The scandal of Spotify and why you should support artists by any means necessary

Last week there was a flurry of sharing on social media of what we all listen to musically.

Thanks to the music streaming service Spotify and their Spotify Wrapped feature we could quickly discover which of our friends are making an effort and who are just still listening to Ed Sheeran and Adele.?

It’s one of the wonders of the modern age that so much data is collected on what we do, who we speak to and what we think. This was probably just as revealing.

Spotify messaged their 172 million subscribers with a personalised story describing what their musical habits said about them as if it were a movie soundtrack with you as the lead character.?

For mine, the soundtrack was Richie Sacramento by Mogwai, a song off their new album that I really like, but I left it playing on repeat by mistake when I went out one day and Spotify thinks I’m obsessed with it.?

My lament in the rain is More Than This by Roxy Music, which is fine. I’ll have that.

But the one piece of data missing from all of this was the absolutely piddling amount of money that will make it to the pockets of the artists that created all of this wonderful music.

I read an absolutely blistering analysis of the economics of music streaming services this year.?

It detailed just how little artists get paid from the billions in revenue that flow to Spotify, and other services, which are no better.?

The author, Joe Taylor, who by a remarkable coincidence happens to be my eldest son, submitted this piece of work as his university dissertation and got a First Class honours degree for his efforts.?

But he also added to the volume of calls from organisations like the Ivors with the #FixMusicStreaming and the #BrokenRecord campaigns which point out how music is controlled by a tiny number of global corporations (Universal, Sony and Warner) who control all this data but do so in the shadows, hiding from creators of music how their work connects with audiences and how they get paid, at the same time boasting about how their business model generates them ‘amazing’ profit margins.

I’ll be honest, as a consumer, I really love the way Spotify works.?

I love the suggestions for new songs, I love the speed of it, the sound quality, the convenience and the ability to make lists to share. Our show, by the way, has a list for each one, which you should be able to search for.?

But the way it shares revenues with the record companies absolutely stinks.

I really don’t know how we break the cycle, without all collectively cancelling our subscriptions and buying our music on vinyl again.?

I have two pleas in mitigation. One, because I produce and present a specialist music show on commercial radio then I can say I use Spotify to help me find another channel for artists’ work.?

On plenty of occasions, we’ve added songs that friends, pluggers and other DJs have suggested, not just a cunning algorithm created by Spotify.

Secondly, the five artists (apart from Mogwai) that Spotify tells me I listened to the most were as follows: Saint Etienne, Richard Hawley, New Order, LYR and Erasure. I think that’s because I went to see them all live, giving their tunes a proper listen beforehand, as well as paying decent money to do so.

And I'm going to see Richard Hawley again this weekend in a small venue in the Peak District.

If there’s a message then it’s this, if you love music, then support artists by any means possible, not just by listening to them on Spotify.

You can listen to me and Neil Summers on Music Therapy on?Tameside Radio 103.6FM?on Sunday evenings from 9pm to 11pm.?Click here to subscribe and catch up on previous shows.