Weekly Scroll - Spotify Struggling

Why neither artists nor Spotify are happy. Plus: Gaming is everywhere and the purse pigeon

Welcome to the weekend, internet gremlins.

Infinite Scroll recently hit 2K subscribers, and I love each of you equally. But I love the paid subscribers even MORE equally, if you catch my drift. So they get a bonus paid post this week! Free posts back next week, let’s dive in.

Why Spotify Struggles

Congresswoman Rashia Tlaib had a very dumb idea recently, but it’s a good jumping off point for a broader discussion of why the streaming industry is in trouble.

This is a bad argument for a variety of reasons:

• Creative artists are not (and have never been) working under the same model as wage labor. Making art, producing music, writing fiction, etc, is an inherently different task than a paid-hourly job. Masterpieces have been made in an hour while others spend years making worthless schlock.

• No artist is forced to use streaming - many famous musicians don’t. If they feel they’re getting a bad deal, they can opt out.

• No musician makes their money solely on streaming. Sales of albums and singles, touring, merch, radio, and commercial licensing are all revenue streams for musicians. It makes no sense to enforce a ‘living wage’ on a single revenue stream when they get revenue from all of the above.

But beyond all of that, it’s also dumb for the much more banal reason that streaming services are all deeply unprofitable.

In a normal fight about minimum wages or living wages, progressives will make the case that businesses make a ton of profit and should share that profit with workers. They say it’s unfair for the business to make billions while its workers struggle to pay their bills. Maybe you find that argument persuasive, maybe you don’t. But it’s very odd to level that argument at Spotify, a company that is famously unprofitable, has been unprofitable for as long as it’s existed, and that really struggles to even communicate a plan for profitability. There is no ‘stealing from the workers’ here, because that implies the company is making money. It’s not.

And it’s not just Spotify. Tidal is unprofitable. Apple, as best I can tell, doesn’t release profit/loss numbers for Apple Music, but reports suggest they struggle with profitability and their own leader has called music streaming a dead-end business.

Why do they all struggle so much? Let’s talk about how the music industry and music streaming services are structured. This one’s gonna get wonky. There will be graphs, you’ve been warned.