You’re right about Fripp’s control; I misread something up above. Which makes sense — I was surprised to think that he’d changed anything there regarding Discipline Global.

What I referred to as “whining” was the fact that I’ve seen quite a few musicians and bands recently essentially denying reality and pretending that there’s still a future for record deals. As you said, pointing out the weaknesses of various possibilities isn’t whining, but let’s say it’s a step in that direction.

Others have pointed out elsewhere that things are not in fact bad for bands right now, and are exceptionally good for music fans. Things are extremely bad for major labels whose revenue structure relies on the sale of tracks — and many of them. If they realize that their strength lies in marketing, not production and distribution, then they may still come out of this with something intact; we’ll see.

For bands, I very much understand what you mean about live music in the U.S. I’ve done quite a few tours and have barely broken even most of the time. It’s rough. However, many friends of mine have built a good framework for themselves through constant touring and just sticking with it (and, sure, playing kick-ass music!). It’s quite possible, and I’m optimistic enough to believe that quality will shine through the glut. I know very well that luck has a lot to do with it, but perseverence does as well. If the huge glut of bullshit bands keeps a good band down, then that good band either wasn’t good enough, didn’t stick with it enough, or, perhaps, was simply unlucky. The loss is both theirs and ours, yes. If we want to be optimistic about this, we can hope that the ability of the internet to provide such a massive selection will lead to listeners finding a niche they love, and put an end to the corporate-endorsed lowest-common-denominator “star”. The cynic in me laughs at the idea, but we can hope.

Good comments!

A few things:

1. Mr. Fripp is in “control” of his music, or at least the music remarked on in his diary post. But that doesn’t stop it from being on Spotify, as he has shown. So: another thing for him to police.

2. Spotify isn’t good enough for artists, or for Music, or for Culture, and won’t solve the underlying issue. It’s not “whining” to point that out.

3. Counseling that bands simply tour or sell merch is not satisfactory. Frankly, the live experience infrastructure in the USA is not set up to support quality live experiences in anywhere near the quantity that the current artistic community requires to survive. There is a huge glut of bands out there, enabled by ProTools/mySpace/internet bullshit, smothering a lot of good artists, who are going to see their careers end prematurely (“prematurely” relative to how long they coulda expected their career to last if they’d emerged pre-1999.) We’ll see who makes it out the other side of this Great Winnowing.

On the other hand. Doing some very crude math, if you assume that the wholesale rate received by a label for an album from their distributors is about £5, it would take 2,500 streams on Spotify to supply the same amount of revenue. Figuring 10 songs/album on average, that’s 250 streams of each song. So you’d need 250 people to listen through the album to generate the same amount of money as one CD sale. That can be fine, if you assume that the number of potential listeners on the internet is large enough to cover the number of CD sales. For an indie band, you’re doing damn well if you sell 5,000 CDs. That would then be 1,250,000 people listening through the whole album on Spotify. Seems unlikely, doesn’t it? So the math doesn’t work very well.

Personally, though, as a former label owner and current musician, I firmly believe that, for better or worse, music is now a free commodity. Whining won’t change that — and in fact nothing will. Music is already pretty much free. People may continue to buy online for a while, but I’ll be very surprised if it doesn’t decline to nothing over the next 5-10 years, if not sooner. Musicians who want to make a living at it will do what indie bands have always done anyway — tour, play shows, sell t-shirts and vinyl and other limited goods: things that people will pay for.

I disagree, because that “stream replaces purchase” assumes wrongly that, if I listen to song X now, it means that I’m only doing so in lieu of buying the song.

a) I could be doing so as a longer preview than, say, iTunes allows.
b) I could be doing so to familiarize myself with an artist whose name–but not music–I’d heard in preparation for a purchase decision.
c) I could be doing so simply because I feel like hearing the song, period.

(c), in particular, speaks to your point. The fact that I’m listening to the song because I can do so right now does not in any way mean that I would be buying the song (assuming its availability on a per-song basis) otherwise.

Free listening does not equal lost sales, because free listening, in many cases, is a matter of opportunity. I get to listen to song X free? Sweet! If tomorrow you tell me I can’t hear that song free, however, I’m not going to buy it simply because it’s otherwise unavailable. Some might d/l it illegally, some might buy it, some might just shrug and listen to something else.

But there is no one-to-one, zero-sum relationship between free listening and paid listening. To claim otherwise grossly overstates *the significance of a single hearing* of song X for the individual listener and for listeners in the aggregate.

Further, concerning your statement that a free listen is “a net loss for the artist and for the culture”…how do you measure that? As I’ve shown above, a free listen does not inherently mean a lost sale. So, how does the artist lose? How does “the culture” (and I assume you mean the cultural community of musicians, rather than Culture writ large) lose? I would hold the exact opposite: a free hearing adds listeners to the artist’s audience, who may then become CD buyers or song buyers or ticket buyers.

To take the extremely myopic view and say, such-and-such song was played X times and I only saw pocket change, is to misunderstand entirely the potential of Spotify and its revolutionary business model.

The big problem with parts of the music industry is the complete failure to understand streaming. Of course in many cases, such as with King Crimson, greed plays a huge part.

Robert Fripp is a person that doesn’t care one thing about his fans. All he wants is more money. If all artists shared his uneducated views the world would be an awful place.

At the moment he gives the Spotify listeners just one great option: to download his music from pirate sites. And how much money does that give him in the end? Nothing. Great work, Mr. Fripp!