Deliberate Listening

...and a Defence of Piracy

What is happening?

It could be the case that your attention span has been eroded by excessive consumption of short form content and you feel a burning need to fill the widening gaps between focused thoughts, or it could be that you would genuinely like to engage with some music. Whichever of these may be the case, and although the expanse and immediacy of a digital streaming platform’s catalogue may suggest otherwise, when you open a streaming app and click where the carefully engineered UI guides, you will be stepping once again onto a travelator that leads away from the act of deliberate listening.

Why should I want to engage in deliberate listening?

This is a question that I believe needs little explanation, just a little introspection.

Think to yourself about why you listen to music, about what you hope to gain from hearing something another person has created, and about what it means to engage with any form of art. Does allowing anyone but yourself to decide what you listen to at any given moment really align with your answers to those questions? I stress any given moment because I believe it is underappreciated how significant the knock to your level of engagement is when something deliberately chosen is followed by something algorithmically dubious, however much the algorithm may “succeed” later on.

Numerous studies have been carried out with regard to other tasks, often due to those results having more potential for increasing corporate productivity, but few extrapolate these findings to the world of art appreciation and malignant algorithmic influence. If it takes 23 minutes to get back on task after a distraction at work, I think it’s fair to assume that a dud in your freewheeling queue would slip you into a similar state of disengagement when performing the more enjoyable ‘task’ of listening to music.

A wrongun could take the form of a song you don’t like, but also could increasingly be a song that wasn’t even made by a human. I don’t think an example nearly that extreme is required to make the point that more deliberate listening results in deeper engagement with the music though: if a song comes on that you didn’t choose deliberately, you are much more likely to write it off as an algorithmic cock-up, even if you might’ve given it a chance had the choice been deliberate. Bottomless queues encourage skipping, and the dopamine hit of a ‘good skip’ becomes addictive, to the extent that a quarter of all streamed songs are skipped within the first five seconds.

It’s much easier to slip into the pool of algorithmic content than it is to climb back out, and who wants to swim in a pool of slop? (That is a rhetorical question).

Can’t I listen deliberately using a streaming service?

A common misconception in sympathetic interpretations of the capitalist model is that every company will strive to provide the best experience for its customers and thus, thanks to the natural buoyancy of freely marketable cream, the most popular and profitable company in a given field will be that which provides its users with something better than its competitors and alternatives. Needless to say I do not believe this to be true, and I believe that the widespread nature of this belief is a key factor in the lack of collective ambition to move away from streaming giants, even as the moral case for doing so, both from artist royalty theft and from battle tech investment, becomes deafening.

Despite the impression that streaming services would like you to have about their supposedly “user driven” goals, as Staff Designer Jack Maxwell writes in an article about their design process, “For us at Spotify, [what we are aiming for] is typically informed by our company and mission strategy”. Read: “Our bottom line determines our design approach”.

With motives laid out as plainly as that, it is clear that ideal conditions for the listener cannot be achieved using these platforms.

Well, what can I do?

Streaming services are so cheap in comparison to physical media or digital purchases that it’s unlikely any listener can afford to maintain their current listening habits by any other means... or can they?

Your money does not go to the artists you stream.

When you pay for a monthly subscription to a streaming service, your money is not distributed amongst the artists you listen to in any meaningful way; your money is distributed according to which artists have the most streams by any listener during a given period. Thus, the money paid by an individual listener to supposedly compensate the artists they’re listening to is actually maintaining the inequality between the incomes of smaller and larger artists.

You may point out that even though individuals’ payments are distributed without regard for their listening habits, when you look at the bigger picture every artist is being compensated roughly according to their music’s streams. If you were to make this point you would be reaching the crucial conclusion: if an individual’s listening habits do not affect the artists they actually listen to at any noticeable scale, the social contract between listener and artist has already been broken. You cannot meaningfully increase an artist’s income by streaming their music more often, or meaningfully decrease it by not doing so.

The tail of this snake is cannibalised by your chosen service’s algorithm, incentivising the profiteers of the streaming world to continue developing a service that results in the top 1% of artists accounting for 90% of streams, a statistic that I do not believe accurately reflects the natural whims of listeners but instead reflects the outcome of an ouroboros designed to support multinational streaming corporations and labels.

The good news is that this vicious cycle relies on the complicity of listeners in the corporate tactics of the streaming giants; you can choose to find reassurance in your lack of direct influence over your favourite artists’ incomes through streaming and instead begin to explore alternatives…

How do artists get paid if everyone pirates music?

The first thing to note is that we will never live in a world where everyone pirates music. The overwhelming majority of the public believe either that it is inherently wrong to break the law (however compelling the case against the law may be), or that it is too risky to pirate in an era where policing on and offline is more covert and authoritarian than ever. The second is a concern I have some sympathy for, although is one I believe can be mitigated with some brief online ‘megathread’ consultation on a popular contrarian internet forum. If you believe your favourite artists are materially supported by streaming income, you can remain safe in the knowledge that this support is not likely to come to an end at the hands of the general public in the near future.

The second thing to note is that there are ways of supporting artists which do not rely on a streaming giant to redistribute your money, and that these means of direct support usually constitute more significant “streams” of income for artists than any payments from digital streaming services. Attending gigs, buying merch, and buying digital music (currently through sites like Bandcamp and hopefully soon through cooperative platforms such as Subvert) all result in artists receiving a much higher percentage of the money you actually spend.

Will enough people support artists directly to make up for the lack of streaming payments?

The moral defence of piracy relies on some people engaging in direct means of supporting artists, but it’s important to consider that the conclusion reached earlier with regard to the impact of an individual listener on a single artist applies doubly here: one listener ceasing to stream an artist is not something the artist is likely to notice in their wallet, but on the flipside one listener engaging in direct means of support will be supporting with vastly more than one listener worth of streaming royalties.

If a small artist receives 50k streams in a year, and 1% of those were from their top listener, that individual ceasing to stream would cost the artist approximately £1.90 (based on the most generous payment per stream by Spotify at time of writing, and not including any label or distributor cuts or fees). If the listener instead pirated the artist’s music but used some of the ~£155 (one year of Spotify Premium Individual at time of writing) they saved by cancelling their subscription to by one T-Shirt, attend one gig, or buy one or two digital releases in a year, they would likely not only make up for the loss of their own streams, but also for many other listeners who chose the same path, or for other artists the same listener pirated the music of without supporting directly. In reality smaller artists have many fewer streams per listener, so each one to engage in direct support leaves headroom for many others to follow without needing them to each contribute the same amount.

In conclusion

If you’re an artist reading this, I hope you understand that I am proposing a behavioural shift that would benefit you just as much as it would benefit your listeners; I am an artist myself and I’m not only dissatisfied with the financial result of streaming being the primary access to music I’m a part of making, but also with the ways I’m forced to consider how my creative decisions will be treated by the algorithm instead of by human listeners. I certainly don’t see artists in the current setup as an oppressive class, or view their engagement with streaming services a moral failure, however I would ask you to consider how little you would actually lose by allowing users to freely download your music, and how much you would gain by refusing to sacrifice your real creative vision to the neutered version you think would perform better on streaming services.

I hope that you haven’t been left with the impression that I think piracy is virtuous - that is not an opinion that I hold. I only wish to float the idea that the business models and design practices of streaming companies harm the listening experience, and thus on both a human and financial level, harm artists. I think that fact is in little dispute among the general public, so I am proposing a potentially radical sounding alternative. I believe without aggressive regulation at the least, or a socialist revolution at best (neither of which are looking imminent in our neoliberal plutocracy) there is no more obvious path to increasing your enjoyment of the music you listen to or create, than by taking a different approach.