Billy Bragg defends Spotify in open letter

UK artist and leftist political activist Billy Bragg has come to the defense of Spotify after a slew of payment-related criticisms from artists.

Artists like Placebo’s Brian Molko and Thom York have blasted the streaming service for favouring record labels over artists in a business model York said is “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.” In July Molko told Music Week the service is, “just interested in making money at the expense of others.”

Yesterday, Bragg requested artists direct their frustration to the record labels. “I’ve long felt that artists railing against Spotify is about as helpful to their cause as campaigning against the Sony Walkman would have been in the early 80s,” begins the letter published on Facebook.

The 55-year-old artist, who once addressed legislators in London wearing a Clash t-shirt, says contracts that were signed pre-streaming (“from the analogue age”) are the problem. Record companies do less heavy lifting in terms of distribution now and previously they would only pay artists 8%-15% of the total revenues collected.

Sky News has reported Spotify will secure a US$200 million deal with Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), a firm in California who lists Facebook and Groupon among its investors.

Read Bragg’s full open letter below, taken from his Facebook page:

I’ve long felt that artists railing against Spotify is about as helpful to their cause as campaigning against the Sony Walkman would have been in the early 80s. Music fans are increasingly streaming their music and, as artists, we have to adapt ourselves to their behaviour, rather than try to hold the line on a particular mode of listening to music.

The problem with the business model for streaming is that most artists still have contracts from the analog age, when record companies did all the heavy lifting of physical production and distribution, so only paid artists 8%-15% royalties on average.

Those rates, carried over to the digital age, explain why artists are getting such paltry sums from Spotify. If the rates were really so bad, the rights holders – the major record companies – would be complaining. The fact that they’re continuing to sign up means they must be making good money.

Here in Sweden – where I’m doing a show tonight in Malmo – artists have identified that the problem lies with the major record labels rather the streaming service and are taking action to get royalty rates that better reflect the costs involved in digital production and distribution. UK artists would be smart to follow suit.

Bragg is also replying to some of the 180+ comments on the post.

Bragg was last in the country for this year’s BigSound conference when TMN caught up with him to talk politics. Read the interview here.