1. Spotify? Not much better than piracy. Sorry.

   April 9, 2012

   

   If you are a frequent user of Spotify, you are probably familiar with the ad in which the Spotify announcer says “Piracy is so last year. Every time you use Spotify, you can feel good knowing you are supporting your favorite artists.” If you haven’t heard this ad, you will; it comes on about once every two hours.

   Spotify is an amazing service, offering free access to potentially every recording ever made. It’s the closest thing to what Napster used to be, but where finding a tune on Napster was totally dependent on who was online at a given time, Spotify’s entire library is 100% there 100% of the time — and it’s legal. It’s about as revolutionary as anything has ever been, but it’s a young company, and its bold claims of supporting artists deserve thorough scrutiny. Does listening to music on Spotify really support the artists you listen to? Is it really better for rightsholders than piracy?

   The short answer: No. Not yet.

   To give you an idea of Spotify’s payout compared with other services, here’s the revenue report for Friend in the Head, a song my band released last April.

   Since my band doesn’t have a record label or any other stakeholder taking a cut of the revenue, we receive the entire payout from each service:

   iTunes (UK/EU)     ~$1.22 / sale
   iTunes (US)               ~$.76 / sale
   eMusic                            $.40 / sale
   Rhapsody                      $.01 / stream
   Spotify                            $.00378 / stream

   So if you lived in the US and purchased a copy of Friend in the Head on iTunes for 99 cents, we would have received about 77% of the sale. This could add up pretty quickly; had we sold 9,900 copies of our song over that six-month period, we would have received a check for about $7600 from iTunes.

   Spotify has a completely different business model and payout system: each time someone streamed the song from Spotify instead of purchasing it outright, we got less than four tenths of one cent. That means that someone would have to stream our song two hundred times in order for my band to have received the same 76-cent payout as a single purchase on iTunes. This does not add up in any meaningful way until you get into the hundreds of thousands of streams, although it is a marked improvement over the way artists were initially compensated by Spotify (Lady Gaga received $167 after her song “Poker Face” hit 1 million streams on Spotify in 2009, or 1.67 thousandths of a cent per stream.)

   When confronted about their business model, Spotify vigorously refutes the idea that they are anything other than the next great revenue source for artists. In a recent interview, a Spotify spokesperson said “Spotify is now generating serious revenues for rights holders; since our launch just three years ago, we have paid over $100 million to labels and publishers, who, in turn, pass this on to the artists, composers and authors they represent. Indeed, a top Swedish music executive was recently quoted as saying that Spotify is currently the biggest single revenue source for the music industry in Scandinavia.”

   This sounds pretty, but there’s a serious disconnect here between what they say and what I see when I look at the revenue report and see that my band makes twice as much from one iTunes sale as we do from 103 Spotify spins. Paying artists $.0038 for one spin on an ad-supported service is no grounds for Spotify telling their listeners that they are better supporting their favorite artists by listening to them on Spotify instead of pirating their music, especially when their revenue growth is reportedly exponential and their CEO is apparently rolling in it.

   To keep using the Friend in the Head example: If 103 people had pirated Friend in the Head instead of streaming it through Spotify, those 103 people would possess a digital copy of the song, which means there are dozens of ways they could pass it along to others. They could burn it to CD and could email it to their friends; They could listen to it using any audio player, in any setting, and could easily transfer it between devices; They could convert it to any format, they could add it to a video, they could sample it, they could make it their ringtone, they could play it as house music at a theater or club, and they could broadcast it on their radio show. By listening to Friend in the Head in Spotify instead of pirating it, those 103 people could have shared the tune with other Spotify users and their Facebook friends, and could have added it to their Spotify playlists, but there’s not much else they could have done that would help the song reach new people since music on Spotify can’t leave the Spotify application.

   Don’t take this as me being bitter. Spotify represents the future of music consumption. We are a culture of convenience, and nothing is more convenient than immediate, cost-free access to every song you’ve ever wanted to hear. But Spotify should not be advertising their support for artists when it takes nearly 300 streams of a song for one member of a band to be able to buy a cup of coffee at a bodega. Until Spotify’s business model is reworked, it should be seen as just another free music service, like Napster and Grooveshark before it, and the best way to support your favorite artists is to purchase their music at full-price – especially their self-released material - and go to their shows when they’re in town.

   Dan Reitz lives in Brooklyn, NY. For the record, he still uses Spotify.
   

   Category Music | Tags: | 3 Comments

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2. Pro Wrestling and the Individual Mandate

   April 5, 2012

   

   Remember Hulk Hogan? In the 1980s he was the world’s most popular professional wrestler. At the height of his fame, he had his own TV show, his own cereal, his own record deal, and was cheered wildly by sold-out crowds everywhere he went. To teenage boys, Hogan was Oprah Winfrey, The Beatles and Batman in one package. His character was wholesome but strong. He wrestled with integrity and made the bad guys pay. For almost two decades, he was the most consistent good-guy, fighting for the fans and the forces of good even as other wrestlers changed allegances. But after taking a few years off to pursue a failed movie career, and having mounted a less-than-meteoric comeback in the mid 1990s, his character did something completely unexpected.

   You see, there was this pay-per-view wrestling match in 1996 between three “good guys” and two “bad guys.” (The bad guys said they had a third man, but they refused to say who he was.) Despite the bad guys being out-manned, they cheated their way to a stalemate, and everyone ended up knocked out on the ground. Just as the ref began counting everyone out, Hulk Hogan entered the arena to thunderous applause. At first it looked like he was there to support his friends – the good guys – but to everyone’s surprise, instead of laying the thunder upon the bad guys, he delivered two crushing leg-drops on the Macho Man, a good-guy and his one-time friend. After high-fiving the “bad guys,” Hogan threw the referee out of the ring and delivered one final leg-drop upon the Macho Man before picking up the microphone and berating the audience. The announcers couldn’t believe it. No one could believe it. Hulk Hogan was supposed to be the ultimate good guy. What was he doing with the bad guys?

   In wrestling, this phenomenon is called a turn: a good-guy suddenly becomes a bad-guy, or a bad-guy inexplicably becomes a good-guy.  (Google “heel and face” if you want an in-depth analysis.) It’s a frequent occurrence, and most pro wrestling characters turn multiple times over the course of their careers. The best pro-wrestling turns are both instantaneous and absolute: once a good guy has turned heel, he immediately assumes all of the characteristics of his new persona. There is always a justification given – usually he’s fed up with something backstage, or he feels the fans don’t respect him enough – but the justifications are always flimsy and are dropped as soon as it’s convenient. If done well, by the next time he’s on TV, a turned heel should seem like he was never a good guy at all.

   Of course, Pro Wrestling is not a sport. It’s a scripted spectacle, one which thrives on sensationalism and immediacy. It doesn’t matter what each character did last week; the announcers will always let you know what the current storyline is, and each character’s back-story is constantly modified to fit it. Heel turns and other sudden changes in a wrestler’s storyline are just part of the experience.

   A similar phenomenon occurs in politics: the flip-flop. A public official commits a flip-flop when he not only changes position on an issue, but does so with little regard for his previous views. Like a “bad guy” wrestler with a sudden change of heart, a politician who has flip-flopped frequently renounces his old opinion, categorically, without any substantive explanation. (If he doesn’t do this, he could either jump through hoops to show that his new opinion doesn’t conflict with his old opinion, or he can claim that he has “always” had his position, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.)

   The recent excitement over the individual health insurance mandate has created a wave of flip-flop allegations. It’s well-known that Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney were both strong advocates of an individual healthcare mandate until they each switched their position on the issue at the start of their current presidential campaigns, while President Obama, a current advocate of the individual mandate, spoke eloquently against the individual mandate during his first presidential campaign, and was skeptical of its constitutionality even while his landmark health care legislation was being developed. Politicians and pundits love pointing these types of things out; like pro wrestling announcers, they operate with the two-dimensional mindset of a playground bully. But there are stark differences between the way that Gingrich, Romney, and Obama are handling their new positions on the issue; Obama barely qualifies for even flip-flopping, as he appears reluctant when endorsing the individual mandate, and is open to discussing his previous position. Gingrich and Romney, however, are in full-on pro-wrestling mode. And I have the video to prove it.

   In President Obama’s case, his fundamental message has remained consistent. His prior criticism of the individual mandate was that penalties would drive up costs to some uninsured citizens. His current support of the mandate is also within the framework of keeping costs down.”There are only two ways to cover people with pre-existing conditions,” Obama said at an AP luncheon on Tuesday. “One way is a single payer plan, where everybody is under a single system, like Medicare. The other way is to set up a system in which you don’t have people who are healthy, but don’t bother to get health insurance, and then we all have to pay for them in the emergency room. We have to make sure those folks are taking their responsibilities seriously.”

   But what of Romney and Gingrich? That last point made by Obama – that the individual mandate is needed to make sure that everyone is playing fairly in the healthcare market – is hauntingly similar to a speech given by Newt Gingrich in 2009 on behalf of The Center For Healthcare Transformation, a lobbying group he founded in 2003. “We believe that everybody should have health insurance,” he said. “We would not allow people to be ‘free riders’ failing to insure themselves and then showing up in the emergency room with no means of payment.” It also echoes Mitt Romney’s position during the 2008 presidential debates, in which he said “I like mandates. They work.” He continued: “If somebody can afford insurance and decides not to buy it, and then they get sick, they ought to pay their own way, as opposed to expect the government to pay their way.”

   Seeing that both Gingrich and Romney were strongly in support of the individual mandate as recently as one election cycle ago, it’s highly suspect that they not only changed their position but began to rail against it as soon as they faced political pressure as presidential candidates. ”A mandate is clearly unconstitutional because it means that congress could require you to do anything with your money under any circumstance,” Gingrich said to ABC news this past December. When he pressed on why he supported it as recently as six months before the interview, Gingrich responded “there was a time, in opposition to Hillarycare, the Heritage foundation and lots of folks supported it [the individual mandate.] The more we looked at it, the clearer it became that it would lead the politicians to redesign the entire system to support the mandate.” This is completely counter to any sense of honesty. Throughout the entirety of the 2000s, and as recently as an appearance last May, 2011, on Meet the Press, Gingrich was an active advocate for the health insurance mandate. In fact, in that Meet the Press interview, he minced no words in his support of the mandate: “I am for people, individuals–exactly like automobile insurance–individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance.”

   So what happened to Newt Gingrich between May and December 2011? I found a video that explains everything:

   In the clip, you can clearly see Newt Gingrich tried his best to resist the Tea Party, but was too overpowered by their insistence and finally gave in. Once he gave in, the Tea Party hoisted Gingrich in the air and he let out a primal scream of acceptance. It was a powerful and chilling moment. I’m glad they got it on video.

   And what of Romney, the man who was not only an advocate of the individual mandate, but made it the centerpiece of his own health care plan while he was Governor of Massachusetts? “There’s a big difference between what we did and what president Obama’s doing,” Romney said on Fox News last month. “We said people had to take responsibility for getting insurance if they can afford it, or paying their own way. No more free riders. And we solved this at the state level. Not a federal plan, but a state plan. This is a federalist nation. States should be able to solve their own problems.” Romney repeats this distinction every chance he gets: his Massachusetts plan is fundamentally different than Obama’s, and his was a state plan, and States have the right to determine their own health care. This is a pretty strong defense, until you consider that Romney strongly urged the president to model the national health care system on his Massachusetts system in a 2009 op-ed, and explicitly mentioned the individual mandate as one of the aspects of his plan that worked: ”Getting every citizen insured doesn’t have to break the bank,” he said. “Using tax penalties encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others.”

   Romney now vows to ”stop [Obamacare] in its tracks on day one” and attacks the president, saying “as I look at this administration I see Obamacare as one more example of a president pursuing his attack on economic and personal liberty.” Forget that Obamacare is basically Romney’s plan, and that he clearly would be in favor of this plan if it were proposed by a Republican. For Romney, this issue is no longer about affordability and covering the uninsured. It’s about freedom! It’s about resisting a government takeover! It’s about red-blooded, patriotic Americans fighting a clandestine Communist threat! As disingenuous and short-sighted as Romney is being, you have to at least admire his tenacity and his fire on the stump:

   What power and umbrage! Not to mention face-paint! If that’s how Candidate Mitt feels about Obama, think of how President Mitt would stick it to the Iranians and the Russians come Summerslam!

   Dan Reitz lives in Brooklyn, NY

   Category Politics | Tags: | No Comments

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