Esteemed recording engineer Steve Albini explains in a recent twitter thread that there’s “an important thread of continuity over time about the exploitation of bands by record labels that deserves a closer look, re the current Spotify debate.” It is a detailed, really instructive discussion. Please read the whole thread. Albini concludes:
It is egregious that these services pay so little [less than half a cent per stream], another manifestation of the greed of predicate labels and the practices of a corrupt industry that predates them.
It gives me peace thinking that the streaming model is unsustainable and will collapse eventually, but in the interim remember that the music business that fucked mainstream bands always had in parallel the contrasting independent scene which was more fair then and remains so.
Jacobin Magazine writer Charlie Bird argues that we need a “Socialist Spotify.”
