In Strict Tempo, vol. 116: We Don't Need A New Spotify

Hello and welcome to this weeks In Strict Tempo. Before I get into the main subject this week, a reminder that on Monday I published the latest Ceremony mix, a 45 minute recording of raw techno from Glasgow legend Mother. Check it out below, and share it round if you enjoyed it!

It seems that every few years a new contender pops up in the streaming industry, offering to “fix” the current model. Generally their mission statement seems to be ‘we’ll pay artists more’, which is a noble cause that I’m not sure anyone reading this disagrees with.

Let’s ignore the fact for a minute that ‘paying artists more’ actually means paying distributors and record labels more, with no control of how much of that money actually reaches an artists pocket - the thing that many of these challenger DSPs all seem to agree on is that the current streaming landscape needs fundamentally changing.

For most new DSPs they firmly have one target in their sights: Spotify. The big bad wolf of the music industry and subject to a recent takedown in Liz Pelly’s book (a consequence of which she recently complained about was that people were cancelling their subscriptions and moving to other streaming platforms- which was basically the entire message around the press campaign surrounding the book). Everyone wants to make the ‘new Spotify’, a DSP with the same breadth of catalogue, but one that pays artists significantly more - and all for the same ten quid a month.

I see it differently. Ask your local record shop owner why they opened their shop, and it won’t be ‘to become the new HMV’. No-one needs to have a shop in every city, and a full range of catalogue. The record shop prides itself on its curation, and the advice it can offer on what else a user might like, kind of like an algorithm, but better, I guess.

Is the future of the music industry a new Spotify? I don’t think so, nor do I think it needs to be. I think it’ll be a selection of smaller, curated, probably genre-specific streaming services. They might not pay loads better than the existing platforms, but you never really heard any customers complaining that HMV was able to buy records with a discount due to it’s size.

There’s already a few platforms beginning to get some attention, of which Cantilever is the most recent. For £4.99 a month you get a small, curated selection of albums with ‘sleeve notes’ to provide context around the release. New albums are added regularly, for a month at a time before cycling off. There’s some drawbacks to this model, namely you might not enjoy the selection that month, and you won’t be able to create playlists of favourites, but the idea is there as a start. It probably needs refining a little as the service hopefully grows, perhaps allowing users to select from a genre or a larger pool of releases to listen to, but with the backing from a whole load of credible Indies, it looks like a good start, and I’ll probably subscribe at some point, out of curiosity at first, but also because things like this won’t survive without our support.

There’s no reason that new DSPs can’t live alongside Spotify and Apple Music in the way that Indies have always existed alongside HMV. The main DSPs can aid broad discovery - something they’re reasonably good at, and if you’re lucky that will convert to a deeper fan. I know it’s a bit like a lottery win, but that was always the case anyway. For the thousands of CD’s racked in HMV, all it took was one staff member to get behind something and push it in order to shift a few, even just locally. More curated streaming services can then build upon that initial “oh that sounds good, who is it?” with deeper context around the artist, maybe even a line of contact to them, merch, tickets and a more meaningful fan-artist relationship. For me that’s where I feel Cantilever falls short a little bit, in that it presents the album as a one-off - I don’t know how it then encourages the user to access the rest of the artists catalogue, but it will be off-platform.

Of course, the biggest barrier in the way of all this is consumer apathy. We’re music fans, but there’s not as many of us as people like to think. Most subscribers to Spotify won’t be fully engaged music lovers, they’ll just want to hear music on their phone. This was illustrated by a report into the activities of the recently closed Nina Protocol. This started off as a challenger DSP, getting a load of press, some decent labels on it, and a weird crypto angle which was never really made clear. It ran for about five years, during which a total of $33,000 dollars was spent on the platform. In contrast, more than $600,000 is spent on Bandcamp each day, and Spotify brings in over $5,000,000 each day in subscription revenue, give or take.

Getting people to spend money on music is a huge hurdle, especially when they can already get it for ‘free’ or £10 a month anyway. Of course we live in a world where the only meaningful way to scale a business (especially one with the high startup costs of acquiring catalogue) is to take VC funding, and they never really look at the long-term. If they don’t have their millions back in a couple of years, you’re done for. Building a sustainable streaming platform will take years to grow an audience to a number that allows it to not only pay rights holders fairly, but to become profitable.

Rightsholders themselves are another hurdle in the road, and bear some responsibility. Although Cantilever has been backed by a number of Indies, back catalogues are quite rightly highly valued, meaning no-one can build anything new if you can’t afford to onboard labels. You wouldn’t sow a field of crops if a bag of seeds was millions of pounds would you? As an industry we need to look at providing access to catalogues without massive upfront advances, and ideally without taking loads of equity. Take a chance, back your catalogue to succeed on that platform.

Maybe this is all a pipe dream then, but dreams have always existed in music. I really believe that most of us who work in this industry do so from a position of genuine love of music, and that we all want things to be better for everyone. All this is way easier said than done, and I don’t have the answers, nor would I know where to start building something like this (not to mention the lack of cash), but someone out there does, and maybe they’re even reading this?

We don’t need to build the new Spotify, we need to build the new Rough Trade.

New Music

I’ve provided Bandcamp links below, but don’t forget all of these records will be available in your local independent record store too. Some In Strict Tempo-approved shops include Boomkat, World of Echo, Rubadub and All Night Flight.

emer & Ugne Uma - you and me [Stroom]

The Ugne Uma 7” on Shelter Press earlier this year remains a standout release for me, so I was excited to check this new collab with emer. It’s nice, perhaps a little bit too soulful for my own personal tastes, so I deffo preferred the solo 7”, but fans of that hazy electronic soul sound will find much to enjoy here.

Rezzett - Into The Boiling Darks [RZ]

21 new Rezzett tracks? In the hottest summer on record? How do you expect us to deal with this?

Sticky, fuzzy, sassy and a little bit off-kilter this is the sound of being stuck on the top deck of the 149 bus as it crawls it’s way up Dalston High Street, all of London laid out beneath you. The sights, the smells, the sounds and snippets of this flash in and out here and there, as the anticipation of a night out grows.

False Berries - Find The Gyres (Monks Hood)

Conor Kiley - OK Hotel (Monks Hood)

A couple of new ones that haven’t made it thru to the streamers yet (if indeed they ever will?) courtesy of the new Monks Hood imprint. Set up by Juho Toivonen and Cuneiform Tabs member Sterling McKinnon, it’s McKinnon who inaugurates things here with a record under the False Berries alias, a lightly Canterbury-esque record that recalls the likes of Syd Barrett & Flaming Tunes as it does the likes of Soft Machine.

The second release this week is the debut solo release from Conor Kiley. Kiley was once dubbed the future of rock n’ roll by the NME during the landfill indie. Don’t let that put you off though, as Kiley has since stepped free of his band Holy Ghost Revival (they actually split up back in 2008) and has now returned as a singer-songwriter, sitting on this album for the best part of a decade before finding a home on Monk’s Hood.

Quiet Husband - The Architecture of Perception [Industrial Coast]

Kicking off with 200mph techno before letting up the pace slightly Richie Culver returns to his Quiet Husband project, combining aspects of his more industrial noise work with fairground waltzer techno to create a relentless album that never gives the listener a minute to breathe.

Nuke Watch - Fusion [Sagome]

Improv free-jazz/electronixxx here from TTT alumnus Nuke Watch. Psych-drums & outsider weirdo gear from start to finish on this one. It won’t be for everyone, but for those that fuck with this kinda stuff it’ll be an enjoyable hour spent listening.

Regis - Power Is Neutral (Mark Broom Edits) [Blueprint]

Techno titans collide here as Mark Broom twists and teases a new life into some classic Brum techno slammers from Regis. About as subtle as a brick to the face, and none the worse for it.

Untold - False Vacuum EP [Hemlock]

Untold returns to his infrequent release schedule with five new tracks on the legendary Hemlock. Take me back to that exciting period of late 00’s/early 10’s London, when stuff like this was leaking out of every railway arch across the city from Elephant to Tottenham and beyond.