Doesn’t Have a Beat, Can’t Dance to It

Last week, LUCIAN GRAINGE suggested, via an open letter to the industry (thinly disguised as a memo to UNIVERSAL MUSIC staff), that the 100,000-plus tracks being added daily to some streaming services were full of “lower-quality functional content that in some cases can barely pass for ‘music.’” (And you thought the critics at PITCHFORK were mean.)

This week, a French governmental agency reported that between 1 and 3 percent of the music actually being streamed in that country is the result of fraudulent activity—an underhanded combination of “false plays... by robots or natural persons,” “false playlists” and “[illegitimate] additions of titles on the platforms.” According to Music Business Worldwide, that adds up to between $5.8 million and $17.4 million in annual shadow streaming revenue in France alone, which could translate to as much as $507 million in shadow streaming revenue globally if the same sort of thing is happening everywhere.

Which, if I’m reading all this is correctly, is basically saying the streaming music biz has a very expensive “crap in, crap out” problem.

Leaving aside for now the question of what actually constitutes “lower-quality functional content”—any VULFPECK fans in the house?—and the other question of the mainstream music industry’s own history of lower-quality functional accounting, these January news drops seem to be setting the tables for a very specific debate/discussion about the streaming economy in 2023. It appears it won’t be about how streaming companies calculate their royalties but rather how they count streams.

The head of the world’s biggest record company used the term “artist-centric model” in his letter, which raised some hopes he might put UMG’s muscle behind the user-centric royalty system a lot of middle class artists have been asking for. But nothing in his letter suggests that. “Artist-centric,” in this context, seems to mean more streams and therefore more revenue for major label artists, and fewer streams—and fewer tracks in the services—for shadowy opportunists and manipulators. By which Lucian Grainge doesn’t mean Vulfpeck. Or its fans. At least I don’t think he does. I hate content farms, too, I really do. But the discussion of who he, or any of us, means may turn out to be, shall we say, not so functionally simple.

To be continued.

Etc Etc Etc

SADE, SNOOP DOGG, GLORIA ESTEFAN, TEDDY RILEY, JEFF LYNNE, GLEN BALLARD and LIZ ROSE will be inducted into the SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME in June... And while we’re on the subject of songwriting... Lyric of the week: “You love your jazz like you love your sugar,” intoned repeatedly, with shifting cadences, by CAMAE AYEWA, aka MOOR MOTHER, during IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS’ set to a packed WINTER JAZZFEST crowd Saturday night at Brooklyn’s SUPERIOR INGREDIENTS. Chew on that (as if you have a choice). It was aimed, one imagines, at anyone who thinks it might have been aimed at them... The physics of swing... The hip-hop song that’s trying to bring the city of Durham, N.C., together.

Rest in Peace

VAN CONNER, Screaming Trees bassist and primary composer of the grunge band’s best known song, “Nearly Lost You.” He and his brother, guitarist Gary Lee Conner, who announced his death on social media, grew up in Ellensburg, Wash., where “they were treated as losers and outcasts,” producer Steve Fisk told the Seattle Times. “That fueled their art, and created anger and explosion in their music”... Boston rock mainstay GARY SMITH, who owned Fort Apache Studio and produced records by Pixies, Throwing Muses, Blake Babies, Juliana Hatfield, the Feelies and the Chills.