“Never underestimate the potency of cheap music” — Noel Coward

As an accountant in my day job, people may think of me as as someone who, as Lord Darlington said, knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. It’s certainly true that I spend a lot of time thinking about the price of things, but I like to think I care about their value too. This is especially true when it comes to music, and I have been thinking a lot about the severing of the relationship between its price and its value.

When I first started spending serious money on music as a teenager, it would cost me maybe £12 to £15 to buy an album on CD. Gigs would be about a fiver at a small venue, £8-£10 at a mid-size, up to £20 for an arena show. My first Glastonbury festival ticket was £65. I didn’t have a lot of spare cash, but what I did have mainly went on music. As I went through University and moved into the world of work, even though I had more responsibilities, like bills and suchlike, this didn’t change a great deal. When I got my first paycheck for my first proper (full time, post-University) job, I immediately went out and bought all the Pixies albums on CD. This kind of behaviour continued throughout most of my twenties.

The music industry used to have a term at this time, 50 quid man, referring to a middle aged guy with decent disposable income, who would go out and buy £50 worth of CDs every month no matter what. One of the most reliable sources of income for the industry (he would be buying records now of course, but the vinyl revival hadn’t yet happened then). I was more like £100 guy, buying so many CDs each month that it actually became quite hard to keep up with listening to them, as well as continuing to go to loads of gigs and festivals. Part of the reason I bought so many CDs, was because I had to buy them if I wanted to hear them. If I wanted to hear what, say, the new Calexico album sounded like, I had to go out and buy it. I wasn’t doing it out of the goodness of my heart, or to support musicians, but because I wanted and needed to hear as many records as possible (I had a bit of a fear of missing out on good music, as I wrote about recently).

Then along came the internet (well ok, it had been around quite a while, but only now did it start to have a massive impact on music). Suddenly it became much easier to hear music without buying it. Firstly there were the file sharing sites like Napster and Limewire. Illegal of course, but I could download an album and listen to it without buying it. I still bought CDs though, not only through moral qualms at illegal downloading, but because listening to illegally downloaded MP3 wasn’t a very convenient or user-friendly experience. A lot of people did stop buying music though, and industry revenues plummeted.

Then along came streaming services, a supposed white knight for both customers (you can listen to all the music in the world at any time you want!) and the industry (we can get people paying for music again!). And to an extent, these things were true. Being able to listen to any music you want any time you want is great, and there are a lot of people paying their £10-£15 a month for a streaming service who were previously not spending money on music at all.

What about someone like me though, who used to spend £100 per month on CDs, and is now paying only for a streaming service, a net loss to the music industry, and ultimately musicians surely? It is well documented that streaming services disproportionately benefit the top 1% of musicians, and at least when I was buying the CDs of less well known bands, I knew that some proportion of that money was going to them.

How do I compensate for the fact that I can now listen to all the recorded music in the world for 10% of the amount I used to spend? The truth is I don’t, not really. The rise of streaming and smartphones coincided with the years I got married and had children, so even though I earn more money than I did when I was young, I have less disposable income. It’s much harder to justify spending money on stuff that I don’t really need to spend it on. I think my spending on music would have dropped anyway, without music streaming, but not by as much. It’s no coincidence that one of the last CDs I bought was Joanna Newsom’s Divers, one my favourite artists, and one of the few at that time that still didn’t allow their music on streaming services. I had to buy it if I wanted to hear it, and that meant I had to buy it.

I still buy records occasionally, but rarely have the time and space to just sit down and listen to one, so it feels like I am just buying a nice object for my house rather than supporting musicians (although I suppose it does at least mean I am supporting the independent music stores we are lucky enough to have in our city). I buy merch occasionally, but am a fussy bugger. To buy a band t-shirt, I have to like the band, like the t-shirt design, and not find the band’s name too embarrassing, so it limits my options. I also buy stuff through Bandcamp sometimes, but I don’t really listen to the music I purchase on Bandcamp, through Bandcamp, I’m still listening to it through my streaming service most of the time. This makes my Bandcamp purchases feel like an act of charity, like chucking a few coins to a busker because I like the song they’re playing. I get to hear the music whether I pay for it or not. Music is too important for supporting it to feel like charity.

And that’s the most concerning aspect of streaming services, what they do to the value of music. I was going to say that streaming services treat music like a utility, but that’s not quite right, because with utilities like electric and water you pay more depending on how much you use. And is it really right that someone who listens to music at every available opportunity pays the same amount as someone who listens occasionally or barely at all? Streaming services are actually more like a licence fee, or a poll tax, a fixed monthly amount that is the same for everyone. The problem is that once people are used to paying their £10 per month for access to all the music in the world, they’re unlikely to want to spend any more. Indeed it has become very difficult for streaming services to raise their prices, as they’re all essentially providing the same service and therefore have to charge the same price. Spotify charges the same £9.99 for its’ premium service that it did a decade ago, so in real terms a massive reduction in cost. Apple Music has at least managed to break out of this deadlock by finally increasing its’ price to £12.99 last year.

Worse than the meagre price is the fact that music consumption becomes passive. You don’t have to think about music enough to decide what to buy, it’s just there to listen to, whenever you need it (thanks to playlists and algorithms, you don’t even have to decide what to listen to). Even though you might be technically be paying for it, your £10 direct debit is lost amongst your other larger bills. It feels like music is free, when in fact it should be priceless.