John Darko
UPDATE 16th Jan: Patron Brother Thomas got in touch to point out that Deezer’s payment system might not be as artist-centric as it first appears. Music Business Worldwide has the details.
Last week, I explained why I cancelled my Spotify Premium account. Today, I have more to say on the matter. Some of these thoughts came to light during my research for the Spotify farewell. Others come in response to comments popping up beneath the YouTube video. That video, by the way, is well on its way to 200,000 views after only four days online.
Qobuz Connect
For example, I learnt from the YouTube comments section that Qobuz Connect is now in beta. Other people stated you don’t need Qobuz Connect if you have Roon. Whilst I agree with that in principle, I will not assume that everyone has – or is willing to pay for – Roon.
In other words, Roon is not a substitute for Qobuz Connect because a) it’s a paid service and b) it requires a third-party app. With Connect services, we use a service’s native streaming app to play a song and hand it off to a Connect-enabled streaming endpoint.
Apple Music ‘Connect’
A few people asked if Apple Music has a Connect service. The answer is ‘kind of’.
Apple AirPlay and Google Cast are the closest to a Connect service but AirPlay drags the stream through the smartphone and Google Cast isn’t gapless. Those who care about sound quality should also be aware that Apple AirPlay 2 endpoints cause the stream to be lossy-compressed, irrespective of the source material.
If you select a CD-quality or hi-res stream on Apple Music’s iOS or iPadOS app and stream it to an AirPlay 2 endpoint, the iPhone or iPad will downconvert the stream to 256kbps AAC before sending it onwards.
“How much?”
Quite a few commenters were horrified by my suggestion that unencumbered access to 100 million songs should cost $50/month. But remember: I said ‘if I ruled the world’…which I do not.
How you react to that suggestion will be determined by your disposable income – but also your age.
Per the above state, roughly 15% of the Darko Audio YouTube channel’s audience is under 35. These people were born after 1990 and will (most likely) have started acquiring music in the mid-00s. They will have done so by downloading music: from Apple’s iTunes store or [cough] by less official means. Streaming would later push these two download-centric options to the margins.
I can understand how the under-35s might be shocked by my suggestion that streaming subscriptions should be $50/month. However, anyone over 35 will have spent at least some of their adult life buying CDs; and those people make up a whopping 85% of the Darko.Audio YouTube channel’s audience.
Moreover, 63% are over 45 – this group grew up with CDs. Some, like me, will remember the mass market’s transition from cassettes (not vinyl!) to CDs. $50/month for streaming is equivalent to buying five new CDs per month. All of my friends in the 90s were deep into music and we often bought five CDs a week. If someone had told us we could stop buying CDs and instead could rent access to the entire CD store for $50/month, we would have snapped their hands off. And because I am over 45, this will always be the context by which I judge streaming service pricing.
Turn back the clock
Next, we ask: is a return to CDs the way (back) to better remuneration for artists? Independent musician and YouTuber Mary Spender said in a video last year that she would need to register over 4.5 million Spotify streams each year to make minimum wage in the USA. She also said one CD sale gives her the same income as 8333 Spotify streams. Doing a little maths, we can deduce that Spender would need to sell roughly 540 CDs per year to make US minimum wage. And I think that’s more achievable by more (touring) musicians than clocking up 4.5 million Spotify streams.
But to think that Joe Public will return to buying CDs is – to borrow a phrase from Gen Z – ‘delulu’. And to bastardise the words of Jack Ladder, we cannot put streaming back in the box. It’s a match already struck.
This one time…
What about Bandcamp downloads? I asked one musician friend if he makes more from Spotify or Bandcamp. He said he favours Bandcamp because Bandcamp takes only a 10 – 15% commission. This musician’s music is niche enough that super fans are more likely to buy a Bandcamp download from him than from the second musician I spoke to. That second musician told me that Bandcamp isn’t as effective in generating income as it used to be. And he talked me through the numbers. His band made $14 from Bandcamp last month but, on the other hand, they made a few thousand dollars from Spotify streams in the past couple of years. This suggests that Bandcamp will work for some artists but not others.
The impact of record label contracts
But these are musicians who own the rights to most of their catalogue. Their download income isn’t subject to a record label contract and its ‘cost covering’ exercises. Back with Mary Spender, we are told that music sold via a $10 download will generate just over $5 for the label and just under a dollar for the artist. An artist working under the same record label contract would need to clock up approximately 1700 Spotify streams to generate that same $5 for the label and, therefore, $1 for him/herself.
ACPS
What should we do if we want to see musicians get a fairer slice of the pie from a streaming service? One answer is Deezer.
Why?
Most streaming services use something called the pro-rata payment model. This is where “streaming revenue is divided among all artists based on their share of the total streams”. This means that even if you never listen to Sabrina Carpenter, she still gets a tiny slice of your monthly subscription. So too does Taylor Swift and Doja Cat, even if you’ve listened to neither.
Deezer does not use the pro-rata payment model. It uses something called the artist-centric model. Deezer calls this ACPS. It’s where only the artists you stream get a cut of your monthly subscription fee. Tidal started artist-centric payments on selected tiers in 2021 but stopped in 2023. The upshot is this: if you only stream music by Autechre and the Butthole Surfers on Deezer in any given month, only Autechre and the Butthole Surfers will see your money.
Just a reminder: Deezer pays out around 7/10th of a cent per stream which is more than Apple Music but less than Tidal. And yes, there is a Deezer Connect service but the Internet chatter I’ve seen expresses frustration with its limited functionality and stability.
Interestingly, Deezer offers lossless streams but they top out at CD quality. That’s enough for me but might not be enough for those wanting hi-res audio. And remember: as Peter Comeau told us in a podcast last year, the audible benefits of hi-res audio have nothing to do with delivering frequencies above 20kHz (which we cannot hear anyway). According to Comeau, it has everything to do with pushing the digital filter further away from the audible band.
And that final thought will provide the jumping-off point for my next post.
