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Renowned songwriter and active PRS Board member Crispin Hunt imagines a brave new digital music world.
Swooping? Sailing? Krusing? Whatever we end up calling it, doesn’t life need a new word that separates the music we choose from the music they choose for us? Maybe we’ll call it ‘gliding’ - and maybe ‘gliding’ will become the future of streaming.
Streaming is a musical wet-dream: all you can eat for two quid a week and no more over-priced CDs that scratch and snap and crack and flap. But, even as a rabid music fan, it’s damn hard to choose what the hell to play when you’ve got 30 million albums and a disappointing two-dimensional interface in front of you.
So. The Nice People at Spotify have started to help by choosing our music for us, opening their app not with artists’ albums but with ‘Deep Focus on a Monday Afternoon’ and ‘Your Morning Coffee’ playlists: off the peg soundtracks to our lives.
Now, when I say The Nice People at Spotify, what I really mean is The Nice Computers at Spotify. Are there real human beings employed to sift catalogues for the consummate ‘Have a Great Day’ songs? I doubt it. Rather, there are algorithms that automatically select ‘like for like’ tracks from current releases.
Don’t get me wrong, playlists are incredible. Hang the DJ and spin your pad. I am more than happy to ‘glide’ all day. Swapping when appropriate to the ‘Rainy Afternoon’ selection or ‘Walking like a Badass’ depending on my ‘Mood’. Furthermore, thanks to playlists, I’ve discovered countless amazing new songs and bands that have changed my life for the better. But I can’t help feeling a strange sense of déjà vu. Just like a new Bruno Mars song, it feels like I’ve known it forever… Wait a minute! It can’t be… I know… it’s made-to -measure radio! But without the DJs. Now That’s What I Call Innovation Volume 1,000.
I love it. I’m very happy to sign up for a £120 a year DJ /ad-blocking service (except for when I’m driving and the DJ is my bezzie). Come on streaming, up your game. Hi-definition audio, sleeve notes and images would do for starters.
Legal agenda
The world’s decrees can’t agree what a stream is. To some it’s a transmission, to others a CD. In the US, when a song’s ‘made available’ (ie. chosen by the user), the lawyers and labels consider it saleable. Yet the very same song, when chosen by radio, is deemed to be more like a ‘communication’ (to the public or akin to a broadcast). In the EU both are ‘communications to the public’, but that definition is split into either ‘broadcast’ or ‘making available’. Confused yet? I am. None of these definitions sound like the stream feels.
Indeed, the stream currently feels like the current is against us, and although the technological tide is obviously turning, the shoreline is still littered with King C’nuts who would deny that streaming is in any way different to selling pieces of plastic containing music. ‘If it ain’t broke,why fix it?’ they ask.
Fix it because, as a songwriter, I feel like I’m up a proverbial creek without a law. Or, as Eric Schmidt of Google put it, ‘While you can have a long tail strategy, you better have a head, because that’s where all the revenue is!’
Streaming and its immaculate progeny ‘gliding’ both need clear, global, legal demarcation from past forms of music consumption, alongside safeguarded, transparent, and proportional returns for songwriters and performers.
The law will always follow progress and governments mustn’t start entrusting digital soothsayers to prophesise on our future. Seeing as Spotify founder Daniel Ek could have barely reached puberty when most of the laws currently applied to digital music consumption were implemented, is it outrageous to suggest that, had current music technologies existed when those laws were written, streaming might have been defined differently?
‘Dream, dream, dream, dream, dream’: The Everly Brothers magically start singing on the ‘Just Cry Sad Songs’ playlist, as if the web knows me better than I know myself.
The recent publication by the US Copyright Office, entitled Copyright and the Music Market Place, seeks admirably to address some of the inconsistencies found in current US regulation by setting out proposals for how to make copyright fit for digital use. The creator community has warmly welcomed many of its recommendations. But, presumably because lawmakers are way too busy to be habitual ‘gliders’, the critical difference between choosing (streaming) and ‘gliding’ was not clarified in their review.
This may prove to be a painful oversight. Certainly all the tech savvy types advise that ‘sailing’ is the rapid into which all streams will flow. Meanwhile Beats, Apple’s promised streaming service, is by all accounts going to take ‘gliding’ to new heights. You’ll be able to walk into M&S and your iWatch will automatically play you the ‘Woollen Socks or Cotton-Mix?’ mix. Delivered directly to the ‘glider’ according to your GPS position. Fantasy or reality, who knows? But that’s certainly the word on the s’tweet.
Another oft-cited argument refuting streaming as an improved form of radio is that the music is not broadcast to multiple people at the same time. But this positively analogue interpretation begins to look conspicuously like nitpicking for commercial benefit, and surely could not rationally be argued for, when multiple customers in M&S are receiving the exact same tunes, albeit at fractionally different moments. Like a Silent Disco for lingerie fetishists, M&S will never be the same. I can’t wait.
However we end up describing it, surely lessons must be learned from some of the protections and rights built into traditional radio that ensure a proportionate share of music’s value goes to those who make it?
Songwriters and composers need a solution to the dismal cut of streaming revenue we currently receive, as do artists and performers. But, perhaps paradoxically, we also need a healthy music industry to invest in our works. An industry that will soon only sell sound, with no shape or form, and it’s probably best left to us, as the creators of that sound, to explain it to the lawmakers.
It’s dangerous intellectual property ground to tread, but to paraphrase the Walt Disney Company motto: ‘All our streams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them’.
Songwriter Crispin Hunt is a member of the PRS Board and has represented creators in many UK and European forums on streaming, copyright, internet regulation, education and future models of music distribution. He joined PRS for Music in the nineties as the lead singer and guitarist in Britpop band Longpigs. He’s now a multi-platinum-selling songwriter and producer working with the likes of Jake Bugg, Florence + the Machine, Ellie Goulding, Newton Faulkner, Rihanna, Bat for Lashes and Luke Sital-Singh.
Streaming is a musical wet-dream: all you can eat for two quid a week and no more over-priced CDs that scratch and snap and crack and flap. But, even as a rabid music fan, it’s damn hard to choose what the hell to play when you’ve got 30 million albums and a disappointing two-dimensional interface in front of you.
So. The Nice People at Spotify have started to help by choosing our music for us, opening their app not with artists’ albums but with ‘Deep Focus on a Monday Afternoon’ and ‘Your Morning Coffee’ playlists: off the peg soundtracks to our lives.
Now, when I say The Nice People at Spotify, what I really mean is The Nice Computers at Spotify. Are there real human beings employed to sift catalogues for the consummate ‘Have a Great Day’ songs? I doubt it. Rather, there are algorithms that automatically select ‘like for like’ tracks from current releases.
Don’t get me wrong, playlists are incredible. Hang the DJ and spin your pad. I am more than happy to ‘glide’ all day. Swapping when appropriate to the ‘Rainy Afternoon’ selection or ‘Walking like a Badass’ depending on my ‘Mood’. Furthermore, thanks to playlists, I’ve discovered countless amazing new songs and bands that have changed my life for the better. But I can’t help feeling a strange sense of déjà vu. Just like a new Bruno Mars song, it feels like I’ve known it forever… Wait a minute! It can’t be… I know… it’s made-to -measure radio! But without the DJs. Now That’s What I Call Innovation Volume 1,000.
I love it. I’m very happy to sign up for a £120 a year DJ /ad-blocking service (except for when I’m driving and the DJ is my bezzie). Come on streaming, up your game. Hi-definition audio, sleeve notes and images would do for starters.
Legal agenda
The world’s decrees can’t agree what a stream is. To some it’s a transmission, to others a CD. In the US, when a song’s ‘made available’ (ie. chosen by the user), the lawyers and labels consider it saleable. Yet the very same song, when chosen by radio, is deemed to be more like a ‘communication’ (to the public or akin to a broadcast). In the EU both are ‘communications to the public’, but that definition is split into either ‘broadcast’ or ‘making available’. Confused yet? I am. None of these definitions sound like the stream feels.
‘All our streams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them’.
Indeed, the stream currently feels like the current is against us, and although the technological tide is obviously turning, the shoreline is still littered with King C’nuts who would deny that streaming is in any way different to selling pieces of plastic containing music. ‘If it ain’t broke,why fix it?’ they ask.
Fix it because, as a songwriter, I feel like I’m up a proverbial creek without a law. Or, as Eric Schmidt of Google put it, ‘While you can have a long tail strategy, you better have a head, because that’s where all the revenue is!’
Streaming and its immaculate progeny ‘gliding’ both need clear, global, legal demarcation from past forms of music consumption, alongside safeguarded, transparent, and proportional returns for songwriters and performers.
The law will always follow progress and governments mustn’t start entrusting digital soothsayers to prophesise on our future. Seeing as Spotify founder Daniel Ek could have barely reached puberty when most of the laws currently applied to digital music consumption were implemented, is it outrageous to suggest that, had current music technologies existed when those laws were written, streaming might have been defined differently?
‘Dream, dream, dream, dream, dream’: The Everly Brothers magically start singing on the ‘Just Cry Sad Songs’ playlist, as if the web knows me better than I know myself.
The recent publication by the US Copyright Office, entitled Copyright and the Music Market Place, seeks admirably to address some of the inconsistencies found in current US regulation by setting out proposals for how to make copyright fit for digital use. The creator community has warmly welcomed many of its recommendations. But, presumably because lawmakers are way too busy to be habitual ‘gliders’, the critical difference between choosing (streaming) and ‘gliding’ was not clarified in their review.
This may prove to be a painful oversight. Certainly all the tech savvy types advise that ‘sailing’ is the rapid into which all streams will flow. Meanwhile Beats, Apple’s promised streaming service, is by all accounts going to take ‘gliding’ to new heights. You’ll be able to walk into M&S and your iWatch will automatically play you the ‘Woollen Socks or Cotton-Mix?’ mix. Delivered directly to the ‘glider’ according to your GPS position. Fantasy or reality, who knows? But that’s certainly the word on the s’tweet.
Another oft-cited argument refuting streaming as an improved form of radio is that the music is not broadcast to multiple people at the same time. But this positively analogue interpretation begins to look conspicuously like nitpicking for commercial benefit, and surely could not rationally be argued for, when multiple customers in M&S are receiving the exact same tunes, albeit at fractionally different moments. Like a Silent Disco for lingerie fetishists, M&S will never be the same. I can’t wait.
However we end up describing it, surely lessons must be learned from some of the protections and rights built into traditional radio that ensure a proportionate share of music’s value goes to those who make it?
Songwriters and composers need a solution to the dismal cut of streaming revenue we currently receive, as do artists and performers. But, perhaps paradoxically, we also need a healthy music industry to invest in our works. An industry that will soon only sell sound, with no shape or form, and it’s probably best left to us, as the creators of that sound, to explain it to the lawmakers.
It’s dangerous intellectual property ground to tread, but to paraphrase the Walt Disney Company motto: ‘All our streams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them’.
Songwriter Crispin Hunt is a member of the PRS Board and has represented creators in many UK and European forums on streaming, copyright, internet regulation, education and future models of music distribution. He joined PRS for Music in the nineties as the lead singer and guitarist in Britpop band Longpigs. He’s now a multi-platinum-selling songwriter and producer working with the likes of Jake Bugg, Florence + the Machine, Ellie Goulding, Newton Faulkner, Rihanna, Bat for Lashes and Luke Sital-Singh.
