Music and the Advertisement Money Monopoly

 As it stands, the music industry is perhaps one of the longest-running industries in the history of our species. For millennia, music has influenced our culture, and for millennia our music has either been controlled by the state or works to subvert the state. 

Today, music is shared in ways never before possible. With the introduction of radio the ability to cheaply access music was possible. The ability to cheaply (and freely) access music has only gotten easier. The Internet's promulgation of digital sound created a renaissance of digital artists. Those of us who remember the early Noughties and late Nineties (I unfortunately only remember the Noughties) know of a time where independent and subversive artists were spreading their music. I think some of my earliest memories outside of the sanitized websites my parents put me on were pirating music with my friends. My introduction to dubstep was not the highly-popular Skrillex, but obscure London-based groups who were releasing their tracks from bedroom studios. The early Noughties was the Wild West of the Internet, especially with music. Full tracks could be found on YouTube, with the lyrics poorly misspelled for you to sing along. Though for most of us we just directly downloaded the music. Link to a great piece about this beautiful time.

This, of course, was not profitable for artists who actually wanted to make money from music, and certainly not for their record labels either. Music is a big money maker. Indeed, Michael Jackson has been dead for over a decade now and yet made $48 million in 2020. Music keeps making money, people freely listening to it takes away that money. Thus it would make sense to monetize continual usage of a song if it is online in a freely available state. Throughout the most recent years, streaming services have added more and more advertisements in attempts to stem bleeding and increase revenue. This of course gives money to creators, but as we've discussed in class, it's a laughably small percentage of the revenue except for all but the biggest artists.

If you use YouTube, you may notice the metric shitload of ads they're dropping on you. Those of us who previously used YouTube are familiar with midroll advertisements. Where ads were places throughout the video. Now, videos more often than not have multiple ads at the beginning of the video, the end of the video, and random spots throughout the video. This is also occurring on videos where creators specifically don't want advertisements to be. YouTube was previously a great way for people to listen to a playlist of music. My girlfriend for example listens to YouTube when she goes to shower. YouTube has now brought in an increased revenue as she is unable to skip long ads without getting out of the shower. I am sure they know that many use their platform in a similar manner, or at parties where the one who may operate the device is away and won't skip.\

For me, Spotify is unusable whilst free because it doesn't give me the ability to even rewind songs. Ads are prevalent and very long, and frankly it's not worth it to me. Soundcloud's ads screw up a playlist. How am I going to get into a mood based upon the music if I get interrupted? I think that ad platform is even worse than Spotify's. 

I wouldn't mind the ads as much if creators were actually getting paid for me to listen to them. Which they really aren't. Out of a two dollar cut, a creator got five cents from ad revenue as was demonstrated in class. That is totally pathetic. It is unlivable. And it's because these corporations and record labels don't really care about giving artists money. Hell, a lot of artists don't want to get rich, they just want to be able to support themselves. It's just now all of their major platforms for distributing music are run by businesses who DO want to get rich. I think that in reality advertisements are doing more harm than good as they lock people out of discovering new artists, which they only pay a small pittance to.