It is no secret that most popular music enjoyed today began with roots in Black music. Yet it’s never a bad time to remind people, especially since June is Black Music Month.
Pick any genre and odds are, you’ll find the impact and innovation of Black musical talent, from rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and pop to jazz, gospel, folk, and hip hop.
Of course, you’ll also find a whole lot of appropriation and whitewashing. Black musicians established or immensely influenced all of these styles — and more that have predominantly white narratives, such as country, classical, and electronica.
However, the way that people listen to music today, most often via streaming services, is making it increasingly difficult for musicians of any genre to make a living. For Black artists, it’s the latest chapter in a long history of mistreatment from the industry.
Here’s how it happened. The world, likely including you, gradually shifted away from physical listening mediums and into digital subscription services. Renegade online platforms at the turn of the century, such as Napster and Limewire, broke the seal and let users download and share songs through the backdoor instead of paying upfront. This freedom broadened audiences, rattled the recording industry, and siphoned away revenue from labels and artists.
While these companies were quickly shut down, their explosive use gave rise to the dominant streaming giants of today — namely Spotify and Apple Music. People now pay monthly fees to access vast song libraries, which has granted streaming services multibillion dollar revenues.
However, hardly any of that reaches creators. The pay-per-stream for artists is literally pennies on the streaming companies’ hundred dollar bill. Spotify pays as low as $0.003 per play while Apple Music cuts $0.01, though how it all shakes out with labels involved is a bit more complex.
In any case, this breakdown means that 50,000 people streaming a song earns someone just a couple hundred dollars, whereas the same amount of people buying an album used to pull in tens of thousands of dollars in royalties. And like any economic policy that shortchanges people, this squeezing of musician wages doubly hurts people of color.
Sending the value of music down the path of inequity is not the only way streaming has shifted the industry. The emphasis on songs and playlists over full albums has incentivized artists to prioritize shorter singles that are as trendy or soundbite-worthy as possible. Listener habits have changed too, from the algorithms that dictate preferences to the app tactics that seek to maximize engagement.
The thing is, music is not going away anytime soon, and neither are the people who make it. Artists of color and women in particular, despite the host of barriers they face in the industry, are surging forward.
So, if the big streamers are starting to ruffle your feathers, consider these ways to better support your favorite artists in making an unfair system work.
For starters, there are more equitable platforms you can use. Tidal, Deezer, Bandcamp, Qobuz, and YouTube Music all pay artists more per-stream than Spotify and Apple Music. Still, even the best of these options do not have great margins for artists. It seems that only relying on streaming to get better is unlikely to cut it, at least for now.
Buying physical copies, though, along with merch and show tickets, can make a real dent in the problem. While each of those revenue streams has its issues, they generally support artists more directly.
Some listeners have even gone full cold turkey on supporting big streaming companies. Instead, they leverage the resurgence of vinyl records and other physical media, the reliable ubiquity of radio, and being free from monthly fees to change their relationship with music.
Meanwhile, artists are on the other side of the same boat, and many are making the difficult choice to push away from distributing their music on the big streaming services.
“Opting out of streaming can feel like rendering your own work functionally moot, like the tree that falls in a forest with no one around,” writes Andy Cush, co-founder and editor of Hearing Things. “But plenty of musicians are opting out anyway.”
“There’s a growing sense that building an alternative might actually be possible—or that it’s worth trying, in any case, when the status quo so obviously stinks,” he added.
