By Sofia Williams
Editor-In-Chief
On Feb. 9, Sonic Youth re-released their album, Walls Have Ears, with Goofin’ Records. Walls Have Ears is a compilation of sets from three of Sonic Youth’s 1985 live performances in the United Kingdom. The original version of the live album was released without the band’s consent in 1985 by Paul Smith, the founder and manager of British alternative record label Blast First, according to Spectrum Culture.
Even though the album was quickly removed from stores by the band after its release, bootleggers—those who illegally reproduce and distribute music or other goods—ensured its propagation through illicit vinyls and CDs and via online forums for decades afterward. Sonic Youth’s loss and eventual reclamation of their uniquely punk album serves as a microcosm for a larger issue: the subjection of artists to capitalistic motives and financial exploitation over the past several decades. In order to properly support musicians, it is important that we hold not only individual bootleggers and illegal downloaders accountable, but that Spotify and other commercial streaming services are also implicated in this issue.
Sonic Youth’s Walls Have Ears is just one example of how bootlegging and pirating can affect a band’s revenue through loss of royalties; albums recorded by groups such as the Velvet Underground, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones have been famously bootlegged. From the 1960s to the 1990s, bootlegged albums were viewed as desirable and rare, leading to the development of a lucrative market that prevented artists from profiting.
While bootlegging of physical music, such as vinyls and CDs, no longer affects the industry as much as it did before, digital pirating arose in its wake through the illegal downloading and reproduction of music. The issue of illegal downloading became a major issue in 1999 following the advent of public internet, and has since caused significant losses on various economic levels, according to the Constitutional Rights Foundation. According to the Institute for Policy Innovation, music pirating costs the U.S. economy $12.5 billion annually in total output and musicians $2.7 billion in earnings annually.
Streaming services might still not be enough to sustain an artist’s career, even if they enjoy relative popularity among online audiences. According to Business Insider, Spotify pays artists approximately $0.0033 per stream, or roughly $1 per 250 streams. Translated, this means that for every 1 million streams an artist garners on Spotify, they receive between $4,000 and $7,000 in revenue. This income is inconsequential in comparison to the royalties that musicians of the past received for the records or CDs that they sold—at between 10 and 12%, royalties per “stream” of an artist’s song totaled $0.30, a much higher rate of income, even taking into account the re-playing of the album by each listener—and is not even close to a liveable wage. According to the Guardian, Spotify may not compensate artists at all for two-thirds of the tracks on the site starting in 2024.
Current artists’ solution to this deficit? Live performances, merchandise, and even (now re-popularized) vinyls, CDs, and cassette tapes. In short, for those who have the means to do so, supporting live music is an important way to contribute to musicians’ revenue, especially in the cases of less-popular artists.
However, this is a short-term solution: avid music listeners must also hold streaming services accountable. Spotify, a $44 billion company, which charges its Premium users $10.99 per month, can certainly afford to shunt more than 70% of its streaming revenue towards the artists which are the foundation of its business.
Those who say blaming Spotify and other streaming services for artists’ loss of revenue may fear that Spotify will raise its premium rates in retribution. However, it is important that we attempt to create social incentives that encourage the production of art, whether it be music, movies, painting or photography. And in order to encourage this sense of a creative community, artists must be able to earn a living wage. When music is illegally downloaded and streaming services take a chunk of artists’ revenue, it is difficult to make that living wage a reality.
It is vital that music listeners understand the negative repercussions that bootlegging and illegal downloading have on the music industry. Specifically, as most music listeners turn to streaming, it is increasingly important to hold sites like Spotify accountable for many artists’ inability to earn a living wage, especially as it continues to reduce its compensations to musicians whose songs are streamed on the platform.
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