Steve reflects on working as a music journalist in the 1990s – and has lots to say on music journalism today; Spotify deletes 75 million "spam songs"; and why is TikTok so important to music?

0:07Steve:Hello and welcome to The Price of Music, brought to you by Music Ally, the show that's fascinated by all the fun and games and finances of the music world. As explained each week by me, Steve Lemack, and him, Stuart Dredge. If you want an easy guide to what's going on in the music biz and how it all works and how the figures stack up, then here we are. This week, more old songs making waves on social media? Has the American TikTok dilemma been solved? And the collapse of music print media and its financial consequences for journalists? But first, here's Stu's big stats of the week. What's your big number this week, Stuart?

0:46Steve:75 million. 75 million is quite impressive.

0:50Stu:It refers to what exactly? It's how many tracks Spotify has removed from its service last year because they were spam because they were spam i didn't know you could have musical

1:01Steve:spam what does what does spam mean in this context then what is spam it's that monty python song you

1:07Stu:know the one so i've uploaded it 75 million times to make a point no so this is spam tracks which is it's a thing that's been become a part of the streaming landscape where people upload thousands or hundreds of thousands of tracks it may be the same tracks slightly with the title changed it may be just a bunch of ai generated music but it's people mass uploading stuff that isn't intended to be played by humans ever it's just put on there to either do a fraud do a fraud that's the one way to commit fraud yeah um or just clogging up the system um and this came as part of spotify did an announcement about some of the things it's doing around ai music and as part of that just halfway through this press conference went by the way we've removed 75 million tracks in the last year and the scale of that like the official number which i think is probably bigger than this now is that spotify has a hundred million tracks on its service like that's been the big this is how much we've got so another 75 on top of that was just landfill um and it's got rid of it so obviously this is one of those stats where they're saying it because they're they want us to be impressed by it and it is quite impressive you know it's like saying we're not just letting this stuff stay up we're getting rid of it so yeah um this week's three big news stories are

2:19Steve:all quite industry-based but worth touching on even briefly i think and you just mentioned spotify announcing some wider changes designed to respond to the explosion in ai generated music so as as part of their latest announcement what else are they doing and why apart from taking out

2:41Stu:the spam yeah so there were three things in this announcement last week um and the one was this this new spam filter, which I mean, I guess we're all used to the idea of spam filters in our email, aren't we? So the things that stop us getting all those Viagra emails, um, being centrist by strangers. Um, and they've got the equivalent for stream music where basically they're going to be detecting, um, tracks that are uploaded, uh, mass upload. So is it mass uploaded? So someone's uploaded a hundred thousand tracks. They're all useless just to commit fraud. They'll go. So it's improving its detection technology.

3:11Stu:Um, the other thing, and look, bear with me on this, because I think you'll listen to this and say that sounds really boring. It does. A new system of music credits developed by the DDEX industry consortium. Right. What does that mean in English then? What does that entail? So when you're a musician and you're uploading a song or getting ready to upload songs to Spotify or streaming services, you have to create all the metadata. So the tracks title, genre, all data. And this new system is also going to let you say how AI was used in the process of a tool. um so what it will be is for example if you used ai generated vocals in your songs you'll say that if you created some samples using ai but then created a song yourself in traditional way you can say that and if you use ai just to mix and master it you can say that so it's kind of you can you don't just say yes i used ai in this song you'll be able to say exactly how and where

4:03Steve:right and what's what will will people will people necessarily do that you know because i mean given the choice some people might think i'm not going to fess up to this

4:14Stu:well so part of the reason behind making it a bit more nuanced is so that people don't feel worried about it because i know a lot of musicians are thinking well my music is human music but i used an ai to mix it but if i say that will it be labeled as ai generated music and no one wants to listen to it so it avoids that um but yeah the idea i mean spotify's pitch was we don't want to punish musicians who are using this properly in their work but we also want to have these transparency rules so that if someone does create an AI track and doesn't fill in that data, that kind of suggests something rummers up and that might kind of help them take it down.

4:47Stu:So there is like a hint of a stick that if you don't use these, that kind of gives them a clue about your motivations because they're also going to have technology to maybe detect if you have used AI. So I think that's quite a good thing. And the idea is it's an industry standard. So it could be used by any service. The idea behind it is that everyone can use the same standard. and eventually you'll be able to see and you'll be able to see a song and say oh i understand how i was used here and i'm not kind of being defrauded okay um and the third thing was um uh ai voice clones you know we talked about this before where like someone clones an artist's voice and then releases a song with them singing something they didn't sing so there's a famous streak in the weekend um that's now officially barred on spotify it's not allowed um which isn't a big change but just makes it official so in the past for example if someone cloned an artist's voice and uploaded a track to spotify the label would have to complain or the artist team and say look that's not my artist and then spotify decided to take it down it might be whereas now it's against the rules it comes straight down when notified so it's kind of just firming that up but well at the same time if you're an artist and you want to do that yourself like grimes did she licensed her voice out for ai so that people could use it that's still fine so that that's allowed And again, it's the idea of they want to support artists who are using their own creative ways, but crack down on what they call as bad actors.

6:04Stu:So that was the kind of unifying theme here.

6:07Steve:Story two. And now this one has been running longer than the archers or for listeners outside the UK. Let's say the history of the Olympics is short by comparison. This is the TikTok saga in the States. Do you want to recap the plot and what has happened this week? And I guess as well, we should also make the point why is, I think, needs restating on a reasonably regular basis why TikTok is just so important to the music industry at the moment.

6:39Stu:Yeah, I'm getting this recap down to a fine art now. I think I've got it in a sentence. So basically, a US law says TikTok there has to be sold or it's going to get banned. And this is all about its ownership by a Chinese company and concerns about national security in the US. and the deadline to enforce this law just keeps getting extended to figure out a way to sell TikTok US in a deal that everyone approves of. So last week there was an executive order from the US president himself kind of giving details of this deal that's been agreed. So the idea is TikTok US will become a new separate company, majority owned by American investors, valued at$14 billion, which sounds like a big number.

7:22Stu:But at one point people were saying oh it could be worth 40 billion right so it's not worth quite as much as people thought early in the process um and then byte dance which is a chinese company that owns tick tock now they'd still they let it's only about 20 of the new company so they'd be like a minority owner but it might still be in charge of shopping and advertising which is basically where the comes from right um so if this deal goes through it basically means tick tock is here to stay in the US. And that means that all the artists and all the labels who have made it a really big part of their marketing plans just carry on using it.

7:56Stu:They don't need a plan B, which they kind of have been doing anyway. Every time the deadline got extended, people got less panicked about this prospect of it closing down there. But there are a couple of dark clouds hovering over this, which I kind of thought might be quite talk about. The first thing is like, so far, it's only the White House saying this deal has been agreed. So basically, you've got President Trump's word saying, I talked to the Chinese president and he approves this deal, but the Chinese authorities have been really conspicuously silenced so far in public. And a few Chinese newspapers saying, well, this will depend on the US delivering on its promises.

8:30Stu:So it's not entirely certain this has actually been agreed and approved. And there is a scenario where China says, actually, no, we don't like this deal. And then Trump possibly throws his toys out the pram, shuts down TikTok in the US and everyone panics again and has to find something else to use. I mean, that seems like the unlikeliest outcome, but it is still possible. But the other thing, and this is, so I have to get a bit political. Is that okay? I'm going to rely on how you look to say if I'm going too far. So this deal was pushed through by Trump and the vice president, J.D. Vance. They played a big role in sort of figuring out this.

9:06Stu:And a tech firm called Oracle is going to be running TikTok or play a big role in running TikTok in the US. And that company's boss is a big backer of Trump. And the new owners, they're going to have control of TikTok's recommendation algorithm in the US, so how it decides what to show people. And also it's content moderation decisions, so who gets banned, who gets promoted. And people are starting to say around the edges, hang on a minute, there's a lot of stuff being talked about in the US about censorship and the media. So there was the Jimmy Kimmel late night talk show recently got taken off the air, kind of under pressure from one of Trump's regulation buddies.

9:44Stu:And so now people are starting to go, hang on a minute, if buddies of the president are going to be in control of TikTok, which has like more than 180 million users in the US, it's big, it's really big. What if this deal starts to turn it into this politicized space? So where there's a lot of far right wing rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and like you don't have to look too far for an example of that, because that's what's happened. that's what people have said has happened to X, formerly Twitter, since Elon Musk bought it. And what happened to X was a lot of musicians left it or have retreated from it because of the kind of culture change there.

10:18Stu:And I think that's the danger for TikTok here, that if it gets saved in the US, but if it becomes this kind of Margot Musk hellscape, which is just me worrying, really. But there's a potential of a similar drain. If artists say, hang on a minute, we don't feel comfortable here anymore, we're going to go elsewhere. So that is the, people are starting to talk about it. Like a lot of the headlines about TikTok's being saved, hurrah. People are starting to say, hang on a minute, how are its new owners going to run it? And what will that mean for artists who aren't on board with the current political regime in the US?

10:52Steve:Okay. Story three, and this, I guess, bears some relation to TikTok and other social platforms, but more news this week of more old tracks finding a new life on social media uh billy eilish's breakthrough hit from 2015 is top of the youtube shorts chart uh while there's a rihanna album track from 2007 which is back in the charts as well thanks to as we've just been saying to tiktok yeah it's just this

11:24Stu:is like we could probably do a story every week with different songs but yeah this week so did you ever see ocean eyes it was like the first billy eilish track to blow up on soundcloud i think right no i didn't not at the time so it's pre her big pre her publicly being on a big label but yeah it's top of the youtube shorts chart so youtube shorts if anyone doesn't know that's kind of youtube's tiktok equivalent so short videos people can make and put songs in them and ocean eyes was the very the most popular song used for videos in in the recent week of 12 to 18 so and then it then the song went back into the top 100 on youtube music and it's just as far as i can tell it's a random trend where people are making youtube shorts videos showing off their eyes and thus the track ocean eyes seem to fit which is kind of it sounds quite like they could have chosen anything because i have a tiger you know you're lying eyes like a lot of songs with eyes in um and here you go and and this is going to be making billy eilish money because her song is

12:22Steve:getting a virus bike yeah i was i was going to ask about this what is the financial uplift um because what's i can't remember now i should know these figures but you know as an artist what would you be getting paid for you know plays on youtube shorts or on tiktok or does the does the presence on those platforms that lead to increased figures elsewhere on the streaming services and that's where the money is that's where the money is i mean the money you do get

12:49Stu:royalties for stuff being used on tiktok and youtube shorts but the money is is small and the music industry regularly moans about it, but what happens, and this is one of those trends that I think we need more research into to understand exactly how big it can be. But if your track goes viral on one of these platforms, it goes up the charts and gets more streams elsewhere. And as we said before, I think in the UK, the ballpark figure in the past has been a million streams, was about 5 ,000 quid. But then you might only see 20 % of that as an artist in a contract. So, you know, a million streams, maybe 1 ,000 quid.

13:22Stu:So if a thing takes off on YouTube shorts and you get 10 million extra streams, then that's like significant. And the same with Rihanna. So this Rihanna track, I love the Rihanna story because this is a track called Breaking Dishes by Rihanna. And it's about cheating men, basically. That's the theme of it. And people are using that on TikTok to soundtrack videos about cheating men. Like they're kind of calling out their ex-boyfriends. But the best one I saw was someone saying, a man cheated, but I've only got plastic dishes and it's them throwing the dishes on the floor and then bouncing all over the kitchen um and so basically what happens is people someone someone used this song and did a really cool video other people saw it followed suit and then once it starts trending everyone jumps on the bandwagon because that's how these platforms work like if you are someone trying to make money from your tiktok videos you're on top of what what's trending today and like right i better do a video with that song in it because that's what's trending um so it's again rihanna this song which was an album track is now in the main top 100 in the us for the first time um and it came out what 18 years ago trying to add it up um so yeah i mean it seems organic like this is this is a case of of a viral craze starting and spreading but i think increasingly labels are going to be saying right how do we make this happen like how do we take this decades old album track find something in the lyrics that could be a really good hook and then how do we get people to start using how do we pay influencers to start doing it so we're going to get these stories and And the thing I'm looking for now is when I hear these stories, is it completely organic or is it something that a label has kicked into gear?

14:56Steve:Yeah, that's part of the idea. Yeah, I get you. Any other business this week? I know we're going to answer a question for one of our listeners, Richard. Before we get to that, though, can we start with the latest from the frontline filing debate, which started when I mentioned having a conversation with one of the lovely staff at Resident Records in Brighton about where you file PJ Harvey under P or H? I'm very much in the H camp myself, but we are indebted to listener Anna, who commented on Spotify, refiling dilemmas. I was in Resident Records today and can confirm PJ Harvey is filed under H.

15:33Steve:Their filing was consistent, so that must be reassuring. It is. Thank you very much, Anna. Well, just when we thought we might be getting towards the end of this thread, then producer Joe has just raised the issue of Elton John. E or J? Should be J. Doesn't look right under J. I mean it should be Jay though should it? I'll tell you what we'll come back I mean there's a lot of discussions we had

15:54Stu:I think Jay but I said P for Hedja Harvey and I say Jay so I'm not sure I've got any consistency that's why I wouldn't get a job in resident records they'd just kick me out

16:02Steve:I think we may return to this in this week's edition of The Lock-In when we can also do that preposterous theory about the Beach Boys and the Beatles we'll come to that later. Here's the question though from another of our followers Richard Bowes, thank you Richard for getting in touch uh he says hi everyone loyal patron here i'm a music journalist slash writer for clash louder than war and live forever though they're all uh for anyone who doesn't know you know big music websites um as a writer for all these i've previously worked as well for gig wise before it folded last year and i've interviewed some fairly big names including sean rider tim burgess royal blood and frank turner but i've never been paid a penny for this work i don't do it for the money clearly uh i'd do it for the love and interest in speaking to people about music but it struck me says richard that with the likes of q magazine and enemy uh folding in the last few years there's very little print media certainly in the uk uh it's mojo uncut kerrang and rolling stone but they're the only music magazines which are certainly the only ones available in supermarkets and even then they're largely special editions about specific bands.

17:15Steve:The recent integration of Pitchfork into GQ met with some outcry, but the dial hasn't moved. It would be interesting to hear how the money was distributed when Steve was a journalist in comparison to nowadays. It strikes me that journalism and writing is a key part of the music industry infrastructure, but those paid for it are few and far between. As I say, thank you, Richard. I mean, it's a massive question there. So when I started thinking about it, I mean, there's one or two tangents you could go off down, I think, from this. So I've got two or three different bits of answer to your question or to your point.

17:54Steve:I guess in answer to the question about payment in the old days, I mean, obviously it's more than 30 years ago now since I left the new Musical Express. But at the time, the circulation was around about 110 ,000 to 120 ,000 copies a week. I think that's roughly how much we were selling. So anyway, because it's quite a long time. My memory of what you get paid is a bit fuzzy. I do remember, though, that while a lot of people talk about being paid by word count, at the NME, you were paid by the inch. So you got paid for how much space your article actually took up in the paper. but at the time say these are very rough figures but a live review a minor live review your average live review uh would probably pay you about 25 pounds a lead review 50 60 maybe i mean the letters page that's what you want letters page paid i think about 80 pounds which is a lot of money in them days i mean those things were the saving grace for freelancers doing the singles page or the letters page that was you know that was a decent bit of money um but obviously the The point was, I guess, if you picked up enough work, you could make a living as a freelancer.

19:09Steve:If you could pick up just about enough work, a live review and an album review every week, maybe the letters page, a feature, particularly as you work your way up to longer form features, then you could, I mean, you're not going to live in a palace, but you could do all right out of it. And I think the other point to be made is the fact that, you know, there was so little alternative music on national radio at the time, except for John Peel. And, of course, later we did the evening session. But the weekly papers had a lot of clout at that point. And, you know, we sort of quite often you could see a music paper or the set of music papers.

19:50Steve:There were the three, Melody Maker Sounds and the NME, would set the agenda, really. and in some cases they were the only place where certain artists could catch a break you know there was nowhere else for a new band to get mentioned really and that was why the music industry were were more than keen on throwing money at the music papers you know major labels we might come back into this in the lock-in as well but major labels at the time I worked for the enemy 2087 and 92 but I know this went on through quite a lot of the 90s as well. They'd always be flying journalists off to America or Europe just to interview a band and buy a journalist drinks to get their artists in the paper.

20:37Steve:So as I say, I mean, I'm not saying everyone made a mint, but most people made a reasonable living, an okay just above living wage living, and had a very good time, I think. I mean, the other thing, I mean, so the reason I can't tell you exactly what some of the payments were to freelancers, because I was on staff my entire career at the NME, starting off as news editor. but then I became live editor where I have to say not a month would go by without you know needing to sub one or two of my stringers at the price of a pint or two before they all went off to record and tape exchange to flog their records to buy us back that was the only way of making money wasn't it selling off your stuff oh yeah yeah it definitely was um but yeah so um but being on staff you get a monthly paycheck for the job you did and so it was like a live editor for a while so i got paid for being live editor and didn't get anything extra for any of the articles or reviews which which i wrote because you were on staff and everything came under your wage uh and i wrote loads i mean a lot of staff members we wrote loads again exactly the same as you not because we wanted to make money out of it because we wanted to want to meet bands and see gigs and you know what were you what we were what we were essentially doing trying to corrupt a nation's musical taste by getting our opinions in print to as many people as possible um although i tell you one thing though the other thing about being on staff and how it relates to payment anything he wrote not only did you not get paid for it it was also owned by the publisher and i guess probably still is so anytime nme reuses or reprints my review of nevermind by nivan don't don't see a penny don't see a penny extra i mean obviously it's nice you know that people still refer to it uh but in the same way that you know particularly during the 70s 80s 90s that bands did record deals where they signed away all their rights so it turns out did we the staff journalists of uh the time anyway that's that's how it was i left in october 92 which i guess was just as the clouds were coming over the horizon, really.

22:56Steve:Because the problem, obviously, for weekly music magazines from the mid-late 90s onwards ends up being the internet. And here's one of the reasons why. While I was at the NME, during my five years there, they conducted at different times readership surveys. I think there were two while I was there, asking people who bought the paper, actual people who bought the paper, why do you buy the paper? What was the number one answer? what did people buy the new musical express for Stuart?

23:27Stu:Gig listings.

23:29Steve:Exactly that. Gig guide was top. If it wasn't gig guide, it was news. Gig guide and news pages were the top two reasons why people bought The Enemy. At number, I think it was three or four, the third or fourth reason, why do you buy the new musical express? The crossword. and so obviously this was quite bruising to all our egos the writers egos but features features basically came you know features and new bands they come right down the list and so of course the internet comes along and the papers lose their exclusivity to the news all the things the reasons why people actually bought the music papers i mean i'm not saying people bought the Bought the enemy, read the news and threw it away.

24:17Steve:Obviously, you then read other bits and pieces. But news was so key that, you know, with news breaking all the time, by the time the music papers came out, that news was out of date. That's the first thing that starts undermining the music papers. And concurrent with that is the change in the way that the music industry decided it was going to market and advertise its artists. because what keeps all magazines alive is advertising revenue. The actual size of the NME, when we sat in an editorial meeting on a Tuesday, you would find out, and you'd have an average size, but size of the paper could go up and down depending on how many ads had been sold for that week.

25:04Steve:So it's quite reliant on advertising. you know both the you know we used to have those big page ads for new albums but also if you remember the music papers from back then acres absolutely acres and acres of live ads for gigs and tours and as the industry over the years moves to new models advertising or marketing spend starts to go elsewhere and the industry decides maybe we'll directly market to fans instead of advertising in these papers. And this was the slippery slope, which started with street teams and endless flyers being given out outside gigs and leads us to where we are now, where marketing will involve TikTok or whatever and bands can publicly announce their gigs on their social media.

25:56Steve:So advertising for print media slowly, slowly starts to collapse. And of course, then as well, as the sales begin to dip because people are getting their news somewhere else then that affects your ad revenue because you can charge more for an ad in a paper selling 120 000 copies a week than you can in a paper selling 80 000 copies a week and and so it goes as the circulation begins to slide and then one by one the papers started to fold i mean even those who survive like the NME survived online, even those publications have had to shift their editorial in order to attract enough readers and hence enough advertisers to prolong their existence.