 Hello there. Welcome. My name is Casper Melville. I am a senior lecturer in the School of Arts at SOAS. I convene the MA in global creative and cultural industries and this is me giving you a little sample, a taster of the kind of thing that you can expect if you come to SOAS, if you come to my MA or indeed other MA's in the department where you can take my courses as options. I'm sorry I can't be with you in person live. I'm afraid I had other things that have taken me away but thank you for joining me for this recording. So like I said in this recording I'm going to give you a kind of taster and I'm going to give you a sample of one of the lectures that comes from one of the courses that I teach which I'll explain to you in just a minute. So let us start by me sharing my screen and let me take you to this and we'll start from the beginning shall we? Okay so as part of the MA that I teach global creative and cultural industries I teach a module which is called the music business which looks at all aspects of the production circulation of popular music. It's a module that kind of stands alone, you can take it as an option, lots of people who are doing a music MA or maybe doing history of our MA or indeed MA's in other parts of SOAS take this as an option but it's also a required a course for the MA global creative and cultural industries and a lot of the issues that I'm looking at in relation to music in the music industry of course are applicable across the creative economy. So as you can see the title of this this piece is going to be what is wrong with Spotify and it's really about the politics of streaming. I'm going to say politics I'm not talking about party politics, I'm talking about the debates about the nature of streaming. Streaming is something which you'll be very familiar with now but it's a relatively new phenomenon but it's transformed the way in which we consume cultural products of course in a huge way I mean throw your mind back when I first started teaching this course in 2013 very few of my students were using streaming some of them had iTunes some of them were doing illegal file sharing one or two had started to use Spotify fast forward now to 2022 and something like 90 percent of the students in my music business class are streaming and not only are they do the degree of penetration of Spotify. So in this session I just want to give a sense of the debate around Spotify what sort of creative industry scholars and various others have said about it and get some sense of you know what it means and what and and how we can think how we can analyze it how we can think about it as a sort of new element of the creative economy. So let's start with this proposition really which comes from an article by Dave Hesman House from 2020. Dave Hesman House is a cultural industry scholar he's written the very well-known book called The Cultural Industries but also recently has been publishing a lot of work on digital platforms like SoundCloud and Bandcamp and Spotify and the most recent piece that he's written or one of the most recent he makes this claim which I think is a claim which he can justify using the data. Having declined for 14 continuous years from 2001 to 2014 the music industry began record growth. This growth was driven entirely by music streaming services so the the piece he read at the end the recovery of revenues was almost entirely driven by the increasing use across much of the world of music streaming services. So the reason why the record industries revenues collapsed of course at the beginning of this of this century is because of the impact of the internet and particularly what the so-called Napster moment this was the moment of file sharing this was the moment when people suddenly realized that they could swap files without having to root it through some kind of legitimate way of buying it and there was this a huge kind of moral panic in the industry or an actual panic about so-called piracy and revenues music industry revenues consequently took a nosedive because of the end of physical sales you know no the collapse of CD sales really and it's only been since the emergence of streaming initially around 2006 2007 and then the way that built up latterly till the point that we're at now in 2020 when streaming is providing a bulk of the revenues in the music industry and revenues have bounced back now to the levels that they had reached it at the beginning of the 1990s the high point of CD sales. So in some sense you might think streaming has resolved some of the big issues in the musical economy and you know it's something to be celebrated. This is just a chart this is actually from 2017 so it's not you know brand new but it just gives you some a sense of the kind of global penetration of streaming services it's not it's unevenly distributed around the world and it's not completely dominated by you know the Anglo-West as you can see Mexico at that point at the top was at the top with 75 of the audience who had streamed or used streaming but you can see Sweden Brazil South Korea Germany Canada Japan is an interesting case right at the bottom because Japan is a bit of an outlier in the music industry and despite Japan's reputation for sort of being at the cutting edge of technology is actually quite slow often to adapt to new ways of distributing music so for example you can still rent CDs in Japan in a way that you just can't in the UK I mean how would you do that. So that gives you a sense of the kind of global spread let's have a little think about how streaming services make money it's not just Spotify there are lots of others but Spotify does tend to predominate because it's got the largest market share they offer ad supported services so the revenue is coming from advertising subscription that's where you pay for a subscription everybody knows about this model now because everybody subscribes not everybody but probably you to Netflix Disney Plus Spotify Apple Music I mean subscription model is now the most you know the biggest and the biggest growing model within the creative economy some kind of hybrid of those two and also offers on-demand access that's the key thing about streaming which makes it different from traditional forms of media like television although of course we now stream television so that's become complicated but unlike television and radio which are pre-programmed the programs will come on at a given time and you have to be there to watch them we're talking about on-demand this is you deciding what you want to listen to what you want to watch by clicking a button here's a key point about these services the majority of them are not profitable now that's an odd thing to think is they're successful but not profitable they generate money they generate income they generate income for the people who work for them and the people who own them and the people who own shares in them and of course Spotify is a publicly traded company but they don't actually turn a profit you know the vast amount of money that Spotify makes through streaming through its subscription services passed on to the record labels which is why you know the music industry revenues have gone way up but they don't actually make profit unto itself and this is a very common model of you know internet-based business it's not initially doesn't it's not initially important to be profitable what is important is market share so what happens with a technology company like Spotify is that they emerge they are given funding from people who back the idea and think it's going to be successful so-called venture capitalists or angel investors and then they go through subsequent rounds of funding which keeps you know allowing them to improve their their interface and to you know buy more things and build up their staff until they are so big that they have they can dominate the market and at that point often things change I mean you'll remember maybe when Facebook was in this position just before Facebook was profitable it had a huge penetration global market and it then transitioned into basically the world's biggest advertising company and is now vastly profitable and similar with Google so that's something to bear in mind when you're thinking about the the economic structure of these new digital platforms and of course now there is there are some platforms which are which in this space which are profitable so for example Bandcamp which is a kind of online record store has reported that it is profitable but and it's probably not coincidental that Bandcamp was just two weeks ago been bought by Epic Games so this is about the model in which independence tend to be bought up by big big players Epic Games is partly owned by Tencent which is a ginormous Chinese internet company which also has a stake in Spotify. Okay so who are the main players in the kind of stream music streaming world is here's a list of some of the biggest Spotify is the biggest 144 million paid subscribers that's going up quite nicely or has been over the past few years although that growth has slowed somewhat as the penetration becomes you know a lot across the world. Apple Music next with 60 million subscribers Apple obviously the world's richest company has significant advantages because people have already got what used to be called iTunes which has been rebranded as Apple Music if you have an iPhone you've got Apple Music already on your phone or on your laptop and they've been you know transferring those people who are owning the phones into subscribers to Apple Music. YouTube has a subscription service as well they've got 20 million paying subscribers I don't know if you pay for YouTube I rather doubt it 20 million is not that many comparative to the amount of people who actually use YouTube and YouTube remains the number one place to discover music it is the most significant music distribution site in the world albeit that it's its business model is different to Spotify and Apple and then there's Amazon now with Amazon as you'll probably know if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber it's bundled in with your Prime subscription which is really to get kind of free delivery or to watch you know TV programs on Amazon Prime but you do actually get a music service bundled in with it I don't know if you know that or if you use it it's hard to figure out exactly how many subscribers they have because of course the 150 million subscribers like I said are subscribing for a multiple reasons not just to get hold of the music service that they have there are independence in the streaming sector some of the big independence Idagio they specialize in classical music they tend to be niche in some way SoundCloud which I'll talk a bit about SoundCloud later on because they've got a new model but they're very much about new music especially kind of younger people's club-based type music or hip-hop produces upload their music which may not actually be released on a major label and people can follow you there's a social media aspect to it. Bankamp I've just mentioned to you which has just been bought so no longer in indie arguably Tidal this was the big experiment that you know a bunch of you know famous African-American artists including Jay-Z established and Rihanna in the US which was designed to compete on the basis of having much better quality sound files it's actually been not a very successful launch business something like three million subscribers and it's now owned by Sprint which is an American telephony company and similarly Deezer which was the kind of French version of Spotify is now owned by Orange again by a phone company so you can see that at this level there's a lot of integration between the platforms and the different services and sometimes the music is there really just to be bundled up with other things to make the other subscriptions more attractive very much like the way that BT bought into sport live sport in order to drive the uptake of their on-demand TV services there are there is global variation of course I mean it's the huge the largest share of the streaming market is dominated by Spotify which is Swedish but really it's an American company now and Apple we know is American but in in India there's Geo Savan which is a huge Indian streaming service 100 million active users and in Tencent in China there's a whole you know in some ways there's more there's at least two internets if not more but you know there's an English language English speaking internet and then there's Chinese internet many of the same services are not available China blocks quite a lot of services from from outside of China but Tencent is a huge company within China and as you can see by the numbers you know 900 million users you know that's the scale of the of the Chinese market and it's growing very rapidly now what are the controversies associated with streaming well here's some of them the dominance of the platform capitalists the way that platform capitalists amazon alphabet who owns google apple and facebook these are the so-called platform capitalists have dominated have come to predominate in cultural production they didn't initially start off as cultural producers of course they circulate as you know they're like you upload your content onto our site we don't we're not publishers but actually now all of them have moved very strongly into cultural production they make things we know that apple tv is making original programming so is amazon and facebook is moving into that direction as well there are some anxieties about the way in which streaming in represents a shift from buying music to owning music and owning cultural products like you know your records on your shelf or your cds or your bvds to paying for access and what the implications are in terms of cultural value really in terms of how we value the products that we're getting access to and our our ownership of them do we take them into ourselves do we make them part of our of our kind of um you know our identities in the same way that we might with things that we buy do we have a same do we value them as highly and there's been anxieties expressed about that and there are issues around the con what are the consequences for pay for creative pay here what you know what does it mean that this system is dominated by these very wealthy platform capitalists and are they fairly distributing the money that they are making especially back to those people are actually making the culture itself and making the music so those are the three of the kind of key anxieties in this in this space now i'm just going to stop sharing for a second because i want to share something else with you i just want to show you this is just a sort of reminder of the vulnerability really of the way that of the way that it's possible to so-called gain the system now this is rather sad but a footage in one sense which is that it it features michael k williams who sadly died quite recently you may know him as the the character oma in the wire but this is an investigation he did for vice which is this kind of hip young media company not so young anymore which went to look at the so-called streaming farms and just have a little look at what happens yeah and stream their music to run the numbers up yeah just basically just run the numbers up some people ask for 100 days to 100 days just to get really the appearance of that music to look at when people go to the beach oh so that's actually not a place for anyone to swim thousands streams how much of that movement that the farmers are the engine of a booming black market the music artists are faking their way to the top of the charts how do your clients find you most of this is just weird enough to refer to maybe it's a label or an art company and they're giving a lot of business with all their clients you've had a and rs and labels come to you yeah you've seen some of these comedy artists like french Montana but maybe last year her song went down and that's twitter thing and become an artist using these farms french Montana got caught up in a scandal when fans alleged that botts had hacked this Spotify account to rack up streams of his music the geese management got caught red-handed in a neat phone call maybe they don't know how to stop them hey no hey they have people they know are you able to show me like your stream farm in action can show you the bottom with all the servers on it basically 50 different means that it's happened to me while you get any given time right so i have them also with the bot so i wanted to play the song for 60 minutes i'm just type in 60 here so 2 p.m all of those servers i'm going to stream i've been taking the song per se for song this is three minutes long so we're talking about 20 times 50 am i correct in a space of one i'm going to stop that there um just so that uh because you don't need to see much more of it but i hope you get the point there are streaming farms streaming farms you can pay them to run loads and loads of computers and phones which will stream your tracks which will push your which will drive up the the listens drive you up in chart position making more popular making more shareable it's the way to game the system okay so let's go back to the lecture and so here um oh this is taking me back to the wrong page okay let's go here so that was what i showed you just now so the thing to bear in mind about these platform capitalists is that while we might worry that they're completely predominating in the in the cultural space that they have too much power that they're generating too much wealth they're not infallible and in fact they're in constant turmoil and they're in constant churn trying to figure out a business model that's going to work i mentioned to you that Spotify is not profitable so here's just a list of some of the things that Spotify have tried to do you know in some ways there's a question about whether really they're a music company at all is music their primary concern because in 2016 there was a decision that they were going to pivot to video um you know that they wanted to make their service much more about video and every now and then when you go and play a spot track you there'll be a little video playing but in fact that was a failure it didn't really work one of the reasons probably is that most spotify usages on mobile phones and people are doing other things right they're not sitting looking at a video they're listening on their headphones in 2018 Spotify decided that maybe they should try and enter the space of labels be a label unto themselves at the moment the way Spotify works is it works with record labels you have to be on a label to get onto Spotify and the labels are the main recipients of the money that Spotify passes on although some of that money is supposed to be passed on to artists and we'll get to that in a minute so they thought why don't we just let musicians come direct to us but in fact they got a lot of bad publicity and feedback from record labels who were threatened by this and who are you know an important part of their ecosystem and they dropped that then in 2019 there was this shift to podcasting and so Spotify started making some very significant investments for example buying gimlet media which is a big podcaster and you might be familiar of course with the controversy that was kicked up around Joe Rogan who they paid a hundred million dollars for for an exclusive to to broadcast his podcast and then Neil Young the musician Neil Young who decided to take his content off Spotify because he was worried that Joe Rogan was spreading anti-vax you know fake news that continues to rumble on that debate but the thing I'm focusing on here is the way in which Spotify pivoting to podcasting why why were they pivoting to do that well because they have to give so much money to the record labels because of copyright when you stream a song money goes to the songwriter the person who wrote the lyrics and the person who owns the recording and that money has by law has to be passed on and therefore Spotify don't get a very high return on their investment but with podcasting that doesn't exist you do not have to do that you can generate you can pay for the production of your own podcast and keep all the money that comes there is also a huge $330 billion advertising pie for podcasts which Spotify can also benefit from so in the end the people who analyze Spotify one of the things that they say is that there's something a bit worrying about having a company which is so powerful in the music industry that doesn't seem to care that much about music they would actually be you know they're actually concerned with making money and the reason they're concerned with making money partly is because they have investors they they they were taken to the stock market and they have to keep their shareholders happy because the share price is what really matters when you're a publicly listed company this is Mark Mulligan who writes for the music industry blog it is tech growth stock and thus its market value is defined more by what it will be tomorrow by what it is today this is what tech growth stock is all about that so really it's not that much about music and this is one of the anxieties that people have who care about music a lot that what you know become these kind of tech companies are using music to drive audience to drive attention to drive advertising but actually do they really care that much about music at all so here is three claims which are being made about the nature of streaming and what's bad about streaming this is again coming from Dave Hesman House's piece from 2020 the first claim is that the new system is damaging to musicians because not enough money is making its way into the pockets of musicians there's too many middlemen and the purse dream payout is too small in streaming and we'll review some of those arguments in a minute the second one is that these systems reproduce unjust systems of industrial power so that argument is about how in the old model of the music industry it was dominated by the so-called big six or then the big four these huge record labels which had a lot of power practiced you know unfair practices you know very unfair contracts you know lots of kind of hidden clauses in those contracts and just had a lot of muscle in the system and one of the promises of digital was that it would it would undermine that power it would remove the middleman it would create the possibility of going direct to the audience but in fact we've just got a new set of middlemen these tech companies and there's anxieties about that and the third claim is that it's now harder for musicians to earn a decent living from recorded music that's the kind of conclusion of that it's like things are getting worse it's because of streaming and it's reproducing an unjust system now Dave Hezman house is a committed academic and it's not that he disbelieves necessarily these claims but what he wants to do is give a sense of proportion and a sense of what is the evidence he's asking the question on what evidence are we basing these assumptions so it's like being slightly skeptical so let me just give you some examples of the kind of arguments that are that the Hezman house is talking about this is um Tom Gray who has become quite a well-known person he's a musician he's in the van Gomez but he started this campaign called broken record which was all about highlighting the poor the bad low payments that were being made by the streaming services to musicians and saying how unsustainable it was and calling for a different system so as part of the lobbying you can see on the left there this you know here's a breakdown of the per stream rates that the different streaming services offer amazon you'll get 0.009 of a pence from Spotify even worse 0.0028 of a pence for your streams right the number of streams to earn one hour's minimum wage you'd need to stream more than 3000 times to just to get minimum wage levels so what we're talking about is you know how this is a system which benefits those people who can motivate millions of streams things people that you know a famous Adele Ed Sheeran you at that level multiple millions of streams you can make good money but at much lower levels for the more independent artists there's an anxiety about whether there's enough money being made at all and then what happens to that money when it goes down the down the shoot down the system and one of the problems with assessing this is that a lot of that information is hidden away it's considered to be business critical information it's not shared by to Spotify or the other streamers it's hidden behind so-called NDAs non non-disclosure agreements and so it can be very difficult to to generate the evidence anyway some of the things that Tom Gray is arguing for here is that this system is very good for those people who have some very valuable copyrights you know if you're a major rights holder that's really what big record labels are these days is they don't really manufacture anything because everything's digital right you don't need to really manufacture digital files but what they do is they own copyrights and if they own enough of them and there's enough streaming of their copyrighted material across a wide range of their catalog there is serious money to be made but not for the individual artists it will depend on the nature of the deal that the artist has with the label but usually these will be in favor of the label and his concern is also with songwriters and the flow of money you know that comes in for those people who've actually written the songs and this is dictated partly by copyright law so it can be a bit of a complex argument but Tom Gray and the broken record sort of perspective is the kind of perspective that Dave Hesman house is being slightly wary of because he thinks that maybe it's exaggerating the nature of what's wrong here's another example of a kind of anti-spotify case this is Liz Pelly who's a journalist who writes for The Baffler and many other kind of independent publications in the US she talks about Spotify's broken music model she says it's a company whose product is fully built on exploited labor the exploited labor of the musicians she is particularly hostile to this thing called Spotify wrapped I don't know if you're a Spotify user but at the end of the year they've started producing this little kind of mini it's now like a little mini film which summarizes your usage from the year tells you what your most listened to track was your the new genre as you discovered and it's become the sort of thing that people have been putting around on social media sharing and Liz Pelly and others have pointed out that really what's happening here is this is a very very effective and very cheap marketing tool for Spotify you know while we're you know sharing our musical interest and taste what we're really doing is is doing free advertising for Spotify do we want a publicly traded tech company whose only investment is to make returns to major labels and banks and investment firms setting the terms of how value is decided across all corners of music that summarizes you know the debate and summarizes the the hostility that's lots of people in the music industry or commentators on the music industry feel towards Spotify but and this is the Dave Hesman house but while musicians have of course always cobbled together income from multiple sources it is not yet clear that in the new musical system dominated by streaming it is harder for musicians to make a living than before one of the things Dave Hesman house who's a media scholar who's been working for you know 40 years in that field is determined to do is to give some historical context and to encourage you to think that yes it may be difficult to make a living as a musician now in the new streaming world but it was always difficult to make a living as a musician it was inherently precarious the creative economy has always been built on risk and precariousity it's never been that secure not that it shouldn't be made more secure but that we can't blame that all on streaming um he even argues looking at the evidence that it's possible that some musicians get more from streaming than they got previously and I'm going to revisit that argument right at the end of this lecture because I've got some new evidence for that now one of the concerns around streaming and this is a bit technical but let me just summarize it feel like this we imagine that we're when we're when we subscribe or pay for these services the money that we pay is going into this that we're listening to right well some of it does but not all of it and that's because they do not actually operate a per stream system you know i stream your track you get one penny or one proportion of a penny from of my money it's not done on that basis it's done on the so-called pro rata basis so total monthly revenue for Spotify is divided up between all the artists on Spotify according to how often they're streamed and what that really means in effect is no matter that you might be listening to experimental Japanese punk or Estonian folk music or only listening to Stormzy some of the money that you're giving to Spotify is going into the pocket of Adele or Drake or Taylor Swift or name your other big artist BTS and some people think that that's unfair and they think there should be a much tighter relationship between you know the listener and you know i want to listen to and put money into the pocket of the musicians that i like and value and i do not want to just fund the big boys and girls so some of the argument about streaming has been about shouldn't we change this system shouldn't we have a fairer system and i'll show you an example of a system which has been developed in the light of that so again have a think about the the the problem with some of the claims that are being made the way in which the apparently very small very small per stream rates offered by the streamers are used as part of the argument about unsafe unfair systems of reward that Dave Hezman house is questioning whether that mechanism of that argument is actually working properly are they entirely responsible for the problem or are they a symptom some of these arguments can tend towards simplification and there's as i said before there's very limited evidence on which to base some of these so there's a kind of argument what what Dave Hezman house and some of the other scholars are saying is let's slow down a little bit let's be comparative let's think historically in context and let's not just kind of rush into the hype i mean i must say amongst my students it seems like a pretty much of a norm that people are very critical of Spotify and money that they're paying musicians or be it that they're also streaming at the same time which is an interesting moment to be in isn't it when everyone's critical of something and yet they're also also always also doing it and can't really imagine not doing it because there isn't really an alternative so i talked about broken record and this is just a kind of summary of their position and what they think should be done to fix it so i'm you know what they're calling for is a so-called user centric payment system one that much more reflects the actual given usage interest musical taste of the individual subscribers so consumers can have their rights restored right they want their money to go to the artists that they want to support not to everyone they're calling for something a so-called fair trade they want the author to get direct compensation for the use of their art rather than it being rooted through record companies and this is partly to do with trying to chip away at some of the power that records companies have managed to reestablish in this period and of course there's this issue of cheating and we've just shown you a video about about farming you know stream farming streams and it is a big problem it's a it's a system that can be easily gained and therefore it's something that we can't really trust and so they're calling for mechanisms which address this and try and stop the inflation of of streaming numbers uh Damon Krakowski who's an also a musician is someone who has written an interesting piece which was called how to be responsible a responsible music fan in the age of streaming so he's not recommending that you get rid of streaming completely some some people do some people say just like when they're talking about social media you should close down your facebook come off it it's bad for you here's his is his kind of rules of engagement how to be an ethical consumer the first is he's he's he's interested in going local he thinks that you should be trying to support your local music ecosystem and he uses the example of the grateful dead here the grateful dead this american blues band from the 70s who famously were followed by this kind of rag tag multicolor you know multicolored fans wearing sort of tie dye t-shirts and taking a lot of acid and they built a very very successful musical career but they never really grazed the charts or weren't really part of a kind of global pop phenomenon it was quite localized and it was very specific and niche and he thinks that that's there's a lot to be said for that kind of thinking not global but local consider your streaming news he says you know just have a think about it 90% of streams are of 10% of songs right 90% of the songs that are streamed in the world are only 10% of the available songs they're all the ones that are huge hits the Ed Sheeran's and the Adele's if you don't want your money to go into their pocket don't stream right you know that that's what happens don't do it that's one option or if you do do it be acknowledge your own participation in that system care about the context he says you know think about the the ecosystem with which produces music this is the kind of activity you can do outside of the streaming ecosystem think about how you can talk up the bands you like you know share information about them and one of the things that he says is that we should be sharing music a lot more you know there was a big crackdown on piracy at the beginning in the origins of the internet age because it was considered to be you know killing off the industry and killing off musicians and and that you know there's an element of truth to that but then on the other hand sharing music sharing what we like supporting it going using things like patreon or other ways that to directly fund or buy merchandise or paying for tickets you know after covid obviously covid the the live economy music economy kind of collapsed under covid but as we recover one of the ways we can support our bands you know the bands we like the musicians that we like is actually paying for a concert ticket because much more of that money will go into their pocket than the streaming revenue so those are some kind of guides on how to do it here's just some example of some of a quite a smart move by soundcloud now soundcloud is another uh streaming site it's slightly different from spotify i think i said before it's much more of our independent artists a lot of artists upload music that hasn't actually been released or music that's a remix or something that they're trying out it's more experimental it's more artist driven but they have just recently introduced what they are calling what do they call it fan powered royalties and this is precisely an attempt to kind of connect uh the issue that people are criticizing spotify for which is how can we connect the money that the consumer has with the artist more directly i want to fund and support the artist i'm listening to and that's indeed what is going to happen as the only director consumer music streaming platform and the next generation artist services company this is the chief executive officer he talks in that kind of language the launch of fan powered royalties represents a significant move in soundcloud strategic direction to elevate grow and create new opportunities directly with independent artists so it's a very artist centers approach and it's got a kind of moral imperative and it's almost saying you know we all know spotify is immoral come over to soundcloud whether it's working or not we don't quite know yet it's only was only introduced i think in 2020 it'd be interesting to know if you use it at all none of my students have yet um taken up the offer so that all remains to be seen let me just leave you with a couple of final points on this issue because there's a lot more obviously i'm just scratching the surface of this so one of them is underneath all of this debate about digital culture about streaming and about nfts you might have heard of those non-fungible tokens you know which is this other kind of new mechanism of commodification within the cultural industries is that they are incredibly environmentally expensive we might we sometimes get the impression that digital culture takes place somewhere in a nebulous nowhere or use these metaphors like the cloud where's the cloud it's nowhere in particular well no it's not nowhere they're in huge server farms you know in the mojave desert and probably also increasingly in the developing world very very expensive of energy especially fossil fuel energy which is what powers them so actually we are we is all of this debate really at the heart of it really a debate about environmental sustainability or should it be a debate and is streaming therefore going to be the best option if it's going to be so expensive this is kyle devine who's an associate professor of music at university of oslo there is a widespread notion that music digitalized is music dematerialized the figures may even suggest that the rises of downloading and streaming are making music more environmentally friendly but a very different picture emerges when we think about the energy used to power online music listening storing and processing music online uses a tremendous amount of resources and energy with a high impact on the environment so actually again maybe we're thinking about streaming not as the kind of end result for some for people in the music industry they may be thinking great we've been saved no one's buying CDs anymore but we've got streaming but maybe it's a transitional technology and we need to be thinking as damien krakowski said we need to name krakowski we need to think about new options new ways of doing this which which are actually environmentally sustainable but let me leave you with this very last point because this is something I just learned this week this this gentleman this great guy elijah he's a grime dj he runs his own label called butters uh he he puts on raves you know he's a sort of entrepreneurial young man um he's been doing it now for like 10 years and he's also become a bit of a kind of he's been posting a lot on instagram advice to other people in the independent music sector giving them advice about how to manage their royalties about how to think about their you know world of work um a very interesting man and when he came in to talk to my class last week one of the questions came up which was what do you think about streaming and I think the assumption amongst my students and myself would be that as an artist or someone who represents artists he might be a little bit he gives that broken record type of argument you know it's very unfair but he didn't say that at all he said streaming has been really important to the sustainability of his business and the reason why is because even though the payments are relatively small they are regular and reliable and they have created an income stream for him which he contrasted with the income stream of what it was like before now he's he hasn't been around in music production long enough to remember the days of making loads of CDs or loads of records although he does produce vinyl and CDs but that wasn't the heart of the business because he didn't start until the 2000s so the immediate environment that he's comparing it to is the environment of file sharing and downloading and illegal downloads and he said that you know back in those days people weren't paying for music so there wasn't revenue for the company or even if they were so if they were buying digital downloads he described the process as being whether you would release this music people would buy a download and that would be it that'd be the end of the income one payment per customer are done and then you move on but with streaming of course the tracks are always there and they're always available to be streamed and so he described a scenario where the income from streaming was actually a really important part of the business model now it also depends on having an ethical relationship with your artists which he certainly does have any profit shares with them so you know because he's representing a label there and it could be the Spotify is very good for labels but not so good for artists but if you're very artist-centered independent label as Butters is actually maybe we should think of streaming as being a vital component in sustaining an independent music economy the other thing he told us which was when we asked him because he'd said that when when COVID came along 80% of his company's income collapsed because they did live shows and a lot of their income came through live shows and clubs and selling merchandise at those events and that was completely killed off for two years and he doubted whether it would come back at the same level but the other thing he said was that a really important source of revenue is sync rights now a sync right is when you sell your music to a company a corporation you know for advertising or to put in a film significant money to be made from that and his basic principle was the way I do my business the way I run it the way I market myself is put out good music and that's the beginning and the end of the whole thing and then there are these new revenue streams which have emerged particularly sync but also streaming which are vital to the survival of an independent business like that so that is really the end of what I wanted to say to you just to give you a sense of the kind of issues that we that we deal with in my core course which is called analytical approaches to the global creative and cultural industries we look at film we look at journalism we look at cartoons you know any any aspects of the cultural economy alongside music then there's a there's also a course which is specifically about the film industry and the independent film industry and issues like festivals and alternative forms of distribution taught by my colleagues lindy wedovie and astrea finandez and then I teach the music business course from which that is taken so if you are interested please do contact me about any aspect of this or if you're interested in maybe coming and doing an ma in creative industries at so as cm 54 at so as dot ac dot uk my name is casper i'd be very happy to talk to you thanks a lot for listening goodbye