name now was once a person who did work that you’d never heard of. Beyonce didn’t get to be Beyonce without people paying her for her skills. Which are, clearly, unique and marketable. Mandy Moore and Ron Perlman have acted in absolute shit in order to be on THIS IS US or in HELLBOY. Believe it or not, they are kinda really doing this out of the goodness of their hearts (also, they stand to make a lot of money).
The fact of the matter is, the abuse of artists comes from two sides– one is from shitty corporate executives who are happy to chew up creative people, extract wealth from them, and spit them out on the ground to die. That’s what execs were doing in the late 1990s, when Napster came to be. It’s exactly what streaming video services are doing to actors and writers and craftspeople now. Netflix, as far as I know, essentially uses the Spotify model of parceling out payment, but it’s not based on ad sales in a market. They instead just… come up with a number that they’re willing to parcel out, and then do so according to the number of plays a thing receives. And because they never actually reveal how many plays an episode or movie or series gets, you’re just kind of S.O.L. if you want to kow why you’re only making 43¢ for one of the hit TV shows that built the streamer’s artistic credibility. This is very, very bad. It’s why the unions are striking– accountability.
But the abuse from the audience also exists. If you cannot live without a Beyonce song, tv show, movie you love, book you like, or piece of art, then you need to pay for it. In whatever way you can– buy it physically (again, increasingly impossible to do), buy or rent it digitally, see it in a theater (if it’s safe for you to do so), or even stream it if that’s all there is left.
Because when executives see that you do not place a monetary value on the product, they will stop paying the human beings that produce it. We know this is true because we’ve seen it happen. Don’t do the shitty corporate executives’ work for them. Please don’t steal artists’ stuff. And support the WGA, SAG/AFTRA, and any other creative union as they fight to get paid– fairly and transparently.
