Things move rapidly in the world of music, and it's increasingly difficult for artists to make a living in the streaming age, due to the incredibly miniscule amounts they are paid. Realistically, the most an artist can earn from a Spotify stream is $0.003, which doesn't add up to a living wage.
To make matters worse, from this year, it was announced that any track receiving fewer than 1000 plays a year won't receive any royalties from Spotify.The exceedingly low amounts paid out might explain the astronomical sums demanded from Oasis fans for tickets recently (so-called 'surge pricing'), which are being investigated by the Competitions and Markets Authority. Questions are being asked about whether fans were warned given enough warning that prices could double or treble, and whether they had enough time to make an informed decision.
Merchandise is also a burgeoning source of revenue for artists, but although CD and vinyl sales have seen a modest increase in recent years, they are still a fairly small slice of the pie for most artists, unless they are on the scale of Adele or Ed Sheeran. Streaming has also meant some 'legacy' artists struggle to score a hit single, so the likes of Rita Ora and Katy Perry haven't troubled the Top 40 in a while, even though they've released some decent tracks.
Another big change is the diminished profile of the Mercury Music Prize, once considered music's most prestigious prize and previously with a big name sponsor attached to it. This year's winners are English Teacher, a Leeds quartet who would definitely not have been the bookies' favourite. I'd imagine Charli XCX or Corinne Bailey Rae were more hotly tipped, but the Mercury has a history of surprising us with some of the past year's winners.
I haven't had a listen to their album This Must Be Texas yet, but I did rather enjoy last year's winners Ezra Collective (the first ever jazz winners of the prize) so I'll definitely give it a whirl. Nice to see a northern band winning too. However, along with the Brit Awards, which have suffered from plummeting ratings in recent years, it feels as though award ceremonies don't have the same mass appeal as they did in the 80s and 90s. I remember well the prestige of the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party when I was growing up. Perhaps streaming has changed things beyond all recognition and diminished shared experiences, much like on TV (although there is the odd exception, like Baby Reindeer, which everyone seemed to be bingewatching at the same time).
Memorable moments from the Mercury Music Prize's history include Badly Drawn Boy throwing away his cheque in 2000, M People upsetting fans of Blur, Pulp and the Prodigy by winning the prize in 1994 (Heather Small told the Guardian 20 years later "how dare you rubbish my hard work? That's what made it sweeter that we won"), and Radiohead somehow not winning in the 90s. The band also got 17 Brits nominations, and never won any of those either. Astounding, given how highly acalaimed they were.
The Mercury Prize has been around for 32 years, and other past winners have included Little Simz, Skepta, and Dave. If I hadn't told you that English Teacher were this year's winner, would you have been any the wiser? I've seen very little coverage of this year's scaled-down ceremony, and big moments in Brits history, like Chumbawamba chucking a bucket of ice over John Prescott and Jarvis Cocker protesting against Michael Jackson's Earth Song, also date back a long time. Things have got very anodyne in recent years, which might explain the plunging ratings.
Perhaps streaming has democratised music, but I'm not sure all of the effects are positive. Soaring gig ticket prices are arguably plugging the black hole in funding that it creates, and the charts often become pretty stale too, with songs like Fleetwood Mac Everywhere and Killers' ubiquitous wedding floorfiller Mr Brightside never leaving the Top 100. I guess things move fast, and the days of taping songs off the radio and trying to press pause on the TDK before Bruno Brookes started speaking feel like light years ago.
Meanwhile, I have several boxes filled with largely worthless CD singles, if anyone wants to make me a offer for them! I dread to think how much money I shelled out on Atomic Kitten and Spice Girls CDs, but the price of an Oasis ticket is probably still Half The World Away.
Alex's Weekly Blog - 21st November
