The Ethics of Spotify

Dec 30

I bought 10 albums this year, and three of those as presents for other people. A couple of years ago that number would be closer to 70, and it’s not like I listened to any less music in 2011 than I have in the past. The difference is made up by Spotify.

I fell for Spotify pretty hard in 2009, signed up for the Premium service as soon as it was launched, and have happily paid my £9.99 per month ever since to enjoy ‘unlimited’ access to a huge variety of music. The service seemed tailor made for me: as much new music as I could find time to listen to, synced to my iPod inside a well designed app and updateable at any time via wi-fi. I used Spotify, in both its desktop and portable incarnations, a heck of a lot in 2010, and in 2011 it became my default means of listening to music. Of the 20 albums on my year-end list I own only four, and all but one of those was discovered via Spotify.

I’ve experiences a few glitches with the service, such as a couple of occasions when the iOS app would suddenly decide it needed login credentials to proceed, and would then not be able to use them because I was on a train and didn’t have a net connection. I’ve also run afoul of the admittedly rare circumstance of having an album disappear from the service, rendering itself unplayable – this happened to Das Racist’s Relax this year, which I’d been enjoying for a few weeks before it was pulled from Spotify for reasons unknown, leaving me with a dead playlist. But these are fairly minor problems, easily outweighed by the positive experience of using the experience for the most part.

My doubts about the service started to creep in at some point this year when I started reading reports, maybe around the time of launch of Spotify in the US, about how it wasn’t working out so well for artists. Having positioned itself as the music industry’s saviour, and the answer to the exponential problem of piracy in digital media, Spotify was allegedly not doing right by the people behind the music.

Here’s the pitch: giving people easy access to limitless music for a low price makes the hassle of piracy look like too much hard work. With Spotify you can get everything in one place, it’s sorted properly, the quality is what it should be, and you’re not breaking the law to listen as much as you want. I’ve always been ardently anti-piracy, adamant that artists deserve to be paid for what they create, so this argument spoke to me directly and if it seemed too good to be true it was at least sanctioned by the labels, right?

Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing for the artists. When Coldplay decided to keep their latest LP off streaming services I’ll admit to feeling a little irked. I wanted to hear the record, and, accustomed as I had become to paying £9.99 per month for as much music as I wanted, I resented being asked to pay £7.99 for one album that-my appreciation for Coldplay being mild at best-probably wouldn’t get played all that much in a couple of months. A year or two before I’d been used to paying £7.99 per album download-down from £9.99 for a CD-and hunting the various digital retailers to pick it up a couple of pounds cheaper was all part of the fun.

I started to look into what the return for artists was from the different distribution channels, and what I found certainly seems to support the idea that if it looks too good to be true it probably is. The exact details of how Spotify calculates payouts to artists is something of a (guilty?) secret, but various sources have pieced together estimations that, together, probably give us a good idea. Anu Kirk (project lead at MOG (mog.com)) estimates that Spotify pays about $0.04 per album streamed, so about $0.004 per track per listen.

David McCandless of Information is Beautiful used data from this blogpost and spreadsheet to put together a visualisation which really helps push the point home:

If an artist has to rack up over 4m listens on Spotify per month to make minimum wage it’s difficult to argue that the streaming model isn’t broken. Selling 12,399 tracks per month on iTunes seems more reasonable, though still a stretch for smaller artists without label-backed marketing. And this is where we come to the argument that musicians these days don’t make money from record sales, instead relying on concert tickets and merchandise to make a living. I don’t know the extent to which this is true, and if it is then it’s something of a shame: not an excuse for the poor earnings made via music sales but a symptom of it.

I don’t entirely know where this leaves me. Do I return to using iTunes and the odd CD purchase as my main channels of music consumption? It seems logical, and with the arrival of iTunes Match it’s easier than it’s ever been to have access to your entire collection from anywhere. But what about discovering new music? I’ve grown accustomed to seeking out new releases on a Monday and giving anything which interests me at least a quick listen on Spotify. Hopefully, if the music blogs are doing their job, I’ll still be able to keep up to date with new releases and hear streams of many of them before making a purchasing decision. Maybe I’ll have to listen to more 6Music, visit We Are Hunted with greater frequency and spend time haunting Bandcamp, but with a little effort it should be possible.

I’ll miss Spotify. The idea is brilliant, the execution is excellent, but it seems too exploitative a model to support, and perhaps to survive. Whether its more artists pulling their albums from the service, or a rise in membership fees which members would be forced to go along with to maintain access to their playlists, it seems something has to give with the way Spotify is set up at the moment.

Author Adam
Category Music
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The Breaking Down of the Desktop Analogy

Jul 25

N’Gai Croal (@ncroal) is one of those smart guys that you just know you should listen to. He knows tech, he knows videogames, he knows basketball…. Occasionally though Croal will come out with something even more insightful than usual. Before I cut back on my podcast consumption I used to listen to Croal in conversation every week on Out Of The Game; essentially the show is a group of friends, formerly or currently employed within or around the videogame industry, talking about anything that comes to their minds – though often it’s web or tech related. During one of the episodes Croal started talking about the file / folder structure of how we understand computing, how that design is predicated on an analogy of the computer as a desk, and how he thought the usefulness of that idea had expired. It seemed like the kind of idea that was underpinning a lot of the digital culture advancements and new technologies but that I hadn’t actually seen spelled out anywhere.

I spend a lot of time organising my digital content. Just as my bookshelves are alphabetised at home I’m fastidious about making sure that everything’s correctly titles, labelled, tagged, filed. I’m that guy you know who looks at your iPod and just shakes his head at how you have multiple artist entries for R.E.M., R.E.M and REM. I’m the one who makes little noises of disapproval because you have tracks just listed as ‘Track 1’, and some of your albums are missing artwork. Seriously, I’ll actually sigh if you’ve got singers alphabetised by forename because you choose not to spend hours of your life completing the ‘Sort By’ field in iTunes.

I have a lot of rules for iTunes:

- Artist alphabetically by Surname, or band name disregarding ‘The’
- Albums chronologically by release date (re-issues filed under release of original album)
- Guest artists listed in square brackets within the song title, prefaced by ‘ft.’ (ie Song Title [ft. Guest Artist])
- Square brackets for remix suffixes (ie Song Title [Mix Title])

…and on and on and on. These are rules I’ve developed over the course of years using the program to organise my digital music. Sometimes I’ll come up with a rule, or Apple will change the software to make something new possible, and I will have to spend literally hours making sure the change is applied uniformly to all of my content. It’s not easy being a pedant but you do get a very clean-looking, easily navigable iPod out of it.

The problem is that not all systems are as flexible, and every system is different. Take Google for example; I tend to use a lot of Google applications in my every day life, Gmail and Google Docs chief amongst them. I like a nice clean inbox, and with Gmail’s huge amount of storage space and archiving function I can easily keep anything I’m not dealing with immediately out of my way. Anything that’s dealt with I archive, anything that needs to be dealt with by me I keep in the inbox, and anything I’m waiting to hear back on I add a star to and archive. Then there are labels – the big difference between Gmail and its competitors (including Hotmail from which I switched) was labelling emails instead of placing them in folders. I used to spend a lot of time on labels: wording and ordering them correctly; choosing colours that suit and making sure the colours were distinct enough from one another; making sure to apply at least one to emails I’d need again, but not too many as that felt like it defeated the object.

Now consider Google Docs, a super-useful way to move all my documents and files to the cloud and have them at my fingertips to edit anywhere. Docs was a revelation when it launched, but I quickly started to wonder why we were back to the language of ‘folders’ again instead of ‘labels’, and the ‘Hide’ function was simply confusing at first. Docs is essentially using the same model as Gmail. ‘All Documents’ is an inbox, folders are essentially labels (in that you can store a single copy of a file in multiple folders), and ‘Hide’ performs the same function as ‘Archive’. What allows this model to work for email as well as documents, spreadsheets and various other kinds of files is Google’s powerful search functionality. Click ‘Show Search Options’ in the top bar of either Gmail or Docs and you’re presented with a remarkably similar box with various fields that will allow you to find any of your material.

This is the breaking down of the desktop analogy. The idea that N’Gai Croal spoke about was that when computers were first mass-produced they were based around a model that was familiar to their prospective purchasers: the desk. Each piece of data was a ‘file’ you could place within ‘folders’ and keep those in other ‘folders’ as you saw fit. This simple system allowed you to feel like you were in control of your data and find it again quickly when required. As the volume of data and the types of files grew (and it grew exponentially, exploded really) the model struggled to keep up. If you had photos, video, written documents and maybe even audio all related to one project you suddenly had to decide whether to file content away by type or by context. You could duplicate the file of course, and store a copy in two places but this caused two problems: firstly, it was easy to change one copy of a file and neglect to alter the rest, thereby fracturing your content; and secondly, doing so destroyed the idea of organising your content like material on a desk.

Google attacked the idea of multiple ‘copies’ of a document with Wave (wherein a single version of a document is collaborated on in real time) and with similar live-editing and collaboration functionality in their Docs suite. But to my mind it’s another of Google’s products which has finally rendered the desktop analogy next to useless: search itself. Those previously mentioned search boxes in Docs and Gmail allow me to find any of my files / emails as long as I remember even the slightest detail about it, such as a word that it contains. Obviously the more I recall the better, as I can quickly make my search more specific: I can look for messages from a specific sender, containing a particular phrase and sent within a given time period, all with a few simple operator commands.

And the approach doesn’t only apply online. It bears pointing out that Microsoft’s Windows 7 has a greatly improved ‘Search’ function which proves very good at pulling up all kinds of content very quickly with even the slightest of search strings. It is perhaps telling that there is a ‘Search’ field built into pretty much every system window you open in the OS.

For someone as pedantic as myself it takes a lot to let go of the idea that I’m not better off meticulously labelling, filing and sub-filing my content, but as hitting ‘Archive’ and learning to make better use of search becomes equally effective I find myself drawn more towards that way of working.

Author Adam
Category Tech; Web
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The Matrix, Avatar and Our Changing Attitudes to the Virtual

Jan 06

The cinema of 1999 is memorable to me for four key experiences: the Star Wars prequel I’d been looking forward to for years; David Fincher “fucking the frame” with Fight Club; the Blair Witch Project nearly making my heart beat out of my chest, and of course The Matrix.

No one saw the Wachowski brothers’ film coming, it just appeared in cinemas backed with a cryptic advertising campaign which told us that no one could be told what it was, you had to see it. For most of us seeing it didn’t even solve that riddle, you had to go home and think about it with a cold flannel on your forehead. The Matrix was brave and complicated film-making that looked and felt like very little before it. Whilst it was rightly celebrated for John Gaeta’s pioneering camera technology and visual effects, the real hook of the film was that irresistible germ of an idea that lay below and alongside all of the eye-candy: what if none of this is real? The Wachowskis’ story has mankind living out a virtual existence whilst reduced physically to the status of a battery. The hero’s story arc is from entrapment in a virtual world to the emancipation of mankind back into the real world.

A decade on and there is another action blockbuster making considerable waves at the box office: James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar. Again there’s justifiable praise being piled on the cinematography – this time because of the film’s pioneering implementation of 3D, but the more interesting comparison is how the film represents the experience of living virtually. The hero is a marine confined to a wheelchair who finds freedom, love and a sense of social responsibility when remotely controlling an alien body; his arc is from frustration and limitation in his own body to community and fulfilment in a new one, which he eventually comes to inhabit leaving his human form behind.

It’s interesting that in ten years we have gone from trying to break free of our virtual selves to striving to fully become them. Can we take these two massively successful pieces of entertainment as indicative of changing attitudes to the virtual?

First let’s compare the manner in which the connection is established between the human and the avatar in each film. In the 1999 movie Keanu Reeves as Thomas Anderson has to endure a very painful looking and certainly invasive procedure which involves having a 15cm spike inserted into his brain stem. The architecture of the machinery used to establish the connection is (ironically) Giger-esque, replete with heavy cables and innumerable wires. The process is uncomfortable, scary and potentially fatal: one sequence in the film makes clear that the consequence of prematurely severing the connection is death.

In Avatar, Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) has a far more pleasant experience: he simply has to lie still on a padded bed and empty his mind, a sheet of something resembling fiber-optics does all of the work. In addition, the penalty for a severed connection seems slighter; at one point some big red buttons get pushed too early and our heroes simply rise from their beds disoriented but otherwise unscathed.

We can read this as indicating a shift in how we are used to connecting to our virtual lives. At the time of The Matrix everyone was labouring away with a dial-up connection, accustomed to having wires tangled up in thick bunches behind their desks, and unintentional disconnection was commonplace. Jump forward to now and Avatar’s less painful, wireless experience is closer to the truth for most of the film’s audience. In addition the experience of being online has become a far more familiar one and commonly a daily occurrence with which we are far more comfortable.

The more important difference perhaps is that the 2009 film portrays the act of connecting to an avatar as a desirable thing, one which gives Sully new reasons to live, whereas the earlier film has disconnection as synonymous with liberation. Where Thomas Anderson must endure connection to acheive his goal, connection itself becomes Jake Sully’s goal. And he doesn’t stop there; ultimately he chooses to transfer his essence to the vessel which he had formerly inhabited remotely: essentially to become his own avatar.

The past decade has seen an explosion in popularity for the virtual. The internet has become ubiquitous in the culture of developed nations, and at the close of the decade digital has become the default solution for any number of formerly analogue tasks: written communication, the buying and consuming of music and video, food shopping. Search algorithms and the advent of blogs have dramatically altered how content in every arena is created and disseminated, making users feel more empowered and informed than ever before.

Launched in 2004, World of Warcraft has become a part of life for more than 11 million paid subscribers, all living out a second existence in a fantasy world. It ranks as the largest of hundreds of online virtual communities equally passionate about their digital second-selves. Also launched in 2004, Facebook now claims more than 200 million users, all of them participants in a virtual existence. To a far greater extent than at the end of the 20th century our lives are now digitised: music collections, photo albums, journal entries. In a very real way people have taken ownership of their virtual selves and embraced the task of curating their digital footprint, realising that what they choose to share and create online is an important part of their social lives.

All of which readies an audience to accept the story arc of a character who chooses to exchange one mode of existence for another. Although the titular avatar isn’t digital but organic within the fiction of James Cameron’s film, the allegory stands. This is an existence-once-removed originally accessed via technology; in which case the conclusion of Sully’s story is sending a message at opposites with the core thesis of the Wachowskis’ film, which told us that to unplug and accept the reality of your existence is to be free. What does it say about our changing relationship with technology that Avatar’s happy ending is watching Jake Sully, in more ways than one, take the blue pill?

- Thanks go to David Edelstein for inspiring this train of thought.

Author Adam
Category Film
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