How to Use Social Media When You Hate It & Why Streaming Math Ain't Mathin' - Q&A Special

0:11Welcome to the Drowning Sound podcast, the podcast that's trying to become a moral compass for the music industry and trying to be something that advocates for music fans. And in that spirit, today's episode is a special Q &A episode. It's also potentially a slightly more of like an advice episode, but don't worry, it's not dating advice. I've had some questions from different musicians and people who are curious about how the industry works. And mostly it's about streaming. In the second half of this podcast, I'm going to attempt to make sense of the disarmed Spotify movement. Why are so many musicians pulling their music?

0:51Why are so many music fans leaving the platform? The platform that we all thought was the good place with their funny little adverts about Scandi beach houses and things like that. If you're in the early days of Spotify, you know what I mean. Those adverts were quite funny and quite strange and very odd to our English ears hearing about listen to Spotify in your beach house. Not really knowing that that's something that lots of people in the Nordic region have. especially in Sweden. Anyway, I don't know where that thought is going. Let's just move on to the very first question then, shall we?

1:30First question comes from Sarah Howells on LinkedIn. She asked me, if you could tell a brand new artist with great music, but who hates social media anything, what would you tell them? And there's a little line art smiley face after that question. though it might have been an actual emoji I don't know if I've copied and pasted it and it's done that anyway so what would I tell them I would tell them that social media has been misunderstood by most people and I think that the idea that you have to do something and if potentially it feels like pathological demand avoidance which is something which I've been reading about due to my neuro spicy brain, which means that instead of recording this Q &A, I've done lots of very dull tasks that I don't normally get around to, which is doing one thing when you should be doing something else.

2:30And I think that there's something in us that makes us think that presenting who we are online is a little bit cringe that social media is kind of how you update people about your engagements and your children and it's the place where you go to tell people you've got something to sell and actually if you flip it completely around if you make social media an extension of your art if you make it part of your world building if you make it part of your storytelling, if you make it a part of making sense of what you do and why you do it, then social media becomes a whole different thing. And I think that there are a lot of different ways of thinking about it.

3:22Like you don't have to speak to camera in order to communicate with the world. Obviously those videos will tend to perform better because they feel like you're having a FaceTime call with someone who's sitting opposite you and just chatting to you as you scroll through your feed and if that person you're getting a FaceTime call from is a musician you're already a fan of then that feels quite special but if it's someone who looks like you relate to them and they're saying something you relate to then you're engaged with it and the amount of times I've gone and checked out an artist because they've said something online I'm like oh vaguely heard of that name saw it on the bottom of a festival poster or seen it on a lineup seen it support seen their name supporting someone I really like they've just said something I really agree with.

4:04I'm going to go find out more about them. And I think that you can find yourself moving from curiosity and intrigue quite quickly into, oh my God, this is amazing. Like it's not quite the same, but like someone went to a Coco Rosie show and posted on the in sound forums about how great the support artist was and the description was so up my street I was like I'm gonna have to find out who this is and this was back in early 2000s when people didn't have all their music everywhere online I think it was even pre-MySpace and uh I eventually got hold of the music and I absolutely adored it and asked to put their first single out and that was about flashes and that just came from someone writing one sentence on the internet and that's the kind of rabbit holes we can end up going down and I think it's harder for artists to self-advocate and to talk about themselves but I think if you are a musician and a music fan that passion and spark and the reason why you make things the things that inspire you can be quite an interesting part of your story to put into the world to lay a foundation and even if at that moment you're only really speaking to the algorithm and not really speaking to an audience getting the algorithm them to understand who you are so it can start setting up who it should be posting out your posts to when it starts showing them to strangers can also be really useful so if you want to make it post like no one's watching and post like no one's listening then maybe that's a better way of approaching things I think that really for any artist that's avoiding using social media or any business or any person I say this as someone who literally probably should be making far more videos for joining sales channels and not just sitting and writing which is my comfort zone I should be leaning into that discomfort a bit you definitely are interviewing yourself and finding really good prompts is really crucial and I think that one of the things the platforms could do more of would be having a almost like this week's discussion topic for musicians or setting agendas in that way and I think it could be really interesting and it's actually something I've considered when I worked at Six Music we used to just ask artists when they came in like five or six questions and then I'd cut up all their answers and put them together into a nice montage and it just got me thinking like should we just be putting those prompts out into the world and just asking people to make video reactions to them there's definitely a scope for slightly more organized music centered music focused social platforms and I think that that's one of the big things we lost when Myspace went.

6:47In fact, I just, there was a great clip of Kate Nash that might stick on the end of this podcast, talking to Steve Lamac about the magic of Myspace. So if you want to stick around to the end, I'll drop that in. There's probably nothing worse than feeling like you hate something. And I think that hating social media is very easy. But making art, making music that you want to reach people if social media isn't the place you do it then figure out a way that you can connect to people or create things in the real world which in the creation of them you're documenting online like I think it's interesting to see how much a lot of recent record campaigns have been very much about the fans creating the content around something so if you're good at creating spectacle or an installation or something that the 50 people that come to can make videos of then think about how that could be the way you approach the platforms and then repost the things that your 30 50 fans make um 100 300 obviously would be amazing and that could be as simple as a wall people can stand in front of and have their pictures taken with which could be maybe your single cover or it could be building something in real time set to your music like I remember when Frank Ocean was just building furniture I don't know if doing that in the middle of your town center or something could be part of the the kind of world that you're making it could be making paper mache and crafts and doing some I don't know there's all sorts of different ways I think that people can approach you don't have to be lord wandering into a club in downtown New York to get people to make videos of you so that you can post online I think also seeing kind of Zora Mandani just like talking to people in the street asking them the questions and just being the host like if you're a musician and you're in a particular genre or scene maybe becoming the scene reporter is not the worst thing like throughout the history of music there's me musicians that are now world famous who didn't really start out as journalists they just started out as a conduit for their scenes so I think that I would just tell them sorry I'm just going back to the question on the screen it says if you could tell a brand new artist with great music but hate social media anything what would you tell them well I think I would tell them all those things but I would also tell them post about how much you hate social media make it make it a meta commentary on social media.

9:30I really love the way benefits do that. Like if you've not seen their social channels, go have a look there. They're really great and really fun at that. Right. I'm not going to make all these answers quite as long.

9:45Next question comes from Mark Painting and he said streaming in five years, More niche platforms or Spotify consolidation? This is a question that I would hope that Spotify hasn't become a complete monopoly. I think that what I will talk about in the second half of this podcast with their investments in Daniel X personal investments, the CEOs in war technology has been the red flag that some people were waiting for they had to justify leaving to their labels and things i think that the complete kind of hands-off approach to andrew tate content on the platform which i've written about in the drannisand newsletter is something we should all be much more concerned that they're not concerned about if you're a shareholder of that company and it's got guides to coercive control like essentially like a master class you should be worried that that's what you are making your living off especially if you are someone with children or someone who is not a privileged white man and I know obviously a lot of the investors are those people and maybe they're not as concerned but I think as a society we should be concerned And if you're profiting off of that, then that doesn't feel like an ethical good place to be.

11:14So I guess on the one hand, Spotify, obviously there's been a decade of people saying how bad it pays. Liz Pelly's book, which I'm going to probably endlessly talk about because I was really moved by it. And I was especially moved by the kind of collective approach to things, given the fact that the way streaming works is that all the money goes into a big pie and then it's collectively divvied up. The platform does not feel like that for most of us that are owning copyrights like a record label or an artist owning their own and putting them online. It doesn't feel like you're getting an equal share of the slice of that pie and I think that we will likely see more platforms designed by and for music fans because I feel that as I just said on the social question these platforms don't feel like spaces made for music they feel like a place to compete with someone's breakfast photo they feel like a place to compete with high-end influencer content they feel like somewhere to compete with big breaking news stories with the heaviness of what's happening in the world and that doesn't always feel like the place where you want to talk about why you've written a song about Florence Nightingale or why your artwork has giant orcs on it like there's lots of reasons why these platforms do not feel like a space to connect with your fans there's a reason why Patreon has gone from strength to strength.

12:53There's a reason why YouTube is being talked about, like Mary Spender said, as the platform where artists should be focusing their time and energy. And I think that as we shift, as a kind of much bigger shift is happening and how we all feel about capitalism, that we will start to think about music like we have been thinking about say coffee and I think many of us would seek out a really good coffee shop rather than just wandering into the Starbucks. If you're in a new town you're going to look for a cool little record shop and you're not going to look for some like Walmart or something to go buy a record like I can't think of what the UK equivalent I don't think any of the UK supermarkets even stock music anymore so I couldn't think of a good example um so yeah so I think that five years from now I would hope that if people get a taste of other platforms they will start experimenting and I think that the stranglehold that Spotify's had and I think the decentralization of your music taste and your music collection I think is going to be pretty crucial I think there is that reluctance to move because people feel like they've kind of settled in but we are now a generation of people especially younger generations that don't live places for 20 years we move around we can't afford to stay places we get priced out of areas and I think that Spotify is just another place it's a platform but it's a place if your music collection is there there are tools to very quickly and easily move it and I think that platforms that understand that onboarding process platforms that make it easy to kind of like fast track kind of having your collection there I think are going to really win right so my screensaver came on so that means next question

14:57so this is from Paul Gaffigan I think this one came through email my question is do you think that there is a place for live streaming of gigs, much like we saw in lockdown. My feeling is it makes gig going or watching a bit more accessible to some whilst raising extra revenue. Interested to hear your thoughts. I have a lot of conflicted feelings about live streaming, and I think it comes down to the fact that the quality of video is kind of fine. Like you can watch Glastonbury filmed by the BBC but often the quality of the audio is just not great like it doesn't feel like being there and often sometimes being at shows the sound isn't always great obviously but it's got better but I don't feel like my love of music is down to production and sound and the quality of harnessing the performance and I think that a live show is something different it's a visceral experience and whilst I understand for accessibility the reasons why if you live somewhere that's miles away then obviously seeing your favorite band anywhere you can is exciting like there was a reason why DVDs were so big when we were growing up and VHSs of concerts and stuff people just wanted that chance to see something that maybe they couldn't afford the tickets or that they weren't nowhere near like if you live in a country that the artist never tour the idea of traveling to another country and being able to afford tickets and being able to afford hotels like that's a huge investment that only a privileged few that can really afford and I think that live streams do replace something but I think often the types of performances that work really well on live streams like the reason why sessions are often so good when it's just a stripped back version is because it's much easier to capture something that's quite special.

16:50We experimented with this a fair bit with Drowning Sounds back in 2012 or so. We filmed quite a few performances from Great Escape and obviously they weren't live but they were live performances and we put them up within weeks or within days in some cases. I just think that as music fans the experience of being there is obviously really important. I think for grassroots shows in particular, I don't know whether it really adds an extra revenue stream because there isn't the scale of audience versus the cost of capturing it and kind of streaming it. And also the if you start to make it so that that's all readily available, essentially for free online, then it's not that.

17:36Yeah, it's not that good because it devalues it. I think there was an interesting startup that I guess they're much bigger than a startup now was called Moment House and some of the performances they had on there were much more like music videos and it was much more like an artist performing in a set if you can find it online there was a Halsey performance that was just absolutely extraordinary it's mostly her singing but in this beautiful set like it was just extraordinary I think there was an Aurora one I watched as well which similarly like she just built and it just looked great and felt great and felt like it was an extension of the music and yeah there was some stuff on track it wasn't all completely live but I think that it ended up feeling like almost like a piece of living art and less like trying to bottle something that was made to be loud and kind of immersive in the space that it's in but not necessarily through laptop speakers or headphones or a little screen and I think that there are certain types of performances that will work for live streaming but I think we really need to figure out the technology like I've watched a couple of things in virtual reality and it's just it doesn't feel like being there it feels like something else and I think maybe with with a kind of mixed reality with smart glasses and things like maybe we will see that some of these performances making a bit more sense if suddenly an avatar drops into your living room and can perform and it feels a bit realer or if you can be almost in that kind of like standing in the second row watching the show but I'm not quite sure that our desires as music fans it's not like there's a lack of live music we can go out and experience I hope that makes sense like I guess I always hoped that live streaming would be more, but the more in which, I mean, you ask anyone what's your favourite live album and hardly anyone can answer, who's your favourite band to watch a live stream of?

19:43Like you flick through Twitch and there's a couple of people that have quite big channels of doing a live-ish performance, but often it's the conversation often it's the bits around it which when it's not a 30 minute kind of plug and play live show it might go on for four hours sometimes that feels a bit more special and I think that maybe broadcasters that also perform is possibly what we're going to see a bit more of and I think obviously those DJ sets in the street and the way in which like boiler room has made it feel like you're at the club when you're watching the stream like maybe that's the kind of stuff that might take off but there's so many issues with paying royalties and all those things right I'm gonna do one more question

20:37I guess more of a statement than a question um but it was from a guy called Tony Moss and I actually replied to his email already and I might contradict myself now because I'm not going to pull up my email and check what I said. But this was in response to my interview with Isabel Anderson. In the email he said, I appreciate your work. I don't see how this statement adds up. I said that 25 million streams over the years, however, as I'm sure you know, whilst that may sound impressive, you need those kinds of plays every year if you want to live off your music. Sorry, that maybe was not the best reading of something I'd written but also maybe shows how cluttered my writing is sometimes.

21:16His state, his response to that was 25 million Spotify would pay roughly$60 ,000 plus up to 15 ,000 of publishing in brackets, a conservative estimate. Spotify has less than 33 % of the market. So multiply that by three to get well over$180 ,000 just from streaming, even on a 50, 50 deal. That's way more than the average wage. Then add performance income, ticket sales, sync, etc. Sounds like someone is extremely successful. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack in this. Probably could have just done an episode pulling this not to pieces, like just to deconstruct it. Because I think to reconstruct why I said that 25 million streams is not enough to live off of is because one, Isabelle's had that many streams.

22:09And if you've not listened that episode it's the previous episode of the podcast um isabel's great we didn't really talk about how many streams she had it was something that when i was looking her up i was really surprised that we didn't talk about it i just happened to kind of like realize that one of her songs on spotify had 22 million plays and a few others had had a few million plays more as well i think she's had more than 25 million plays but that was over 10 years and i think a lot of it happened in very quick succession I think due to algorithms I'm assuming I've not actually asked Isabel about this but I'm just going to use this as an example so across 10 years she might have made$60 ,000 so that's about$6 ,000 a year which as most of us know is less the minimum wage and And that's not accounting for the maybe$3 ,000 or$2 ,000 it costs to record mix and basic marketing of a track.

23:13If you're going to market a track to reach 25 million plays, then you're going to need to spend huge, huge sums. Like on Spotify, it's 45p per click to get an existing follower to play a song once. And I worked out you need about a thousand plays for each of those one clicks to really add up. If you want to get someone to click from Instagram across to stream a song, you're looking at anywhere from 5p to like 56p. Like it's crazy how much that can vary. And that's partly because a large chunk of the people you're advertising to are not clicking. So let's say for sake of argument, you want to drive a million streams.

23:57then obviously you can very quickly add up in your head that that is going to be huge sums of money you'd need to spend just to generate a million streams and a million streams is worth roughly three thousand dollars or three thousand pounds because the dollar and the pound are about the same obviously that is there's like i can't even begin to add up like how much you need to spend just to reach a million streams if it wasn't being driven by the algorithm and there's ways in which your streaming amounts depending on what was big that month what country those streams came from all those different factors like what type of record deal you had had you recouped your record deal if you recoup basically means paid off the debt in one of my newsletters last year i sort of talked through by Lily Allen was selling feet pics on OnlyFans or somewhere that you pay back against.

24:59So if you get£100 of income and your deal is an 80-20 deal, then your£100 becomes £20. The record company takes the 80 % and the£20 goes towards paying down your debt. so if you've got 300 ,000 pounds of debt to your record company it's obviously going to take you a lot longer if you had 300 ,000 pounds come in of income that would not be paid that would not be your debt paid back unless you were in a different kind of like profit split deal or anyway record deals are incredibly complicated I don't want to bore you with that right now so let's also look at the other point he made that Spotify is at 33 % of the market well the other platforms don't have the random you suddenly reaching millions of people and it's just going to keep self-perpetuating apple is primarily from what i see on its home page lots more major label artists youtube getting into the algorithm is much harder and it's mostly kind of even with some really big artists their biggest songs are something like 10 of the plays that they've got on Spotify.

26:13And I think that makes sense. Like obviously if there's an amazing music video that became something that was shared around massively then sometimes they can have more streams on YouTube than on Spotify. But as a whole like YouTube can be quite random. A lot more music being streamed but often per song not getting those huge spikes. And I think that it's very easy to say if something's a large percent of the market it's easy to forget that how much of that market is dominated by sort of half a percent of the artists in the world it's Taylor Swift's and Adele's and all of those kind of Ed Sheeran level artists that are taking the lion's share across all the platforms and yes Spotify has been good to give a few artists this big bump due to the way their algorithm works and it can become a self-perpetuating loop and it can build an audience.

27:07Let's move on to the next point that income from performances and ticket sales. Well, I looked and I couldn't see that Isabel's done huge shows. She's not a global touring artist, which is why she runs her academy. Building a live audience can be so different to building a audience off the back of a song that people have maybe streamed in the background or streamed for a month and then not really listened to it again. And I think that the depth of connection we can have with a song it's really notable when pop artists like at certain points can have number one albums but their live shows are small artists that have struggled to get into the top 40 like they're not building those audiences they've got people that are connected to a song but not necessarily connected to the artist like I think that if we really think about what building an audience means and like the last two episodes have been really great at talking through that I think that ticket sales are really hard you've got to have someone in the right place taking the time out and being able to like you might have an audience that are just not of the demographic that go to mid-level shows that marketing a show to them is much harder they're used to going to arena shows which have bigger budgets to connect to an audience the Oasis shows were international news that reaches people and creates demand.

28:35The average show doesn't have the benefit of that. So whilst it may sound like someone with 25 million streams is incredibly successful, I've walked into tents at festivals with artists that have had 15, 20 million streams and I've been one of 300 people in a tent that holds like 5 ,000 people. There is a huge discrepancy. Those streams could have all been in Sweden, they could have all been in Spain and not in the UK. And I think quantifying the scale of an artist, once you start to realise that the number of people around the world and how scattered that can be, having a cluster of people in the same place, building a live audience when, say, 10 ,000 of those people streamed your song in Spotify, but you have no way to communicate with them to let them know you've got a show on.

29:21I've got 25 ,000 followers on Spotify on my personal account not as a musician but as a curator no way of telling them about my record label releases no way of telling them about this podcast and every artist is in the same position so whilst this data might look impressive the reality is it's incredibly incredibly hard I would love to talk to Isabel about what she's actually made but I did ask her whether she'd made anything close to£60 ,000 from Spotify. And I think I got a laughter emoji back. So I hope that answers your kind of comment, Tony, and anyone else out there that's thinking that artists are doing really well when they've got these huge kind of essentially a vanity metric.

30:06Yes, there will be some people that have made£60 ,000 off the back of that many streams. And yes, some of them will replicate that and will go on to do really well with live shows. but from the majority of musicians I speak to that I mean I worked with Max Richter who at the time when I worked with him had three billion streams he is not selling out venues of the scale that three billion streams would suggest because it is very very hard to connect to that audience and you would think someone with billions of streams would be selling out 15 20 nights at the O2 and the Hydro in Glasgow and Madison Square Garden and all those venues and yes Max does do big shows but he is not at the Billie Eilish level he is not at the Ed Sheeran or 1975 kind of level so I think it's really crucial to see the disconnect and the brokenness of the system that you can build up that many streams on a song but really struggle to turn those into an audience and And I think it's one of the big failings of Spotify.

31:12And I think going back to the previous question about the consolidation, every time you sell something on Bandcamp, you can communicate with that person again. They might buy the next five to 10 releases you put out and a t-shirt and come to one of your shows. And in grassroots music, it's so crucial. You can have, I think we worked out for like one album sale on Bandcamp, which brings in after the costs about£7, that is thousands of streams on Spotify and like I once stood at a merch desk and told a friend of mine who worked at Spotify when we were in Sweden that someone was demanding that I put an album up on Spotify and I didn't own the rights to it it was a previous label I think that was in administration and they'd taken their catalogue down from streaming and I was like look you can buy it for like 15 euros and this guy's like I pay less than that for my Spotify subscription I just want to listened to it a few times and I was like but you'll cover some of our costs to get back to the UK and we'll be able to come tour Sweden again he's like yeah but I'm paying for Spotify why do I want a CD I don't think I've even got a CD player which is completely fair enough

32:34so that's the end of part one of this week's episode stick around for part two which is going to be all about the disarmed spotify movement i've been sean adams you've been you thank you for your questions and if you like this q a episode you want to send questions for the next one send your email to sean sean at drowningsound.org or just find me online somewhere and drop it in the replies and i will copy and paste into a little note that I keep on my phone. And I guess if these episodes are something that we should be doing more regularly, like if there's a certain topic that you feel like you'd like to learn a little bit more about, then that'll be really useful too, even if you don't have a specific question.

33:16Thank you to Josh for cutting together this. Hopefully I did not meander too much, me had to take too much out, but I will see you in the next one.

33:38there's definitely a scope for slightly more organized music centered music focused social platforms and i think that that's one of the big things we lost when myspace went in fact i just there was a great clip of kate nash that might stick on the end of this podcast talking to steve about the magic of myspace so if you want to stick around to the end i'll drop that in I think Myspace was one of the freest, best eras in music history we've ever had. I'll fight anybody who wants to argue with me on that because there was no gatekeepers. No one from radio, no one from record labels owned it. The people that decided what was going to be successful were kids.

34:20That's never happened. When has that ever happened before? And when has it ever happened since? Because as soon as Myspace went away, everything now is like algorithm crazy. Everything's bought and paid for. there's like teams of people behind people becoming discovered it doesn't mean those people aren't talented but it's like this access route that made my career just isn't there anymore it was like this weird window that some of us managed to slip through and go oh my god like no one's in charge apart from teenagers that are doing myspace meetups it's not the same on tiktok and instagram because actually artists find that to be a lot of pressure because they have to present everything's filmed and it takes time and effort to like film and edit things and try to make things go viral and it's like I think a lot of artists really are exhausted by that but like we were right at the beginning before it got too horrible and all you had to do was like upload a photo when you did a gig and it wasn't as much about image it really was about the song player and songs and as a fan of music I found it really fun to discover music through

35:26Thank you.