Spotify and Bandcamp going into 2024

Spotify//Bandcamp

Discussing unions, fair artist income, regulations, streaming, labels, and more…

Introduction

When I joined Orpheus Review as a freshman two years ago, I wrote an article discussing how the military industrial complex has wormed its way into the Spotify CEO’s financial dealings. While doing so, I also highlighted a hopeful alternative to the mega-corporations that have dominated music streaming in recent years: the wonderful website Bandcamp. Since then, multiple sales, mass layoffs, union busting, and policy changes across companies have further exacerbated many consumers’ concerns – and predict a grim future for independent music.

Sale to SongTradr and Union Busting

After being sold to Epic Games in 2021, Bandcamp has recently been sold to SongTradr alongside mass layoffs at Epic Games. SongTradr’s entire purpose is licensing artists’ work, the antithesis of Bandcamp’s mission. The only features SongTradr plans to add to Bandcamp is that rather than artists setting prices for fans to support their music, you can “opt in” to pay SongTradr to set a price to license your music. Music licensing is pretty much unnecessary to a majority of Bandcamp’s user base, as well as their artists. Bandcamp connects artists with fans, while SongTradr aims to connect artists with corporations. There is a fundamental disconnect between the two companies

Besides, if you’ve spent enough time around YouTube, you could probably recognize a few very popular unlicensed songs that are used by creators across the platform. There is already a plethora of unlicensed music that these YouTubers use, and they compromise just a fraction of individuals who frequently use copyright free music for their jobs on a regular basis. Most companies looking for background music for ads, movies, etc. also have the budget and the means to find all the resources they need. There are musicians who primarily compose soundtracks, because… that's their job. There are already artists drawn to so many different niches of music, why should every artist on Bandcamp be forced into these roles that are already oversaturated.

SongTradr’s website mentions YouTubers, TikTok, Twitch, and “apps” are ideal ways to get money from licensing on their “For Artists” page, as well as movies and television. The way SongTradr gets its artists paid is by “mak[ing] it easy for major brands, agencies, content creators, television networks, and more to discover and license your music online.” From my experience, commercials either use catchy, trendy songs, or music composed as background music, and as I’ve mentioned, many content creators have tried and true songs, albums, and artists that allow them to avoid the nightmare of YouTube (any many other platforms) copyright strikes. Bandcamp’s artists, and especially the users, are not going to benefit from anything SongTradr has to offer.

As for layoffs, Bandcamp previously had 119 staff members. Following the sale, 60 were offered jobs and 59 were not. A disproportionate number of editors and support staff were laid off, and the union has reported concerning discrepancies in hiring rates among gender non-conforming, non-binary, trans, and Black individuals.

Additionally, following Epic Games’ sale of Bandcamp to SongTradr, 404 Media has reported that “eight union leaders members democratically elected by their peers to negotiate their first union contract” were invited to a meeting with Songtradr’s CEO Paul Wiltshire before being fired the following week. Songtradr has claimed it has no access to union membership and that meetings such as these were extended to all employees they were looking to hire. The odds that these union leaders happened to randomly be invited to the same prospect hiring meeting before all being fired is beyond improbable. Bandcamp United, Bandcamp’s workers union, has since filed an Unfair Labor Practice violation against Songtradr.

Since the layoffs, Bandcamp United has publicized data highlighting the discrepancies between hiring rates based on gender and race. In two Instagram posts, the union reports that, of the 19 black employees who accounted for nearly a fifth of the company’s workforce, only 4 – one in five – have been extended offers by Songtradr. The union has also reported that only 3 of 17 trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming individuals were extended offers. This is a 79% reduction of Black employees, and an 82% reduction of trans/NB/GNC employees.

Now, we can ask, was the firing of veteran employees and a majority of the editorial staff, the disproportionate firing of minorities, totalling to half of Bandcamp’s staff, worth the opportunity for artists looking to sell their music and connect with their fan base to opt in to music licensing agreements?

And while Bandcamp employees are rightfully concerned about their company’s future, the industry titan Spotify has only furthered its antics over the past two years.

Spotify’s Policy Changes

Starting Jan. 1st, 2024, Spotify plans to “introduce a threshold of minimum annual streams before a track starts generating royalties…in a move expected to de-monetize a portion of tracks that previously absorbed 0.5% of the service’s royalty pool.” What they don’t say is that this 0.5% of the royalty pool accounts for $40 million worth of revenue, which is being shifted further up the pyramidic power structure to artists that Spotify refers to as “legitimate” or “working” artists. Spotify also plans to further redistribute $1 billion over the next five years to these “working” artists.

Before diving in, it's worth mentioning that Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO, has previously blamed artists complaining about streaming income for their own lack of income, stating “You can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.” Ironically, many of the most popular musicians of our generation (Tyler, The Creator released 6 albums since 2011, Billie Eilish has released 2 albums since breaking out in 2016, Doja Cat has released two albums since “MOOO!” in 2018 and just released her third earlier this year, and I’m not even going to bring up Frank Ocean) often release albums several years apart yet pull in plenty of income through tours and streaming.

This is not to say that releasing lots of albums is better or worse in any way, some artists prefer to make lots of music: Westside Gunn, Future, The Alchemist, Billy Woods, and these include some of my favorite artists. However many artists, including the wealthiest and most popular, like to fine tune their albums, and rightfully so. Daniel Ek has no right to pressure artists into releasing music more frequently (something Spotify likes to push artists to do a lot), especially when the artists Spotify benefits most are guilty of the same behavior Ek claims is impoverishing other artists.

Moving on…

Additional changes to Spotify’s structure include changes to the 30 second payment model, in which songs must be over 30 seconds long in order to be monetized. You can easily see this in the app by checking any interlude on an album that is shorter than 30 seconds long. It will have no streams as a result of not being monetizable. This 30 second minimum has been guaranteed to increase in Jan 2024. Spotify is also targeting specific tracks such as nature sounds, white noise, and AI generated music, which begins imposing restrictions on what qualifies as music. While I have no personal issue with the demonetization of nature sounds and white noise (I’m sure they will still thrive on YouTube), it does allow a precedent of the inclusion or exclusion of certain content as monetizable from their platform. Ambient music is a beautiful genre with many pioneering artists who may unfortunately succumb to being classified as “nature music” accidentally, as the enforcement of a white noise and nature music ban will almost certainly be enforced by computers (Spotify reportedly receives anywhere from 40,000 - 120,000 tracks a day).

Another concern arose while I was doing research, as nearly every single article I found used per-stream monetary figures to calculate artist incomes from Spotify. This highlights a huge issue in regards to the public debate about Spotify’s monetary abuse of artists. Given how abstract and secretive Spotify’s payment system is they reinforce a false narrative for the readers (nearly every single article reports estimates of earnings based on faux per-stream calculators, which Spotify has repeatedly stated they do not use). A Verge article reports: “The more controversial change, however, is that tracks that earn less than $0.05 per month (or about 17 plays, as estimated by MBW) won’t earn royalties at all.” While this is partially true, there is no way to ensure that 17 plays will net an artist $0.05. A per track basis means artists who are just starting out may never reach a level of publicity or amass a fan base large enough to monetize their content on Spotify, as they are drowned out amid Spotify’s massive subversive marketing schemes (which we will discuss later). This is a direct result of poor regulations in the streaming industry, which other unions such as United Musicians & Allied Workers (UMAW) are organizing against.

No progress can be made through public discourse until Spotify is more transparent with its numbers and how it pays artists. Consumers have begun to acknowledge that we have no idea how much money artists on Spotify make. In the meantime, it is entirely up to them how and where the money flows.

Spotify’s Reduction of Music to Money: Super Fans

Spotify actively utilizes data from artists you listen to the most to advertise their merchandise to you more frequently and effectively. This is how the company advertises itself to artists – a platform that can provide you data-driven methods to profit from listeners. Instead of connecting the artists with their biggest fans, Spotify approaches what it calls “super fans” as more gullible consumers who will buy more stuff. On their “‘Fan Study for Artists” page, they recommend the use of their “clips” feature (as a consistent Spotify user, I did not know these existed) to drive super fan engagement, and provide colorful graphics aggressively promoting how more frequent releases “supercharge your fanbase.” Spotify defines a super fan as the “buy-up-all-your-merch fans.” They even specify countries for artists to target that will consume more music and possibly generate more super fans, and further categorize successful artists on their platform into “chart toppers, specialists, breakthrough artists” and more. Spotify’s entire business model is about vaguely categorizing art, breaking down each song into said categories, and then promoting “similar” songs to listeners that enjoy those “categories.”

This is partially why Spotify’s recommendations can often stagnate, or on the flipside, provide seemingly random songs that you have no interest in. Artists and labels that can afford to pay Spotify’s additional advertising fees will consistently remain at the top of Spotify’s recommendations, where they get more money, so they can pay more, and then get more promotion, etc. They also advertise their “discovery mode” where an artist and labels can pay Spotify to “identify songs that are a priority to them,” and the Spotify algorithm will increase recommendations for these songs across the platform. They include a plot featuring the title “Flow Chart for Programmed Streams that Lead to Active Streams” claiming 40% of listeners discover new artists this way.

It's jarring to begin to pick away at the Spotify iceberg and discover how nearly half of all your new discoveries on Spotify are placed there in exchange for more money. Spotify has slowly added these services to their platform for years, gamifying the music industry and turning it into a competition about who pays more to get on this week's featured playlists.

The next time Spotify notifies you about exclusive tickets or merch from artists, know that they are specifically targeting you in an attempt to get you to buy additional material through Spotify, not the artists’ merch pages. This is paired with the euphoria of being told you are in the top 2% listeners of an artist's fanbase, making fans feel special, practically begging them to advertise their allegiance to this artist through merch sales. The clinical, impersonal, and anti-art rhetoric Spotify has built its business on is deplorable, and encourages and enables algorithmic, scientific, and reductive approaches to art and music.

Regulations at Work

On November 20th, Billboard reported “The Uruguayan Society of Performers (SUDEI) had pushed for the changes. ‘It’s not that we are against the platforms,’ Gabriela Pintos, a spokesperson for SUDEI, told El Observador earlier this year. ‘We are not at all, but we want it to be distributed fairly.’ She added that ‘performers are the most vulnerable part of the industry.’”

In response, “Spotify took issue with the lack of ‘clarity’ in the language of the new bill. ‘Spotify already pays nearly 70% of every dollar it generates from music to the record labels and publishers that own the rights for the music, and represent and pay artists and songwriters,’ a spokesperson for the streaming service said in a statement. ‘Any additional payments would make our business untenable,’” emphasizing “changes that could force Spotify to pay twice for the same music would make our business of connecting artists and fans unsustainable, and regrettably leaves us no choice but to stop being available in Uruguay.”

It hurts to read this. Not once are artists directly mentioned in their payments, something that will be no surprise by the end of this article, but they also completely neglect how other streaming services are seemingly unaffected. I have checked for any other business announcing the suspension of service in Uruguay and can’t find anything. Spotify is framing Uruguay’s policy as ‘unclear’, when the issues have been clearly laid out for them.

Analyzing Spotify’s Data

To illustrate the clear disparity among artists’ payments on Spotify, let's visualize based off the ominous bubbles they provide on the “Loud and Clear” page I analyzed in my last article. While Spotify’s presentation looks like this:

Graphing their data paints a slightly different picture:

Pie chart representing percentage of artists on Spotify who comprise each annual revenue category

Total minimum income is calculated assuming every artist in each category makes exactly the minimum income to be included in that group. For example, 10k artists making at least $1k a year means 10k * $1000 “total minimum income”. This means we are severely lowballing the actual annual income of these artists on a whole, but the disparities are just as severe if we assume everyone is making the maximum to be included, i.e. 10k in the $1k group means 10k people * $4999.

The first graph represents the percentage of artists on Spotify who are in each annual revenue category. Over 56% of all earning artists earn less than $1,000 annually from Spotify streams, and are paid less than $250 million collectively. That is 3.4% of the total income of all groups. 3.4% for over 56% of the artists (of $7.3b total annual revenue as calculated with minimums).

One piece of data that caught my eye was the number of top earners, or the number of artists in the over $10 million and over $5 million categories. In both categories, the number of artists remained the same between 2021 and 2022, with those earning over a million annually only increasing by 20 artists, all while the number of earning artists continued to increase by the thousands year over year in the lower revenue categories.

This makes sense, and the site does state that the figures are rounded to the nearest ten (not sure why there is a 15 then, and the 425% growth implies there are 42 or 43 artists in 2022), but it also shows that there is nearly no movement among top earning artists in recent years.

It is also worth mentioning that the second graph assumes that every artist in each wage group is receiving exactly the minimum revenue to qualify fitting into the group. Without any public data available for exactly how much artists like Drake, Bad Bunny, and Billie Eilish earn from Spotify’s “streamshare,” it's impossible to truly determine how much of Spotify’s revenue these artists truly comprise, BUT, we can still work with what we’ve got.

Spotify claiming that “artists'' are being paid this amount per year is also misleading. In their own video, they claim that Spotify pays a majority (if not all) of their revenue to rights holders, not to artists themselves. As a reminder, this is exactly the type of service SongTradr offers, licensing music to rights holders for an opt in fee.

Regardless, while Spotify's bubbles show a seemingly nice distribution, our graphs clearly paint another picture. As we can see, over half of the money generated from all Spotify revenue is distributed among artists making $500k or more ($4.17 billion for the artists at $500k or more in annual revenue, and $3.16 billion for those in the $100k or less range). These 3,930 artists account for less than 1% (exactly 0.95%) of artists represented on this chart. The visible skew and massive disparity among artists’ pay is exactly what Spotify seeks to reinforce through its new policies, demonetizing tracks that are streamed less frequently. Do Spotify’s top earning, “legitimate” artists, really need a billion more dollars in revenue? Annually? Do the two hundred thousand artists earning less than a thousand dollars a year truly represent Spotify’s most pressing issue?

Should Bandcamp cease to exist, many artists will no longer be able to produce music without touring, a significant investment that is not always a viable option for creatives, especially those not working with LiveNation (a company that deserves its own article known for monopolizing the concert industry along with organizing Travis’s most recent Astroworld festival that ended in tragedy). Within this context, Spotify’s plan to move up to a billion dollars up its payment pyramid to “legitimate” artists is beyond concerning. If you have ever attended an Olde Club show on campus, these are the artists that will be suffering from Spotify’s redistribution, and from corporations continuing to play hot potato with Bandcamp.

Art, Patronage, and the Avant-Garde

We are lucky enough to live in an age with amazing companies like Bandcamp, Nebula and countless other services that pair those seeking art and entertainment directly with talented artists and creators. No longer is patronage restricted to the super rich of the art world (the Medicis, the Catholic Church, Peggy Guggenheim, Albert Barnes, etc.); any individual can commission the work of artists (think Fiverr). When discussing the development of the avant-garde art in twentieth century New York, Clement Greenberg writes: “No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real.”

(For context: when Greenberg writes “the avant-garde” he’s referring to the NY Abstract Expressionists: Rothko, de Kooning, Pollock. These artists wanted to separate themselves from the dominant socio-political group of New York as their political views did not align with the NY elite, however the NY elite were also the ones buying their art, and these artist would have been unable to succeed without their financial contributions)

While Greenberg’s writing can often be nationalistic, reductive, and slightly disillusioned, his assertion of the avant-garde’s “umbilical cord of gold” is painfully accurate. Artists working in any medium will and have always required patrons, i.e. a social basis and source of stable income. And in the Spotify/Bandcamp situation, it is not the “avant-garde artists” (in our case, just “artists,” or more specifically “musicians”) who are attempting to distance themselves from their source of income, but the industry itself hijacking this connection between artists and patrons / fans.

Those who enjoy music, especially fans of musicians at the fringes of genres, may soon be entirely unable to directly support the musicians that they love. During the writing of this article, new articles about venues steep hike in merch percentage cuts have been popping up. Every income source that artists have access to are being slowly but surely infringed upon by middle men.

And it is this “umbilical cord of gold” that companies such as Bandcamp have transferred into the hands of everyday people. A $10 purchase on Bandcamp is equivalent to over 3,000 streams through Spotify, with 82% (100% on Bandcamp Fridays) paid instantly and directly to the artist without any rights holders involved (assuming each stream pays a third of a penny, so very generous). Rights-holder groups are also still able to function on Bandcamp, and a label can set up a page for the label which contains all of their signed musicians’ music. For some artists, a label IS the right choice for them, and many labels do fantastic work promoting their artists.

I feel this is important to highlight as we have been discussing the detrimental effects of labels throughout this article. To clarify, it is not labels as a concept that are the issue, but the largest of these labels which now have monopolistic influence over the industry that are excluding smaller musicians from earning money. More specifically it’s the fact that this money is being taken away from smaller musicians to pay more to the wealthiest artists and labels.

Conclusion

All it takes is a cursory glance at Bandcamp’s “About Bandcamp” page and Spotify’s “Loud and Clear” page to understand the astronomical difference between their approaches to the music industry. Bandcamp’s clear and simple pie chart, as well as constantly updated revenue figures displaying artist revenue through Bandcamp, and a stream of recent purchases from fans are straightforward and to the point. No obfuscation, no confusion, no bullshit. Straight to the point.

Spotify’s glitzy page, only created in response to growing outrage regarding fair artist payment, features two videos under the “How Money Flows” section, each three minutes long. In 15 seconds, I understand how Bandcamp’s monetary system works. For Spotify, I had to scroll through to find the (objectively) smallest title on screen explaining “how the money flows,” only to find six minutes of explanatory videos using AI voices, flashy animations (including tubes of money flowing into buckets, real groundbreaking stuff), and very little real explanation. It takes over 45 seconds of the video before the now recognizable voice of Spotify’s DJ “X” says “So how exactly do artists get paid? Let's break it down.” After watching these videos, we learn… absolutely nothing. Both videos are wholly uninformative, and the phrase “once this money leaves Spotify's hands'' is repeated (by AI) at least a dozen times per video (slight hyperbole).

Their videos exists to use rightsholders as scapegoats, explaining how the money is divided “once it leaves our hands'' according to individuals’ contracts with these various rightsholders (which they define to be “labels”, “distributors,” “aggregators,” and “collecting societies”). It's essentially an admission of guilt, where the company is like, “yeah, we know the system is bad and artists are unable to make minimum wage, but it's not our fault because… well… you know, once this money leaves Spotify’s hands, it's not our responsibility.” Companies like Bandcamp are proof that there are effective ways for musicians to make livable incomes through their creativity.

These trends are a worrying shift in the existing power imbalance that is prolific throughout the music industry, and are only bolstered by the butchering of Bandcamp’s original mission goal. Just as Greenberg said, “No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income.” Modern genres such as hyperpop and cloud rap were born through Internet niches that allowed for content to be accessible to and supported by anyone, yet more and more, both consumer influence and artist indepence are being diminished and restricted.

There is a strong likelihood that you can search your favorite artist’s name on Bandcamp and find their page, along with merch and albums that you can purchase that will directly support that artist.

(as I’m writing this a TV Girl song is playing, so I looked them up – they have merch, vinyl box sets, and downloads to their albums with no minimum price, thanks to Bandcamp’s name your price feature. If you’ve ever thought about producing and want some samples, odds are, with a little searching you can find some of your favorite songs for free to start analyzing / sampling)

Spotify’s insistence on its heavily skewed payment system exists to reinforce the superstar personas that they plaster across banners every time you open the app. The company is an industry titan, funded by and built to serve major recording labels, that has enough influence to direct the modern music landscape, and we are slowly watching the last remaining alternatives be torn apart by greedy corporations.

Groups such as Bandcamp United deserve our support; if you care about music, artistic freedom, and fair economic conditions for artists and Bandcamp workers, you should care about Bandcamp’s ongoing battle. Subscribe to Bandcamp United on Instagram, and keep up to date with these news stories. I know there are many pressing issues in the modern world, but artistic freedom and many artists’ most stable source of income are being degraded before our eyes – and none of these companies are trying to hide it. They don’t care if you see because they aren’t afraid of the consequences, or at least haven’t been until now. Seeing how quickly Spotify removed their service from Uruguay following regulations proves how effective unions and regulations can be in fighting the exploitation of artists by labels and the streaming services designed to enrich them.

I don’t have an answer for “how to fix the entire music industry and two of its largest monopolies” (LiveNation and Spotify), but being informed about these companies' policies can go a long way to dispel their twisted narrative. As we all look at our Spotify wrapped this year, just remember how much data the company collects at every step of the way (the location tid bit was slightly funny, but also demonstrates how Spotify collects your location whenever you listen to artists, and can query these locations and / or artists to find cities to more effectively advertise to when marketing for specific artists), and how they will use this data to improve their marketing effectiveness, no matter the cost to the artists.

My Spotify wrapped even urged me to buy some of my top artists merch, an unfortunate addition to the fun, sharable end-of-year summaries, which as a reminder, has essentially been completely re-invented by Jewel Ham in 2016, a Black artist who was a Spotify intern at the time. She has gone on to discuss how she was never paid for or credited for any of her work (as she was an intern), and has said “At the end of the day, the problem here is not that Spotify stole my idea. It’s that I gave it to them. The way we treat labor, especially the labor of young people, and especially the labor of Black women, creates an environment where they have often have few options but to ‘give’ their work and their ideas.” It’s disheartening to see the consistent mistreatment and exploitation of workers and artists of color throughout multiple stories in this article, and serves as a reminder of how prevalent these issues actually are, especially at the cross section of music and tech.

However, we can all help change the way things are: pay attention to some of the news around the topic, especially with Spotify pulling service from Uruguay, and lend your help to unions such as Bandcamp United and UMAW. Thank you for reading, and if you’d like some more information and context, check out our interview with Bandcamp United member Ed Blaire for more.

Addendum:

As of December 3, 2023, Spotify plans to lay off around 1,500 employees, or nearly 1/5th of their workforce in its third job cut of the year. Magazines such as WIRED have chosen headlines such as “Spotify is Screwed” - however, as we’ve seen, Spotify is still pulling in an absurd amount of money and redistributing it among the large, dominant labels of the industry. CEO Daniel Ek sent a memo announcing the layoffs to employees, which The Verge obtained access to. In the memo, “Ek said slowing economic growth and rising costs were to blame for the cuts, which he said would make Spotify a leaner company.” The article also highlights Spotify’s motivation behind previous layoffs, citing cutting costs.

The article goes on to state that “Spotify has generally prioritized growth over quarterly profits throughout its history, but the WSJ notes that investors have been increasingly pushing for profitability over the past year. Ek said at an investor day last year that he intends for Spotify to be profitable by 2024,” noting that the company had already lost over $500 million dollars in the first nine months of 2023.

Spotify has historically lost money every year since it was founded, but since Spotify is built to pay record labels, it hasn’t really been detrimental to Spotify’s operations. Growing the company means more paying users to generate revenue, which gets siphoned along to the rights-holders. The organizations that profit from Spotify don’t need Spotify itself to be profitable. However, the limits of how much money investors are willing to lose are being tested as Daniel Ek aims to make Spotify profitable BY NEXT YEAR. It has already been uncomfortable to read about how Spotify musicians will soon be unable to qualify to earn money on the app, but seeing how Ek and the Spotify board aim to fast track shifting money farther up the pyramid by axing 17% of the work force seems highly destructive.

While mass layoffs among FAANG companies (Google, Meta, Spotify, and Netflix) have been commonplace this year, primarily in reaction to mass over-hiring during the pandemic years, Spotify’s decision takes on new meaning when they are executed parallel to their alternative goals to move more money “up” in the company.

Once Spotify stops paying (a majority of) artists, these artists have no reason to use Spotify anymore beyond exposure. If enough artists are able to successfully move their fan bases to Tidal, Apple Music, or any other platform, Spotify will be reduced to nothing but a Pandora pop station. Spotify’s future genuinely hangs in the balance at this moment. If Ek and investors can successfully turn Spotify into the dystopian monopoly that appears in their dreams, the amount of money being taken away from employee wages and artist salaries will be at all time highs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this (in our society, and I’m not going to try and impose morals and ethics onto capitalism) – it’s the capitalist way! – but the commodification of popular music and exclusion of those artists seeking to pursue their passions outside of the mainstream WILL turn Spotify into a ghost town as they leave the platform.

Spotify has received backlash before (Joe Rogan vs Neil Young, can’t believe that happened, and Neil Young added his music back…) and popular artists pulled their music from the platform. While this sort of artist-organization/movement is unlikely to happen right now, I’d be unsurprised by future developments once artists have absolutely no monetary penalty for removing their music from the platform. Fans will understandably be upset, but WE as fans need to start understanding the ugly mess behind the curtains of the music industry. We all want awesome music, yet the artists we love so dearly are unable to feed themselves and their families without putting themselves at serious risk. This includes health risks and financial risks, and many artists will often be unable to produce or record new music on tour.

While many of us can work, go to school, or do whatever more or less as we did before the pandemic, many artists large and small are still battling the impact of COVID-19 on their tours, 4 years later. Many bands also have to consistently deal with theft, loss of equipment, and travel mishaps; bands constantly have to deal with van/bus theft while touring. Two years ago, the publication NME posted an article about “the alarming rise of tour van thefts.” “underscore,” an artist fairly popular among Swarthmore students, posted today (Dec. 4th) about an airline company losing a majority of their gear. This is not an isolated incident - it is one of many struggles musicians must work both with and around constantly. This is all on top of venues imposing restrictions on merch profits.

It is up to all of us to read, learn, and talk about these issues. Ignorance is not bliss. It will just turn Spotify into yet another shitty pop station, one with a subscription fee. Get involved however you can, no matter how large or small the action, whether it’s telling your friends about how Spotify abuses artists, reposting Bandcamp United and UMAW posts on your Instagram story, writing articles and raising awareness, or committing to a career in entertainment law. There are options and opportunities for everyone, and if you truly care about music, not just the silly Canadian rap guy and the folk/pop private airplane top-carbon-polluter lady, then you should take it upon yourself to get invested.