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What Does Spotify Going Public Mean For A Family Of Songwriters?

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Kris Delmhorst is a subtly powerful singer/songwriter operating in the genre of Americana. Take the songs on her latest record, The Wild: they’re cunningly simple at first listen. Then, without warning, you’re humming a melody and you don’t know why. You almost don’t know where it came from—until you remember it came from Kris. Like implanted memories, her songs slide easily into your unconscious and linger there, blending in with the rest of your private library while remaining unmistakably hers.

Hers are the kinds of songs written by someone who gets out into the world and lives a little, and it was while living a songwriter’s life that she met another musician, the guitarist and singer/songwriter Jeffrey Foucault. Up until her most recent record, the two had collaborated only occasionally, appearing sometimes on each other’s records, but leaving their mutual jobs outside of the home.

Joe Navas

In 2008, they had a child, but this did not change the grand scheme of their work. Neither stopped writing or performing. They would keep touring, keep singing, and keep trying to sell records.

All went according to plan—except for that last part, for 2008 saw another birth, one that would have a remarkable effect on Kris, Jeffery, and indeed, every full-time musician trying to make a living. That, of course, would be Spotify.

Now that the streaming music service is going public, plenty of outlets, Forbes included, will issue pieces about what the move means for the music business. I thought it would be interesting to take a different tack—to talk about what Spotify has already meant to a family of singer/songwriters.

The immediate effect of the service is easy to grasp. “We make less money,” Delmhorst said of the effect Spotify has had on her work. Previous to Spotify, she had noticed a decline in sales due to the platform’s predecessor—the iTunes music store. But watching the shift to downloads was a longer, slower change, especially compared to what came next. “When streaming happened,” Kris told me, “that’s when the velocity of the change really got crazy.”

After almost a decade of streaming prevalence, one thing has become clear: “The whole idea of financial security? We’re just used to it not being there.”

But Kris and Jeffery are not going to stop writing or playing. It’s not in their DNA. So what’s been the way forward for the couple? The conventional wisdom has been to offset Spotify losses by touring, licensing, and a little crowdfunding for good measure; indeed, “the one thing that’s fairly reliable is touring,” Kris told me.

However, “it’s hard to be twenty years into a career—to have a kid and a house and be at the point where people start thinking about being on the road less—and have the only answer anyone can come up with be ‘you better be on the road more.’”

As for licensing, they’ve had success with that; her husband’s songs have lent themselves to shows like Sons of Anarchy. But the licensing world only holds so many open spots, even as television shows proliferate. A few years ago, this outlet and others labeled licensing a verifiable trend. But now there seems to be more supply than demand.

“It’s a drying up watering-hole,” Kris said, “and everyone’s competing.”

The reality for Kris and her contemporaries is that “there’s no way to make up for people not buying stuff…There’s nothing even remotely close.”

In recent years, Kris, her husband, and many others have been flirting with how to land a spot on the coveted, curated Spotify playlist, which has assumed the role of musical gatekeeper in our current times. But the mechanics of how to land such a placement remain murky at best—even to labels.

For more perspective on this, I talked to Jim Olsen, president of Signature Sounds, an independent label specializing in Roots music and Americana.

“It is a somewhat mysterious process,” he told me. “Some of the roots playlists are curated by a woman who has you fill out a form, and you just send it off. She doesn’t want to be worked on. Doesn’t want to receive emails or phone calls.”

Jim has noticed that in filling out forms and sending press Spotify’s way, “we do get some good placements.” However, “it’s just so unpredictable, and it’s so meaningful now that when you don’t get them it’s disappointing. And you really can’t bake it into your marketing plan.”

If this seems a little more opaque and confounding than you’d expect to hear from a record label, here’s something Jim would like you to keep in mind: “You have to understand that Spotify’s partially owned by the major labels. They received a sweetheart deal, and it’s to Spotify’s advantage to make sure that their stuff becomes priority.”

Seen in this light, the hurdles to a Spotify playlist for independent artists seem more clear. However, I think this relationship explains a larger trend as well; the coordination between Spotify and the majors speaks to the growing homogeneity across musical outlets as a whole.

We know that the most successful genres on streaming are hip-hop and R’n’B, just as we know that a lion’s share of listening is done via streaming. Sure, you could say this is the free market at work, that people are voting with their clicks, but this ignores the forces behind a supposedly free market—an engine of cooperating majors that drive their chosen music across mainstream radio, so that it becomes the din behind everyday activities (pay attention to the music in the grocery store the next time you shop, or the tunes coming through the radio at your locally national pharmacy, and you’ll hear what I mean).

We know that people like what they’ve already heard; to be constantly exposed to one song over and over again could result in an echo-chamber of experience, even across so-called democratized platforms. This facet, plus a mysterious cherry picking of new content for playlists, typifies in an experience Kris calls “weirdly homogenizing.”

“All of us grew up making tapes and burning mixes for people—and it’s such a great way to share music,” Kris told me. However, “it’s disconnected. It takes a song out of its context. A song is just a song—this isolated piece of art that’s dissociated. You don’t even know what decade it’s from.”

Much has been made of Spotify’s effect on the album as a whole, its place as a gatekeeper for new music, the ramifications of the service on an everyday’s musician’s life. In the light of Spotify’s DPO, where it becomes more and more certain that shareholders will make money as artists continue to struggle, there might not be much of a silver lining.

Still, artists like Kris aren’t going anywhere. “What we have is a couple decades of an actual fan base,” she told me. “On a very fundamental level, that feels like something we can count on. We have people who’re interested in the music we make, and are interested in helping us keep making it.”

When it comes to Spotify, Kris may have “zero belief that they, or pretty much any company, give two sh**s about anything aside from their bottom line.” Still, there’s a strange kink in this whole struggle—this dance between artist and vendor—that weirdly serves them both.

“The weak spot in this whole thing is that musicians, we just want to keep doing it,” Kris told me. “Until we really can’t survive doing it, we’re all going to find a way.”

 

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