Tag: Premium

A reader writes:

I see that in the context of your Spotify conversation, a reader has claimed that musicians make “all their money from touring, and to a lesser extent, merchandise.” The music industry is sort of unusual in that many people have strong opinions about how musicians “ought” to be making money, despite not having any first-hand experience in how musicians actually DO make a living. We actually surveyed over 5000 musicians about their income and among the things we’ve learned is that only 27% comes from touring – much less than many people assume.  And only 2% comes from merchandise, like t-shirts, posters, etc.

With regard to Spotify and streaming services, an important thing to understand is that what works for some artists may not work for others. In particular, streaming services are set up in a way that makes sense for labels and artists whose goals are based on mass-audience assumptions, like the major labels (which own equity stakes in the services).  They may not work as well for artists who are trying to build sustainable careers on a more intimate scale.  Here’s a blog post we wrote on the subject.  In general we’d like to see systems that allow people who aren’t Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift to make a living.

Update from a reader:

The statistics offered by your reader are very misleading.

It would appear that the 5,000 musicians surveyed include very few who actually record and release records as featured artists for a living.  The survey appears to be dominated by orchestra players, music teachers, studio musicians, and others.  None of this is relevant to the issue at hand, which is whether Spotify and the other streaming services reduce the income recording artists make from their recordings and whether or not this is significant.

If one were to survey recording artists, I think you would find that a much larger percentage of their income is derived from live performance, particularly since record sales have declined in the last decade.

Your reader also misunderstands the nature of the relationship between major record companies and the streaming services.  Sure, the three majors have equity interests in Spotify and in some other services.  But they also have licensing agreements with the services under which the labels are paid royalties.  I have some familiarity with this area and I can tell you that the equity interest owned by the major record companies doesn’t lead to a lower royalty rate under the licenses.

The real divide is between current artists who release new albums and so-called “catalog” artists. Anecdotal evidence suggests that streaming services have had a negative impact on sales of new releases.  On the other hand, for older artists who have aging catalogs of recordings, sales of physical records and downloads have in many cases withered away, and for those artists, streaming services, as well as digital radio services, provide a new source of income.

Another reader:

I found the discussion of artist royalties very interesting. Two years ago I earned my masters degree in music business and focused my final paper on independent artist and what the business looks like for them. I’ll agree that royalties earned through Spotify, Pandora, and other similar free services are very low. But I’d argue that the alternative to those services isn’t people purchasing a download, but finding other free ways to access the music.

The bottom line for artists is that the cat is out of the bag with regards to getting music for free. It’s been over a decade since the Napster years, and the consumer expectations have changed drastically. Big-name artists like Thom Yorke can get away with pulling their music from Spotify because dedicated fans will pay for it anyway. For new artists, though, it is unlikely that unfamiliar fans would be willing to invest money up front in something they haven’t heard before. They’ll look for it for free, and if it’s not on Spotify or YouTube then there are other means to get the same thing without even a fraction of a cent going towards the artist. There are still dedicated music fans out there willing to invest their time and money to find the music they want, as the niche vinyl market shows, but they’re the minority.

I do feel sorry for people working to make it in music today. Technology has made it easier to record music and distribute it worldwide instantly, but harder to get noticed. Few artists have ever been able to make their living only through music, but more people than ever are trying to with little success. I’m currently working at SoundExchange, a performing rights organization that processes royalties for public performances of sound recordings on digital radio stations, so I know what those numbers look like.

In an interview with Slate, David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, argues that downplaying the genetic aspects of athletic talent is harmful:

I think it’s become really detrimental, because now there’s this early hyperspecialization in sports, and there are very few sports where the science shows that actually helps and others where it shows it’s detrimental. What the more recent science is suggesting is that you should have a sampling period, when you find what activity and training fits your genome best before you specialize in your mid-teen years. And so I really think we’re doing some athletes a disservice with that message, but some of the scientists, sports psychologists particularly, have felt like saying, “Well, you can achieve anything,” is the message you should put forward. Well, the converse of that is, if you didn’t get to the NBA, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough. It’s a theme which maximizes the sort of “free will” message, and it’s self-helpy, which is why people enjoy it, even when most people in the back of their head realize that they have proclivities which make them better at one thing than another.

Razib Khan enjoyed Epstein’s interview with NPR:

[Epstein] reports that 17 percent of men over the the height of seven feet (2.14 meters) between the ages of 20 and 40 in the United States are playing in the NBA!

Obviously there is no gene which is guaranteed to make you an NBA star, but having the allelic profile which predisposes you to being seven feet tall obviously helps. It also illustrates the ridiculousness which the “10,000 hour rule” has been taken to in popular culture. Practice matters, and, talent matters. At extremely high levels of performance one often needs to have focus to engage in repetitive tasks over and over. But, one also likely needs a preternatural complement of genes. Most of the children of NBA players do not become professional basketball players, but the probabilities are far higher. Epstein outlines these sorts of facts in a breezy and concise manner in the interview, as well as dismissing the infantile disorder of genetic determinism which results in the purchasing of DNA kits which will tell you if your child is an athlete or not.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Epstein explains how the field of genetics is already being used to improve athletic performance:

I think genetically tailoring your diet is already a thing; for example, one of the doctors I talked to for the book also does genetic testing for retired athletes. And he knows who’ll respond better to fish oil supplements for brain health, things like that. I think we’ll start to see more of that.

One other thing that’s happened organically is individualized training. Great coaches sometimes do this intuitively: They have these intuitions about genetics, in that they recognize that certain athletes are responding to certain types of training while others aren’t. There’s one scientist I talked to who actually takes biopsies, so that he has the muscle-fiber types of athletes—percentages of fast-twitch and slow-twitch, stuff like that—and develops training regimens for them accordingly. Most athletes are recreational and won’t be getting muscle biopsies, but hopefully we can start paying more attention to what individuals respond to.

Earlier Dish on Epstein’s book here.

Julia Ioffe supports the president’s cancellation of the impending Moscow summit, but nevertheless lays the blame with Obama for letting things reach this point:

You can’t back Putin into a corner and leave him no options. If you are a world leader worth your salt, and have a good diplomatic team working for you, you would know that. You would also know that when dealing with thugs like Putin, you know that things like this are better handled quietly. Here’s the thing: Putin responds to shows of strength, but only if he has room to maneuver. You can’t publicly shame him into doing something, it’s not going to get a good response. Just like it would not get a good response out of Obama.

The Obama administration totally fucked this up. I mean, totally. Soup to nuts. Remember the spy exchange in the summer of 2010? Ten Russian sleeper agents—which is not what Snowden is—were uncovered by the FBI in the U.S. Instead of kicking up a massive, public stink over it, the Kremlin and the White House arranged for their silent transfer to Russia in exchange for four people accused in Russia of spying for the U.S. Two planes landed on the tarmac in Vienna, ten people went one way, four people went the other way, the planes flew off, and that was it. That’s how this should have been done if the U.S. really wanted Snowden back.

Samuel Charap expects Russia-reset skeptics like McCain to now “seize on Obama’s decision in order to proclaim that they were right all along”:

Obama’s Russia policy did produce a long list of important results, from the New START agreement, which verifiably reduced both countries’ nuclear arsenals, to Russian WTO membership, which signaled Russia’s integration into the global economic order. And while the space for pluralism in the Russian public sphere has narrowed significantly since Putin’s return to the presidency, Russia is not North Korea — or even neighboring Belarus.

And despite notable differences over issues like the conflict in Syria, Russia has actually been a crucial partner for achieving U.S. objectives internationally. Just take the agreements Obama reached with then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2009 that allowed for overflights and rail-based transit through Russia to support the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Without that northern route, it’s hard to imagine the U.S. risking closure of the other major transit route — through Pakistan — with the operation to take out Osama bin Laden.

Drezner downplays the chill in relations:

Essentially, each government got what they wanted from the other — arms control, WTO accession, Afghanistan — a few years ago.  Besides counter-terrorism, there ain’t much left on the table where there is any kind of bargaining core — and neither country matters all that much to other for core issues.  The question going forward is whether the lack of agreement about future issues will compromise existing cooperation.  My hunch is that it won’t, and that the tit-for-tat ends here.

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As more and more evidence emerges that medical cannabis can transform some debilitating diseases in children – preventing seizures, for example – Dr. Sanjay Gupta does more than an about face, he acknowledges his past error:

I apologize because I didn’t look hard enough, until now. I didn’t look far enough. I didn’t review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis. Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have “no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse.”

They didn’t have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true.

What’s staggering to me is that anyone who has access to the Internet could believe for one second that what the federal government says about marijuana is true. It’s a self-evident, massive lie, incapable of being defended, and asserted by some kind of fiat. Just watch this pathetic spectacle. It’s like something out of the late Soviet Union, in which an apparatchik is forced to lie to conform to an obviously untrue ideology. This is not science:

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That the Obama administration has done nothing to reclassify the drug to conform to minimal medical standards of accuracy can only be called extreme cowardice. At some point, in my view, this president needs to say about marijuana what he said about marriage equality: that he’s for legalization, taxation and regulation. But Gupta is a helpful stepping stone – a mainstream celebrity acknowledging that the US government is engaged in misleading and lying repeatedly to the American people. Gupta spells out the empirical reality:

It doesn’t have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works. Take the case of Charlotte Figi, who I met in Colorado. She started having seizures soon after birth. By age 3, she was having 300 a week, despite being on seven different medications. Medical marijuana has calmed her brain, limiting her seizures to 2 or 3 per month.

I have seen more patients like Charlotte first hand, spent time with them and come to the realization that it is irresponsible not to provide the best care we can as a medical community, care that could involve marijuana. We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that.

Alex Moore thinks Gupta’s support could prove significant:

The fact is, no matter what category they represent, celebrities tend to cauterize our opinions. It’s not their fault—it’s just how work as a society. Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver and Top Chef come to define how we think of good cooking, and the opinions of celebrity doctors like Sanjay come to represent the “medical mainstream.”

Slate announced yesterday that it will start referring to the Washington Redskins as “Washington’s NFL team.” David Plotz explains his magazine’s rationale:

Americans think differently about race and the language of race than we did 80 years ago. We now live in a world, for instance, in which it’s absolutely unacceptable for an NFL player to utter a racial slur. Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others. In public discourse, we no longer talk about groups based on their physical traits: No one would ever refer to Asians as yellow-skinned. This is why the majority of teams with Indian nicknames have dropped them over the past 40 years.

He says the term’s “relatively innocent history” doesn’t excuse its current usage:

As Smithsonian linguist Ives Goddard has shown, European settlers in the 18th century seem to have adopted the term from Native Americans, who used “red skin” to describe themselves, and it was generally a descriptor, not an insult. Over time, it became a more ambiguous, and less benign term, sometimes used as a slur. When Washington owner George Preston Marshall – who was admittedly a racist, refusing to integrate his team until 1962 – chose the name in the 1930s, he was almost certainly trying to invoke Indian bravery and toughness, not to impugn Indians.

But time passes, the world changes, and all of a sudden a well-intentioned symbol is an embarrassment.

Update from a reader:

Color me unimpressed. If Slate started nurturing Native American journalists or ran a new, substantive article on Native American issues once a week (whether by a Native American or non-Native American journalist), I’d be impressed. Please publish something along those lines, if you have it in you. It’d be nice if they got a little embarrassed by their cheap, easy sanctimony.

For more on the long-standing controversy, check out the comprehensive Dish thread, Do Mascots Need Modernizing?

Keith Humphreys points out that “most state prison inmates today are incarcerated for a violent offense”:

[E]ven assuming the best of all policy worlds in which reducing incarceration continues to be a priority, the U.S. is probably too violent of a society to ever shrink its prison population to a Western Europe level. The proportion of the U.S. population that is serving time for violent crimes is larger than the proportion of the Western European population that is serving time for all offenses combined.

Arrests, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly for non-violent offenses. Balko reviews that latest numbers:

Millman dreams big:

If The Washington Post treated its own newsroom as a premium product to be bundled with a larger package of services that mostly re-purpose third-party-generated content – and long-form investigative journalism in particular is a perfect example of a premium product that is very hard to sell on its own, but which considerably enhances the value of a more comprehensive bundled product – then its scope could be much, much larger than it could ever be on its own. Larger, and more truly national, in fact, than The New York Times is (and the Times has already gone some way in the “parallel internet” direction, but relying on its own prodigious capacity to generate content). …

My own personal hope is that Bezos becomes the first internet media mogul to actually downstream revenue to third-party content providers. I’m sure it wouldn’t be much, but even establishing the principal would be huge. And the opportunity to capture a huge portion of the high-value journalistic internet is enormous. Who wouldn’t rather optimize their blog to integrate with the Washington Post‘s engine than try to sell enough banner ads to keep the lights on? And once that process has begun, the “parallel internet” starts working better than the real thing.

Ken Doctor’s vision is similar:

Netflix Inc. (NFLX) has rounded up movies and TV shows. Apple Inc. (APP)’s iTunes has rationalized the buying of and listening to music. You know the buzzwords of the consumer digital revolution made meaningful: recommendation engines, aggregation and curation, socially mediated discovery, save lists, wish lists and flexible alerts.

All of that would create a boffo news product. The Associated Press offers a 1.0 version of it, in AP Mobile, and Google News and Yahoo News, among others, have long aggregated. Google caused near apoplexy when it pulled the life-support line from Google Reader. Feedly seems to be the replacement flavor of the moment.

Seriously, though, there’s nothing like a Netflix or iTunes experience for heavy news consumers — a place to read, buy, share and be easily informed without heavy lifting.

Yesterday the advocacy group All Out delivered a 320,000-signature petition to the International Olympic Committee urging it to condemn Russia’s crackdown on gay people. Stephen Fry released a letter calling for a boycott of the 2014 Sochi Olympics, saying that Putin “is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews” and comparing the event to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin:

Putin is eerily repeating this insane crime, only this time against LGBT Russians. Beatings, murders and humiliations are ignored by the police. Any defence or sane discussion of homosexuality is against the law. Any statement, for example, that Tchaikovsky was gay and that his art and life reflects this sexuality and are an inspiration to other gay artists would be punishable by imprisonment. It is simply not enough to say that gay Olympians may or may not be safe in their village. The IOC absolutely must take a firm stance on behalf of the shared humanity it is supposed to represent against the barbaric, fascist law that Putin has pushed through the Duma.

LZ Granderson thinks the comparison to the Berlin Games is apt:

In talking about the 1936 Olympics, I do not equate what is happening in Russia to what happened to Jewish people during World War II. I just want to remind you that the Holocaust did not happen overnight. It was subtle. Surgical. In silence. These new anti-gay laws are disturbingly similar to the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws Hitler passed before the 1936 Olympics. And with the Pew Institute finding 84 percent of Russians believe society should reject gay people, perhaps some saying they object to gays for fear of arrest, the world should question how far Russia intends to go.

Meanwhile, runner Nick Symmonds became the first US. Olympian to publicly criticize Russia’s “gay propaganda” law this week. However, in stark contrast to Fry, Symmonds said he wouldn’t raise the issue in Russia:

I will say now what I said before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China, when people asked me how I felt competing in a foreign country with questionable human rights standards: The playing field is not a place for politics.

In a world rife with never-ending political battles, let the playing field be where we set aside our differences and compete for national pride and the love of sport.  If I am placed in a race with a Russian athlete, I will shake his hand, thank him for his country’s generous hospitality, and then, after kicking his ass in the race, silently dedicate the win to my gay and lesbian friends back home. Upon my return, I will then continue to fight for their rights in my beloved democratic union.

Meanwhile, ESPN’s Jim Caple thinks a boycott would be counterproductive:

Skipping these upcoming Olympics would only alienate and anger the very people in Russia the boycott supporters are trying to influence. It’s somewhat like Dan Savage’s misguided call to boycott Stolichnaya vodka, which is produced in Latvia, not Russia. The people such a boycott will hurt are not the Russians with anti-gay views but the innocent workers in what was once an oppressed Soviet republic. … If Russian President Vladimir Putin opposes gay rights, let LGBT athletes from every nation go and beat his athletes in competition.

Along similar lines, last week Frida Ghitis urged athletes to show up and “turn the Winter Games into the gayest games in history”:

Let the Russian police, if they want, arrest every athlete, every coach from Europe, North American, Australia and other forward-looking countries – that includes you, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. The teams should march during the opening ceremonies brandishing rainbow flags, holding hands, proclaiming that every one of them supports equal rights for gay and lesbians — in Russia and everywhere else. Make it an “I am Spartacus” moment for the world. Let Putin arrest them all.

(Photo: Unknown anti-gay activist hits Russia’s gay and LGBT rights activist Nikolai Alexeyev during an unauthorized gay rights activists rally in central Moscow on May 25, 2013. By Andrey Svitailo/AFP/Getty Images)

Looking at Europe, Olga Khazan highlights one silver lining to upticks in male unemployment – a significant drop in domestic violence toward females:

The results showed that the 3.7 percentage point increase in male unemployment during the time caused a decline in the incidence of domestic abuse by 12 percent. Meanwhile, the 3 percentage point increase in female unemployment increased domestic violence by 10 percent. The correlation held for all kinds of abuse, but it was stronger for physical violence.

Though it’s not proven, the theory that Jonathan Wadsworth, a University of London economist and study co-author, suggested to explain the phenomenon is that when male unemployment in an area is high, more men — having either lost their jobs or fearing job loss — are likely to try to stick with their partners in order to ensure some semblance of income stability. And to keep their partners from leaving them, those that have abusive tendencies are more likely to abstain from violent behavior. Meanwhile, when female unemployment is high, women might similarly be less likely to leave men who are predisposed to abuse, and so reports of domestic violence would rise.

Meanwhile, Papa Kwaku Osei notes that in the US, the current dip in labor force participation is likely due to millennial women turning toward college.