Stream runs dry for bands and labels

CIARÁN RYAN is one half of the Midlands-based independent label Out On A Limb, which is celebrating a decade of releasing music this year.

One of its artists, Windings, were nominated for the Choice Music Prize this year.

Ryan is not a fan of streaming music, which is a surprise considering he runs a label that has all its releases available on the internet for streaming.

“The online world is all clicking from one thing to another, and I just find my attention wanes easier,” he says. “Whereas with a record, you invest your time and concentration in it. You have to turn the record to get to the second side and all that, and to me, that gives me more of an attachment to it, and a sense that I’m digesting the album as a whole; not in some kind of piecemeal way.”

Streaming is great for music fans, casual or otherwise, but nowadays it’s possible you will never pay a cent to listen to your favourite band. And yet bands and music labels, or what’s left of them, are clamouring to have their newest releases on Spotify, probably the most popular of the myriad streaming services available. There are around 20m tracks available on Spotify. If you can put up with listening to irritating ads every so often, you don’t have to pay anything to listen to whatever music you want. Its closest equivalent in Ireland is Deezer, which comes across as a poor man’s Spotify — and even a poor man can use Spotify as often as he wants.

From a music blogger’s standpoint, our best friends are Soundcloud and Bandcamp, while for a band, it’s probably Breaking Tunes and Reverbnation, where your music can be streamed alongside your bio and live tour dates and other information.

So with all these options, bands and labels must be raking in the cash, right? Wrong.

OOAL has made all its bands’ releases available on Bandcamp and Soundcloud. Ryan says streaming opens up new markets, pointing to one of the artists on the label, Owensie, who had “an insane amount of streams from Italy”. He adds: “Yet, we didn’t see that transfer to online sales of the physical record or in iTunes sales from Italy.”

As for royalties off these services, good luck trying to survive on them. Uniform Motion, an Anglo-French folk band, last year broke down their earnings from the various streaming services. Spotify earns them €0.003/play. If you listen to their album the whole way through, they will make €0.029. On Bandcamp, meanwhile, artists can allow potential buyers to name their price, if any, for an album. Bandcamp gets 15% of an album that costs €5. As for Soundcloud, which is valued at about $200m, the royalties are nada, zilch, nothing. One of the biggest tracks of the year is Disclosure’s ‘White Noise’, featuring AlunaGeorge, which has notched up over 1.3m plays on Soundcloud alone since it was uploaded on Jan 21. And yet they’ve earned nothing from the site. The track is available to buy on iTunes and reached number two in the British charts.

Ryan is relatively sanguine about the situation. “Tonnes of folks are recording cheaply and self-releasing. That means there’s more of a clamour to actually get your release heard so you have to go that extra mile and let people taste the album before they decide whether they want to part with their hard-earned cash or not. And some people will really like it, but, for one reason or another, may not buy it – they may have bills to pay or no turntable or whatever. But some of those people will go to the gigs and invest their time and finances in the act that way.”

Streaming has handed the entire history of music to the casual listener, the one who says they’re into a bit of everything. Instead of paying €10 for 10 tracks that some people have slaved over for months, maybe even years, we’re happy paying €30 a month to an internet provider and €10 a month to the all-conquering Spotify so we don’t have to listen to ads. We’re used to constantly sampling the new, while being able to return to the past in three clicks.

Record Store Day is on Saturday, April 20. Head to a record shop, buy a CD or record and give it your undivided attention. You might be surprised at how rewarding an experience it can be.