FY 'PON THEE, SPOT!

Since September of last year I have been using Spotify as my primary means of listening to music. For years I didn't go near the programme because for obscure technical reasons it was not on speaking terms with Microsoft. But that contretemps got sorted out and I caved in.

The experience was glorious, like all Christmases coming at once. That album you've been fruitlessly trying to find on CD with online auction prices guaranteed to send a chill down the back of your bank manager? Why, it's here! Records or songs which you weren't quite sufficiently sure enough to want to purchase? Ones you read about in the papers, or in magazines, or online, from critics or peers? Albums available on download only? A simple matter to go to Spotify, give the records a listen and make up your own mind about whether you want to explore or invest that music further.

It set off a stream of liberation through my arteries, the likes of which I haven't quite felt since my teenage days 40-45 years ago when I would tape things off the radio, and the surrounding DJ chatter didn't disturb or vex me at all; quite the reverse! It was an internal gasp of: wow, I can actually endeavour to listen to everything! A modest ambition.

Now I have as many albums on Spotify as I do actual albums in my house, and no doubt the actuality element will shortly be surpassed. And, possibly uniquely, I listen to everything I add to my library, as an accompaniment to work, at quiet times over the weekend. I absorb what is happening and react to it accordingly. It is as though somebody opened the curtains and windows and let the sunshine peal into what was hitherto concealed gloom.

It has fundamentally altered the way I listen to music, has Spotify. And yes, I know not absolutely everything is there, which is why I also use YouTube Music, Deezer, Tidal, Apple Music and to a degree Bandcamp as backups to find those elusive items not available on Spotify. However, the overall impact has been phenomenal.

Don't get me wrong. If I like something fervently enough to want to get it on physical, I buy it; I haven't stopped doing that, but I'm doing a lot less of it, which is essential for my wellbeing (apologies for the banal corporate terminology). I used to spend entire days in record shops, or circulating around gigantic clouds of record shops. That was when they were exciting and colourful. Now, going into a record shop is like entering a morgue; grey, lifeless, a purposeless appendage to real (i.e. online) business. These days I get most of my CDs online. It's so much less bother, so infinitely better for my incrementally failing health.

Furthermore I make a point of buying CDs from musicians who would benefit from it; those in the distant outlays of jazz, improv, indie, electronica or wherever whose music I like so much that I pay them money to listen to it. That way, you see, the musicians would be able to make more music that I might like in the future.

So I am trying my best. Which is why I am irked by the increasing hostility shown by several bodies of musicians, and music writers, who really should know better directed, not at the executives of Spotify but at its users. I am fully aware of Spotify's damaged business model, its highly questionable politics and investments, and the pitiful rate afforded to the people actually responsible for that music. I can understand why Neil Young and Joni Mitchell would wish to vacate the premises (at least for now). It is absurd that a band as imaginative and powerful as Field Music, for example, should, as I understand things, be subsisting on a slender £5,000 per year.

I know that people like Tom Gray are fighting - and absolutely justifiably doing so - for a far better deal for musicians whose work appears on Spotify for so little personal reward. I completely empathise with those musicians who simply go on Bandcamp, get far better compensated financially there and actually find an audience. I don't blame them at all.

However, I do not think that some folk are appreciating just how radically the world has changed in the past few years. The unendurable truth is that an awful lot of people in the alleged developed world of 2022 - I would go so far as to say the majority of them - cannot currently afford even to feed or heat themselves properly. They are struggling to remain alive. And I have to say, with the heaviest of hearts, that if people don't have disposable income - which really is the case now - they aren't going to have any money to spend on music beyond a monthly subscription to somewhere like Spotify.

I would venture further and attest that it is fundamentally wrongheaded to be attacking, scolding and bullying ordinary people who literally cannot afford to buy music. For a lot of desperate folk, Spotify is all they have. It's the only affordable and practical means of listening to music available to them now (I would certainly emphasise the "practical" element; finding a song or track online is so much quicker, easier and less fussier than ploughing through endless piles and shelves of records to find the one you want. When you come home from a tiring day's work you want not to have to do more work when you get there).

What I would like to know is why these figures in the music business - I could name and shame every one of them here, but the argument is bigger than that - direct their ire at us; the people whom Spotify leads and encourages to discover and find out about new names for themselves, without the need for any "gatekeeper" (which is why some music critics and broadcasters are up in arms about Spotify, lest it might make them redundant). I'll remind you of one of the fundamental rules of capitalism - if producers of product scold and tell off potential consumers, they are essentially inviting consumers to take their custom - and their money - elsewhere.

Note that none of these people dares to attack any of the Spotify executive board members and their seven-figure salaries. Oh no, they think to themselves, we can't do that because if we did, Spotify might throw our music off their website, and then how would people find out about us? So it's the classic cocktail of canting and cowardice. Far, far easier for them to rage at the people they're supposed to be attracting. At people who can't fight back.

It is in truth akin to the likes of Lord Sugar berating working-from-home types for not returning to the office. Sorry, but it's better at home; we've found that out the hard way since March 2020. Your bluff has been called and your property portfolio (which is what you're really fretting about) is quivering like the metaphorical house of cards.

You would almost think that the Spotify user-berators are in league with the rest of the far Right when it comes to what the late ITN newcaster Sir Alastair Burnet used to describe as "plain people." Wagging their fingers at us like a classroom teacher who considers us all to be naughty schoolchildren. What are people supposed to do? Not listen to music? Do you actually want to ban poor people from listening to music, say "you're not allowed" in the same way that the disadvantaged, beaten and dispossessed are to be prevented from having a television, or a computer, or good food, or anything that will lend pleasure and meaning to lives which would otherwise consist of bare survival only?

The solution is: if you're going to attack - and I reiterate that plenty of musicians are rightfully and justifiably angry about the current state of things - then attack the nature of the beast; the industry itself. Battle for a better deal with Spotify, threaten to withdraw your labour if you have to. There's no reason why a basic, affordable, universally-applied monthly Spotify subscription fee - £20 perhaps? - wouldn't help solve matters if properly addressed. But do not, by any means or under any pressure, misdirect your anger at ordinary people who are doing no more than trying to stay alive and live as much of "life" as they can manage. If you do, then you reinforce the possibly bogus notion of the music business being a self-serving cartel of "friends" who only really make music for each other (see also the London literary scene) and you run the exceptionally serious risk of alienating everybody who would otherwise be interested enough in the music you make to want to invest in it. Then how are you going to make a living?