Spotify, unwrapped..

It’s “Wrapped” season again – that magical time of the year when streaming services give gift-wrapped digital badges to both listeners and artists. For the listeners, it’s a chance to show off what they streamed most in the year prior; evidence of their fandom. But for artists, the badges come emblazoned with the amount of hours their music was streamed, how many listeners they had, and in how many countries their music was played.

I may come off like Andy Rooney here - we do share the same birthday, after all -  and I am aware that I’m not breaking new ground with this, but please allow me to offer my two cents - equal to about 7 streams on Spotify - vis-a-vis “Wrapped” for the music makers.

As most musicians are well aware, despite being positioned as a holiday offering to artists, the only ones really benefiting from all the “Wrapped” celebrations are the streaming services, who use it as an opportunity to trot out the grand-dame of canards: payment in exposure.

I suppose it’s nice of them to add up the hours a songwriter or band’s fans spent in the previous year on that particular streamer’s hamster wheel, but it seems an awful lot like a way to get something for nothing. This time, the ruse is run through the holiday-warm-and-fuzzy-machine, et voila: It’s a gift.

Don’t get me wrong, exposure’s a good thing. Artists need it to generate an audience, and I’m not judging anyone for showing off their Wrapped stats; the reach of streamers is, indeed, very cool. But that reach begs the question: what’s an audience on a streamer really worth? For the purposes of this post, Iet’s focus on Spotify, who pay the least and, perhaps, benefit most. And full disclosure, you will find my music there because what choice do I have if I want to participate in the 21st century music business?

The streaming royalty rate on Spotify is somewhere between .003 and .005 cents per stream - yes, you read that right. An artist on Spotify can conceivably make from $4-7,000 per million streams, but when over 80% of the artists there have under 50 monthly listeners, that seems, well, unlikely. What seems more likely is that Spotify’s starting salaries are north of 7k a year.

Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek suggestion that artists simply go make more content, citing the low cost of creation was rightly lambasted as more Let them eat cake than actionable feedback. Most artists can’t afford to make more content when there’s no money coming in from the last round.

To be clear, the music business has never been for the faint of heart. Artists have always been hungry enough for recognition to take whatever what we can get. And if it’s exposure on offer, hey, at least it‘s something. But it was never everything. When you take the actual business out of the music business, I’m not sure what’s left in it for the artists, except for the art. Most of us already weren’t doing it for the money, but we do still need some in order to be able to make music at all. And I understand that an entire generation or two has come up without ever paying for music, to which I say:

So what? I did, and it’s a perfectly normal thing to do. As a music maker old enough to remember fans who were happy to spend 10-20 bucks for a CD I made, I’m still not on board with the idea that music should be free, but I digress.

The issue I have with “Wrapped” is that the music-is-free/exposure-is-payment-enough narrative is coming from the ones keeping all the money, which makes Wrapped feel a lot more like gaslighting than giftgiving. In 2024, after years of crying poor, Spotify reached a quarter of a billion subscribers and finally turned their first annual operating profit, a whopping1.5 billion USD. Maybe it was all the money they saved on holiday marketing? Who knows, but Ek and other Spotify execs cashed out stock options amounting to over 1 billion dollars, with Ek himself accounting for 283 million.

I know, hate the game, not the player; I’m aware that technology’s the real culprit here - along with the guy from Napster who mainstreamed the music-is-free lie to begin with. And I get it, technology’s going to do what technology does, which is to innovate. But streamers have gone from innovators to profiteers. In the case of Spotify, who invented Wrapped, they’ve done it while pretending to be the champions of independent musicians, heroes who democratized the playing field and created a way for any given artist to, potentially, spontaneously catch the zeitgeist. Or combust.

In truth, Spotify has colluded with the major labels to make sure they both keep making money while doing just the opposite for artists. They’ve built out their company off our backs, not the other way around. We’ve given them the content they needed to become the central point of entry for music consumption in the 21st century while helping them amass an impressive portfolio of luxury office spaces around the world. The only thing most musicians got in exchange was “Wrapped”, the digital equivalent of ..And All I Got Was This Lousy T Shirt.

The hard truth is it’s on us artists. We’re the ones who still choose to believe it when they dangle the possibility of breaking out on one of their impenetrable editorial playlists that mostly go to their label partners, who choose to celebrate exposure as the sole metric for success. And the reason we do so is understandable: when streaming is mostly the only game left in town, exposure is the coin of the realm. But just because they offer no meaningful compensation beyond the eyeballs they can get us doesn’t make it right.

Adapt or die, you say, but it feels more like adapt and still die. Unless, of course, you’re a superstar. But, superstars, don’t you miss selling records? I guess you probably still do, but just remember, the Beatles didn’t tour for years and still made enough money to be, well, the Beatles. Who knows, you probably do too.

I’m not denying that streaming is the modern business, along with touring and selling t-shirts. And I’m readily admitting I’m just as guilty as the next artist of wanting to break out on their platforms; the possibility of discovery is intoxicating. But like all intoxicants, it can also kill you dead.

So, with all this in mind, I’m choosing to do the one thing I can, which is to not play along. I’m choosing to acknowledge “Wrapped” for the charade it is. I’m choosing to not celebrate what amounts to a music business variant of Stockholm Syndrome, to not participate in my own devaluation, to not do free advertising for a service built off our songs that refuses to pay us a non-laughable royalty rate while its founders cashed out to the tune of over a billion dollars just in the last year. Not when I still have to figure out to pay for my next record.

And so, this holiday season, when you see artists showing off their Wrapped numbers, I encourage you to go buy their music somewhere, because for the vast majority of music makers, their 2024 Spotify proceeds maybe covered their groceries 12 times in the last year. If they were lucky.

All Spotify really did was make them feel more popular than hungry. And to that, I say, Bah! Humbug! because I just can’t stomach it.

That’s a wrap.