As the streaming music landscape shifts, artists want more pay and listeners want more friction

Hundreds of millions of people around the world stream music on two of the biggest platforms: Spotify and Apple Music. Data show in the U.S, more than 50 million people pay for Spotify, while more than 40 million pay for Apple Music.

That’s led to a lot of conversations about how we as listeners find new music, and how streaming platforms compensate musicians. And some new models are popping up, as well. One of them is called subvert.fm, which calls itself a music co-op.

Jason P. Woodbury, a Valley-based writer, musician and podcaster spoke to The Show more about it.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Jason, at the risk of asking an overly broad question, how would you describe the current state of music streaming and how we as consumers listen to music?

JASON P. WOODBURY: Well, broadly put, most people use streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music — those are the sort of industry standards. Obviously, people listen to things on YouTube, all these different stuff.

But generally speaking, most of these platforms offer incredible access to music and variety and ease of use. But sort of where they lack is compensating most artists, you know? Even old radio was much more a beneficial financial arrangement than what happens with streaming services.

So I think right now, that’s the way people are consuming the music, but you’re getting a lot of musicians who find that the scale of that streaming model isn’t working for them. So, you’re seeing some interesting things start to come into the field in terms of new potential ways to stream or reimagine the scale of streaming.

MARK BRODIE: Well so, are you seeing those things coming from the musicians themselves in terms of maybe looking for different and creative ways to earn money, or are you seeing them come from other places?

JASON P. WOODBURY: Obviously, to be a musician right now you have to also sell merch and play shows, these are like all part and parcel, right? But as far as general streaming goes, I think you are seeing artists start to push back and say, “Well, what are some different ways we can do it?”

I mean, Bandcamp has been around forever. Bandcamp is sort of the industry leader in terms of DIY musicians doing direct digital music access. But you’re seeing all sorts of stuff. You know, Sam Means, who does Hello Merch — which, full disclosure, I work for — he’s got a service that he’s created called Wavlake.

You’ve got stuff like subvert.fm, which is a sort of worker-owned streaming service. And I just signed up for that to see how it would go. And I uploaded my most recent project to it and I thought, “That’s cool.” You have to be accepted as a co-op member in order to be on that site, and it’s like, OK, we’re starting to see people reimagine ways that this could work.

Amber Victoria Singer/KJZZ

MARK BRODIE: Do you think that these new models can really be effective in terms of making sure that artists are compensated for the music they’re creating, but also providing broad enough access so that enough people can hear them?

JASON P. WOODBURY: Well, I mean, there’s a lot of different ways. It’s tough. Unfortunately, the average consumer, I mean, I get for a lot of listeners why something like Spotify is really awesome, right?

But a lot of the times with streaming services, you’re also getting all this algorithmic sort of manipulation. And so, I think that the big challenge right now for things like this is just people realizing that we might have to compensate musicians differently in order to have that kind of access to their work, and to be willing to do that.

And it’s hard to be willing to do that when you’ve got like five things you want to listen to and each one of them is asking for the equivalent of a month’s subscription, you know? So, I kind of get why, I get why that’s such a convenient thing.

And at the same time, when you break off from that, though, all of a sudden now you don’t need that many listeners in order to potentially substantially benefit, right? You don’t need every single person who’s on Spotify who’s not hearing your music because it’s not being algorithmically pushed towards them, versus like a thousand people who are going to support you through one of these like more scaled-down things.

MARK BRODIE: Well, I wonder, when you look at sort of the state of things now and the landscape out there for musicians and getting your work out and making sure that you’re compensated for it, do you see another time or can you think back to another time where the change was as dramatic as it seems to be right now?

JASON P. WOODBURY: Well, it’s hard to say. Musicians have always been presented with challenges, right? Like, radio represented something, a shift away from getting paid to appear someplace, right? So, that was an advance, and I’m sure people were afraid of the radio, too.

But the radio worked for getting music to people. And soon enough, people started getting compensated for it. And the music industry has always undercompensated artists, I believe, but that old model was more in line with adequately compensating those musicians.

And so, you look back and you see all these inflection points where the technology represented a challenge, but people figured out a way to sort of make it work.

MARK BRODIE: It’s interesting because I think back even, you know, a couple of decades ago when iPods first came out, and people were looking and saying, “Oh my gosh, like I can have music with me, like a digital version of whatever I want in my pocket, and I can just listen to it whenever I want, wherever I am.”

That seemed at the time so revolutionary. And you look at it now and, you know, as you referenced earlier, you know, if you subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music, you can have almost any song that’s ever been recorded in your pocket, in your headphones, at any given time.

JASON P. WOODBURY: Well, yeah. I mean, I’m struck by two things: One, the primary difference, and interest in like iPods on eBay and like secondhand markets is off the charts, by the way.

MARK BRODIE: Really?

JASON P. WOODBURY: Yeah, I bought an MP3 player, or my wife got me one for my birthday last year, just like a standalone MP3 player.

MARK BRODIE: Huh.

JASON P. WOODBURY: And I think part of the reason why people feel so particularly nostalgic towards that is because that was the early days of the internet. But you were still largely managing your library of songs, you know what I mean? That was your job.

I know there are lots of people who use Spotify the same way that I largely use streaming services — I mostly use Apple Music and I use Qobuz, which is a French company that pays artists more. But if you’re using those to look stuff up and have a real active relationship with them, then it’s really hard to beat that.

But a lot of times, I think people are just more and more, you get sort of inundated with algorithmic response, stuff that they want you to listen to.

MARK BRODIE: Like you’re not even paying attention to what you’re listening to. You’re letting you’re letting the service pick what’s next.

JASON P. WOODBURY: You are, and I don’t think that that’s always wrong or anything, you know what I mean? But I do think it creates a frictionless relationship with the art form. And I think like oddly enough, what we’re seeing people itching for is like a little bit more friction.

And it needs to be real. But it’s like people are looking at it, and it’s like in the early days of the iPod, the internet coupled with that technology made us feel like, wow, we could listen to potentially any song, but you still had to go find it for yourself, you know? And that still exists. We can go off-road from these sort of streaming services and explore around corners where people might be loading.

I mean, it is tempting to think of them as having everything, but they really don’t have a lot of things. I do think that we could look at it right now and just say, well, it doesn’t have to just work the one way. There should be lots of different ways that people can distribute music online and have it reach people.

And I don’t think the problem is that there are too many of them. I think there’s not enough. People should just keep doing it, you know what I mean? There should be all these different decentralized ways — I think, right now — for artists to, like I said, just sort of go off-road of the streaming thing.

Or you can do like, personally, I have all my stuff on all of them, you know? It’s like it’s there wherever. I love the idea of making it accessible to everybody. It’s kind of an exciting thing because if one of them starts to really work for people the way Bandcamp has, that’s awesome.

MARK BRODIE: All right, we’ll have to leave it there. That is musician and podcaster — among many other things — Jason P. Woodbury. Jason, good as always to talk to you. Thank you so much.

JASON P. WOODBURY: Oh, thank you so much, Mark. I always appreciate it.