In Strict Tempo, vol. 67: Retail Woe
HMV & Spotify are in the news this week for different reasons. HMV scaling back their latest expansion plans, and Spotify fighting PR fires whilst trying to promote their latest report to the industry.
It was reported last Thursday that HMV was shelving plans to massively expand in the UK in favour of opening a new shop in… checks notes… Belgium. They’re blaming it on the autumn budget, but I feel that whatever HMV tries to do these days is either badly thought out or five years too late. They pivoted back to vinyl a few years ago and tried to restart in-stores but years after Rough Trade and other Indies perfected it. They turned their back on music in favour of games and plastic toys, and now want to get back into bed with it as becomes popular again. Have you been in a HMV recently? I don’t even know where my nearest one is any more (there’s a Fopp in Cambridge still, but it’s very rare I’ll go in these days).
HMV claim that the vinyl resurgence has been good for them, but if anything they’re probably a victim of it really - higher prices on records mean they’ve got to charge even more to cover their overheads like rent and staff that online operations don’t have. When a record was £20 online or £23 in HMV you might have sucked up the extra few quid for the convenience, but nowadays you’re looking at the difference between £28 or £35 you’ll save yourself the extra and get it delivered without the ignominy of being upsold a PVC protection sleeve at the counter. It just feels like a huge missed opportunity really.
There was probably still a way back for HMV a few years ago, but if I’m honest I can’t really see much of a future for them - DVD/Blu-Ray sales must be all but dead, I don’t know if any of the current generation of games consoles come with disc drives, but the next generation almost certainly won’t so that only leaves music. It really pains me to say it as someone who spent six mostly great years working there (the last eighteen months prior to administration were about as miserable as you can imagine) but I’m not sure I’ll miss HMV on the High Street, and that’s something I wouldn’t have said even a year or two ago.
It’s been a busy week for the Spotify PR team this week too, firstly dealing with the fallout that it’s been discovered they’re hosting “courses” from misogynist dickhead Andrew Tate that’s led to a number of people to cancel their subscriptions, and secondly that they’ve announced their annual ‘Loud & Clear’ report, basically where they try and convince the music industry how great they are. Let’s not beat around the bush - Spotify pay an incredibly low royalty rate on a per-stream basis, but for many artists and labels it will still be their biggest source of digital revenue. Of course Spotify are gonna spin the results towards their agenda, and the headline is that Spotify paid the music industry over $10 billion in 2024. Impressive enough, and a figure not to be sniffed at by any means, but an amount that will largely fall into the hands of the major labels.
One thing I noticed in the communication is that they wheeled out a Spotify employee to explain that Spotify doesn’t actually pay artists directly, that they only pay rightsholders (aka labels, distributors & publishers) who then deal pay the artists from their share. Reading between the lines they’re saying “don’t blame us, take it up with your label/distro/publisher instead of moaning at us”.
Anyway: some other headlines, over 71,000 artists made $10k on Spotify last year, but only 12,500 made over $100k - that’s still a very decent number of musicians making solid money, but the amount of artists making a liveable wage (let’s say $35,000) off the platform must only be around 20,000. Of course there’s plenty of other ways artists can make money on top of Spotify streams, but it shows you the industry perhaps isn’t as doom and gloom as some people make out. Of the top artists, earning over $1m a year? There’s 1,450 of them - around 1,000 more than there was back in 2017.
Of course, this all comes with the caveat that there’s a whole pile of artists now who aren’t earning a penny from Spotify compared to last year - with the royalty threshold now starting at 1,000 streams. The thing is, even if Spotify paid £1 per stream instead of the fractions of a penny they currently do then these tracks would still be miles off earning their artists a liveable wage.
Spotify say there’s over 12,000,000 artists on the platform - there’s a lot of noise to cut through in order to get heard there, something all artists and labels I’ve spoke to agree on. What’s the answer? Banning AI music would be a big start, but Spotify like that stuff as they don’t have to pay out as much on it.
This might come across like I’m a spokesperson for Spotify - I’m not. But I understand that it shouldn’t be looked upon as the cause of all the ills in the music industry. It’s far from perfect, and yes paying the likes of Joe Rogan and hosting Andrew Tate is an incredibly shitty and brain-dead thing to do, but fact of the matter is that it’s where the biggest audience for music is for the most part, even if that audience experience isn’t particularly great (much like HMV these days I suppose). I’d love a fairer and more equitable DSP to come along and pay artists 10x more per stream than Spotify does and have hi-def audio for listeners, but it already exists and no-one uses it. It’s called Tidal. If it closed tomorrow would everyone migrate to Tidal and Apple Music? Maybe, but I think a bigger number of users would go to YouTube instead, a platform that makes Spotify look like a Euromillions jackpot when it comes to royalty rates. Let’s be careful what we wish for (whilst trying to imagine a better alternative for artists and labels).
New Music Please
Taking a bit of feedback on board this week, I’m now sharing Bandcamp links on almost everything (as well as shop links within the text). It’s not for me to tell you where to buy your records, but Bandcamp and online/independent record stores can happily co-exist and both do a great job of pushing new music, so try and support ‘em both!
Memotone - Pruning [Discrepant]
More lost-in-the-ether dreamlike electronica from from one of the most underrated producers out there. If you dug his past releases on The Trilogy Tapes and Diskotopia you’ll dig this.
DJ Elmoe - Battle Zone [Planet Mu]
I never really got that into footwork, but there was a time around 2009-2010 it felt inescapable. Even Theo Parrish kinda got in on it. DJ Elmoe first came to light on that Bangs & Works compilation that Planet Mu used to pretty much introduce the genre to a worldwide audience, and has been quietly putting out music since. This new album continues that run, landing back on Mu for the first time since 2010, even if the genre has long since fallen out of fashion with the hip London DJ crowd.
Brassfoot - Search History [The Trilogy Tapes]
At first glance I thought this was the return of Brasstooth (he of certified UKG stomper Celebrate Life), but it’s actually a new EP by Apron and Don’t Be Afraid alumnus Brassfoot, which is just as exciting. Pitching in somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic between Detroit and LDN this is late-night bus-home rolling gear.
Quiet Husband - Raging Habits II [Quiet Husband]
If Weatherall was still about this would be exactly what he had in mind when he coined the term ‘panel beaters from Prague’. Proper ‘ard as nails noisy Tekno here. Doesn’t seem to have made it to Bandcamp yet, and seemingly sold out everywhere.
Surgeon - Soul Fire [Tresor]
Yessss! A new Surgeon album, and it’s Surgeon being Surgeon, not messing about with modular synths or doing ambient or any of that. Can’t wait for this.
Kara Lis Coverdale - Daze [Smalltown Supersound]
Grafts is still one of the defining electronic pieces of our generation, so new music from Kara-Lis Coverdale is always gonna get my attention. This new one is airier, lighter than Grafts but still enough to keep me interested. Looking forward to the new album
Dirty Projectors/David Longstreth/stargaze - Song of the Earth [Transgressive]
Slowly revealing itself on Spotify there’s now four songs from this album of broadly orchestral pieces from Dirty Projectors frontman David Longstreth. Switching between contemporary classical, avant-rock and a folkier slant on the indie sound Dirty Projectors are better known for, this is an interesting take on what it’s possible for a band to do if they really put their mind to things.
Thom Yorke/Mark Pritchard - This Conversation is Missing Your Voice [Warp]
I really didn’t like the first single from this collaboration and a second listen hasn’t changed my mind. This new one however is a little better, reminding me of King Of Limbs-era Radiohead.
The Cure - Alone (Four Tet Remix) [Unreleased]
I’ve said before that Four Tet is probably a better remixer than he is a producer, and he does little to discredit that take here, with his remix of the opening track from the last Cure album - but then again, it’s hard to fuck it up when the source material is this good, isn’t it? No sign of a release yet, you’ll have to head to Instagram to hear it.
That’s all for this week, hope you enjoyed it! Thanks as ever for sharing, subscribing and commenting, I really appreciate it.