For the conscience-laden music consumer, streaming music services
present an interesting quandary. By separating the concept of “legal
access to music” from the age-old paradigm of “paying the artist for an
entire song or album,” they’ve presented us with a whole new set of
ethical dilemmas to worry about. Instead of buying your music, you pay a
subscription fee that is in some way filtered down from Spotify to
record label to artist, based on some opaque algorithm of pay-per-play,
which is based on some opaque deal struck between the label and Spotify,
and then the label’s opaque individual contract with each of its
artists.
I suppose what I really want is some sort of “free range” sticker
slapped on my music consumption, so that I know the artist was ethically
treated in this transaction. Unfortunately, the current state of the
industry is rife with finger-pointing, and I have no idea who devours —
and who’s getting screwed out of — the $9.99 I drop into this darkened
pool every month.
What I do know for a fact is that some artists aren’t happy with
streaming services. Notable pullouts include Coldplay, Adele, and the
Black Keys (each of whom have removed their most recent albums from one
or all of the services), while many artists and catalogs have never been
available at all.
