Why Is Spotify A Virus?

 

Simply put, using Streaming Services is stealing from artists, DJs, musicians, and music producers. The inception or start of this virus started with the invention of Napster and later Lime Wire in the late 1990s and early 2000s; streaming literally went viral and infected the music industry and took away the ability of the musician, artist, DJ, and music producer to be free from being victimized by theft, rape, abuse of power, and a pillaging of their hard work, dedication, effort, time, and resources put into music creation. As creative artists, musicians, and writers, we must have an equal energy exchange in the form of compensation for our published works. You don't go to Amazon.com or a book store and not pay for your items at checkout time.

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Only true artists, musicians, engineers, and studio talent know what it is like to put in long grueling hours of work for something that they truly love and are passionate about & something they should be rightly compensated for. I wouldn't go into a pizza parlor and ask if I could stream a slice of pizza for three cents or go into a coffee shop and say I only wanted to sample the coffee for a few moments so could you please give it to me for fractions of a penny. Us musicians and artists don't ask tech bros, doctors, lawyers, mechanics, architects, psychologists, nurses, policemen, firemen, or office workers to do their jobs for free, right?

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So at MIM - Music Is Medicine - we take the position that streaming is essentially, an act of highway robbery and theft and should only be done when we rightfully give you consent to use our music for streaming purposes. You wouldn't invite everyone in the world into your house to live for free so why are many artists and musicians doing that on streaming platforms? As Snoop Dogg famously said, "It don't make sense.... 1 billion streams and the artist only gets paid $45k? Where is all the money going?" (Video at the bottom of this page)

 

On April 27, 2024 we released this statement and press release regarding Spotify.

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For immediate release: After some careful consideration and thought, my team and I have decided to take down our music from Spotify. Having your music on Spotify these days is in a sense a modern day form of slavery for the music artist. We know that streaming is all the rage these days and has overtaken downloads and physical copies of music, but these are still viable options for many music listeners and you can stream on other platforms that treat the artist more fairly. 

 

Over the next few weeks you will see all of my music from OM Daddy, idtfkngno, Ganesha Cartel, Dharam Deep, Cola & Lollipops and Anahata Love Recordings artists, and yours truly, I am that I am, Jim Carson, taken off of Spotify. Any music left up on Spotify will NOT be authorized by me or any of my affiliates. We know there are many Spotify users out there but NOT as much as you think. More users use other sites like YouTube and others. 

 

I hope you will stream and download the music we as artists and creators put so much money, time, energy, and resources into on our new website - MIM - Music Is Medicine - where we offer a number of completely free options, in addition to other ways to support our artists who work hard on producing and creating music.  We are creators, and co-creators, and thus, we are under the umbrella of writers and creative producers of mathematical and abstract or creative music which is a profession under the codes of professions - section - 27-0000  Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations. (Source: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm#27-0000) 

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It takes money to make money and we do not offer our services away for free because we believe we should be paid a sustainable wage in order to adjust for the rising costs of economic inflation. We deserve and ask to be paid what we are worth.

 

Not everyone wants to be performing in nightclubs for "exposure" every night to support their families or to attempt to earn a living wage on the road touring festivals, gatherings, and clubs. For some of us, this is our only source of income and we rely on the support of friends, family, and fans.

 

Thank you for understanding and NOT taking it personally if you are a Spotify user. We no longer feel in alignment with Spotify's business practices and gatekeeping. Mostly, only paying artists from the music industry get coverage on Spotify if they are paying to be listed and seen. They even have instituted a policy where if you are seen as having artificial streams they will charge you for it. I've seen artificial streams on my statements and I've never paid for an artificial stream in my life. Also, all songs streams with less than 1,000 plays will not be paid out. This is unconscionable and unfair especially when they have a paying user base and the company is worth billions of dollars going to one man at the top and Silicon Valley venture capitalists as seen in the Netflix documentary "The Playlist." 

 

So we at Anahata Love Recordings, Cola & Lollipops, and Music Is Medicine refuse to be exploited and say no to corruption and theft in the music industry. 

 

Namaste, Jim Carson

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To understand the origin of Spotify and Napster being a virus placed into inception of the human brain and universal consciousness much like the movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio "Inception," I refer to this piece of history from "The Guardian." (Originally posted here 4 years ago if link is still valid: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/may/31/napster-twenty-years-music-revolution)

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From The Guardian, "June 1999, and the music industry is rolling in cash. Bloated by the vast profits of the CD business, which reached a high of £30.6bn that year, the future looks bright for the suits at the top. Sadly for them, in a dorm at Boston’s Northeastern university, a precocious coder is about to blow it all apart.

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Napster, the brainchild of Shawn Fanning, linked computers and allowed users to access each other’s mp3 audio files. Fanning met an ambitious teen, Sean Parker, on the webchat channel w00w00, and together they triggered a series of events that brought the record business to its knees by making music discovery instant – but payment optional. It was not the first service of its kind, but it was the one that went viral. Four months after its June 1999 launch, 150,000 people had signed up. By February 2001, it peaked at a verified 26.4m users, with some estimates topping 80 million.

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It wasn’t just some student project gone rogue. From the earliest days, it was built as a business. Shawn watched his uncle John Fanning try to get rich in 1997 when he was hawking chess.net, an online chess service; John convinced his nephew to hand him 70% of Napster in order to help him make it a success.

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The company quickly created a buzz among San Francisco tech investors during the dotcom boom. Venture capitalist Eileen Richardson says downloading the software was a Damascene moment: “What’s better than learning about new musical artists without having that big holy hell of a bunch of crooks called ‘the record industry’ in the middle?”

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She and her friend Yosi Amram, who knew John Fanning from his chess.net days, put in money and met Fanning and Parker. “We definitely talked about [whether] this was legal or not,” she recalls, but Amram referenced the landmark Sony Betamax ruling from 1984 on home copying to try to allay fears. Richardson became the company’s first CEO.

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There is an ossified narrative that record labels were too arrogant and lazy to see the digital revolution coming, and deserved their downfall. But the story is also about the slowness of a generational handover of power. EMI’s Capitol imprint was the first major to sell a download version of a single, Electric Barbarella by Duran Duran, in 1997. But it was a Sisyphean struggle to get the boards to really listen. Jeremy Silver, VP for new media worldwide at EMI at the end of the 1990s, recounts chasing one of EMI’s most senior executives into the toilets to speak to him about digital plans: “The only time I could get him to stay still and listen to me was when he was having a piss!”

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Alison Wenham was heading AIM, a newly formed trade body for independent labels, when Napster appeared. Her account of a meeting between industry heads at Midem, the industry’s annual trade conference, in January 2000, sums up this divide. “A man from one of the majors banged the table and said the answer was to ban the internet.”

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As the new millennium began, in San Francisco, a power struggle within Napster was threatening to pull the company under. Richardson knew John Fanning’s 70% stake would cause problems. “I tried to keep him out of operations day-to-day as much as I could,” she says. She claims he wanted to work with one firm valuing the company at $115m, but which Richardson felt would damage Napster’s long-term future. (John Fanning did not respond to multiple requests from the Guardian to speak about his time at Napster.

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Richardson was planning a per-track download model – “a dollar a song” – echoing the $0.99 track price that iTunes would offer in 2003. “Why would you spend $17 on a Britney Spears CD and get only two songs that you like?” she asks. “Wouldn’t you prefer to spend $17 and get 17 songs that you like?”

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But at the time, breaking apart the CD was never going to land well with labels, and Richardson stepped back in May 2000. Music copyright lawyer-turned-VC Hank Barry became the company’s second CEO in a year. His company invested $15m and got two of the three seats on Napster’s board. “I just wanted it to survive,” says Barry. “I figured if the company could survive for a year or so and make some arrangements with the record companies, that it could be a very good investment.”

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Napster had swiftly become a cultural talking point. By October 2000, its creator was on the cover of Time magazine. Moby said he was “very flattered” that his music was being shared on Napster and Courtney Love claimed that “major label recording contracts” were the real pirates. Napster had also spawned copycat services such as LimeWire that were built with one eye on avoiding the same legal mistakes Napster had made.

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But Napster was by now seriously under threat. The RIAA, the trade body representing US record companies, had begun suing the firm in 1999, and acts including Dr Dre and Metallica tried to close it down. In May 2000, the latter delivered 13 boxes of documents to Napster’s offices, listing hundreds of thousands of users suspected of unlawfully sharing their music.

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But Barry was meeting with major labels, desperately hoping to hammer out some kind of deal. He got into advanced talks with Edgar Bronfman Jr, of Vivendi Universal, that June. “We had spreadsheets that covered a conference room table, trying to work out what the business model could be,” Barry says. He claims they were “48 hours away from a deal” – but then Bronfman stopped taking his calls. “To this day, I don’t know what happened.”

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Silver suggests the real reason the majors did not want to do a deal with Napster was because doing so would blow a hole in their obscurantist accounting policies.

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“Suddenly, the data associated with digital transactions was unambiguous [compared with traditional sales] and very powerful,” he claims. “For years, record companies had traded on dodgy numbers. What [the lawyers] were afraid of was wholesale renegotiation of artists’ contracts triggered by data transparency.”

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While majors Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner viewed Napster as a threat, the independents and BMG were more accommodating. “Our perspective was pragmatic,” says Wenham. “We didn’t condone ruthless piracy, but this seemed to be much more of a fan-based phenomenon that had grown to tens of millions of users.”

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Helen Smith was director of business affairs at AIM and, alongside Wenham, negotiated the deal on behalf of the indies. She wanted “the usual,” she says. “A good royalty rate, in advance, equity. Napster definitely wanted to do a deal. There were some who felt you shouldn’t do a deal with the devil, but they were the exception.”

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Wenham says the business model – based on converting a percentage of Napster’s 80 million users into paying subscribers, similar to the freemium model Spotify established – was viable.

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Napster had carried out audience research to determine how many users would pay for music and what they would pay: “If only 2% of the Napster user base converted to paying, it would be incredibly valuable to the sector.”

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None of this could save Napster. Rolling legal action against it since December 1999 hobbled its growth and the resulting legal bills drained its resources. In September 2001, Napster agreed to pay copyright owners £20m in a settlement, and by May 2002 it couldn’t pay its staff, who were offered the choice of being laid off or taking a week’s unpaid holiday. Mass resignations ensued. The company filed for bankruptcy protection in June 2002 and the assets were eventually sold to Roxio. It relaunched as a legal service in November 2002, but by then, it was yesterday’s brand.

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It took until 2015 for the record industry to finally move into recovery – watching aghast as its value dropped every year from 2000 to a low of $15bn in 2014.

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The services slipstreaming in Napster’s wake benefited from the risks it took. Swedish technologist Daniel Ek was hugely inspired by Napster when developing Spotify, so much so that he brought Sean Parker on to his team. Spotify has just passed 100 million paying users (of 217 million users in total); the record business is now back to a £15.15bn ($19.1bn) value last year, though still only half of its 1999 peak.

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Arguably, Napster’s true benefit was clearing out industry dead wood . “Some people just can’t get used to change, and that means we have to wait for those people to go away,” says Paul Hitchman, who set up digital music service PlayLouder as Napster was emerging. He is now president at label services company AWAL. “In a way, Napster won. From a consumer point of view, it opened up music to the whole world in a completely liberated way.”

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The battle with Napster also instilled an image of the music business as grasping and arrogant. “Even today, the music sector are perceived as control freaks, living in the old world and trying to hold back innovation,” says Smith. “Obviously, that is not the case, but that image still haunts us today. That is one of the biggest downsides of what happened with Napster.”

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Those who tried to make Napster a success still feel the music industry missed a great opportunity. “Shawn Fanning and I had a debrief a couple of years later, and we both decided that we were the first and that we were going to be made an example of – no matter what,” says Richardson.

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Barry remains sanguine. “Shawn Fanning did an amazing thing, and was quite far ahead of his time,” he says. “But timing is everything, right?”