David Byrne Slams Streaming Services in New Op-Ed

"The internet will suck the creative content out of the world until nothing is left."
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David Byrne's soapbox this week is not limited to discussions of the creative class and wealth inequality in New York. Today The Guardian has published a very long op-ed by Byrne on the much fussed-over topic of digital music streaming, and whether or not dominant services like Spotify and Pandora will actually work to benefit smaller acts in the long run. He references discussions started by other artists, including the Black Keys, Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich, and Damon Krukowski.

So how does David Byrne feel about the move toward a free online streaming culture? It's not black-and-white, of course, but he ultimately makes the case that services like Spotify threaten to create a "culture of blockbusters" and that "the inevitable result would seem to be that the internet will suck the creative content out of the whole world until nothing is left."

Byrne talks about how these streaming services harm up-and-coming acts. He argues:

In the future, if artists have to rely almost exclusively on the income from these services, they'll be out of work within a year. Some of us have other sources of income, such as live concerts, and some of us have reached the point where we can play to decent numbers of people because a record label believed in us at some point in the past. I can't deny that label-support gave me a leg up – though not every successful artist needs it. So, yes, I could conceivably survive, as I don't rely on the pittance that comes my way from music streaming, as could Yorke and some of the others. But up-and-coming artists don't have that advantage – some haven't got to the point where they can make a living on live performances and licensing.

And he doesn't think the services help listeners discover new music, either:

I also don't understand the claim of discovery that Spotify makes; the actual moment of discovery in most cases happens at the moment when someone else tells you about an artist or you read about them – not when you're on the streaming service listening to what you have read about (though Spotify does indeed have a "discovery" page that, like Pandora's algorithm, suggests artists you might like). There is also, I'm told, a way to see what your "friends" have on their playlists, though I'd be curious to know whether a significant number of people find new music in this way. I'd be even more curious if the folks who "discover" music on these services then go on to purchase it. Why would you click and go elsewhere and pay when the free version is sitting right in front of you? Am I crazy?

He also makes a broader point about how consumption is going to change on the whole if trends continue to move in the direction they're headed:

The larger question is that if free or cheap streaming becomes the way we consume all (recorded) music and indeed a huge percentage of other creative content – TV, movies, games, art, porn – then perhaps we might stop for a moment and consider the effect these services and this technology will have, before "selling off" all our cultural assets the way the big record companies did. If, for instance, the future of the movie business comes to rely on the income from Netflix's $8-a-month-streaming-service as a way to fund all films and TV production, then things will change very quickly. As with music, that model doesn't seem sustainable if it becomes the dominant form of consumption. Musicians might, for now, challenge the major labels and get a fairer deal than 15% of a pittance, but it seems to me that the whole model is unsustainable as a means of supporting creative work of any kind. Not just music. The inevitable result would seem to be that the internet will suck the creative content out of the whole world until nothing is left.

Read the entire thing here. And read Damon Krukowski's op-ed "Making Cents" here.