LONDON: According to Apple Music’s replay service, in November I listened to Emma Rawicz’s new album Inkyra for 16 hours, Steve Reich’s Runner for 10 hours, and the soundtrack to K-Pop Demon Hunters for five hours. Across a single month I listened to 95 hours of music from across the globe and across time. For this I paid a little bit under 0.004 of a penny per minute.
This is a fantastic deal for consumers, and one that holds true in film and TV as well.
Over the past month, I have rewatched the whole of Stranger Things (some 35 hours and counting), Azazel Jacobs’ marvellous movie about grief and family, His Three Daughters (an hour and 40 minutes), and Alejandro G Inárritu’s Bardo (two hours 40 minutes) on Netflix at a cost of 0.14 pence a minute.
Even accounting for the emotional distress of persisting with rom-com Too Much for two hours, this is a fantastic return for me as a customer. But it’s a terrible one for artists.
CUT-PRICE LUXURY
A handful of superfans, like me, will go to gigs and buy physical records by the artists that we really love, as I have for both Rawicz and Reich. (The K-Pop Demon Hunters are on their own, I’m afraid.) But the sums raised by gigs and records are, for most artists, not enough to replace the lost income from record sales in times past.
At least musicians have the option of selling merchandise and records to the devoted: as it stands, I cannot, and almost certainly never will be able to, pay for physical releases of Bardo, His Three Daughters or Stranger Things. Physical releases of TV series and movies, such as DVD box sets, and repeat fees, once the backbone of an artist’s income, have dwindled to essentially nothing.
I live in a flat around 10 ft larger than the one I grew up in. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic place, but equally the flat I grew up in was bought by a single mother working in arts administration for less than the deposit on my current one. Most people in the rich world have not enjoyed the level of upward mobility I have – they have run not to stand still, but to go backwards.
That downward mobility is particularly sharp among artists.
The combination of what the economist JK Galbraith called “private affluence and public squalor” has given way to what you might term “cut-price luxury and exorbitant necessity”. Housing and many of life’s essentials are expensive, while food inflation has risen steeply in much of the world.
Yet we can all enjoy the kind of access to music and entertainment that was beyond the dreams of even the richest and most powerful people on the planet as recently as the turn of the millennium.
WHAT SUSTAINS THE FILM AND MUSIC INDUSTRIES
The most successful of the companies that have brought us cut-price luxury is Netflix, which is aiming to further cement its grasp on film and TV by acquiring Warner Bros Discovery and its vast library of work. (Paramount sought to throw a spanner in the works on Monday (Dec 8) by launching a US$108 billion hostile bid for the whole of Warner’s business.)
Netflix did not invent this world, but it is the most successful operator in this new dispensation. However, it remains to be seen whether its success in knowing what its customers want to watch can be matched by an enduring ecosystem for creative talent.
For when we have grown used to paying such small sums for such huge libraries of talent, who is going to persuade us to pay enough to give a new talent their start?
What sustains the film industry and the music industry and the world of culture in general is not just the handful of incredibly successful musicians, artists and writers at the top. It is the jobbing violinist and the working camera operator. It is the young director that hones their craft doing regular work on a syndicated show who becomes a great artist.
Indeed, for some works of genius it is the job as a pianist in bars and cafes. In pop music, we are already seeing the consequences of this no longer being as common. And in the worlds of classical music and jazz we have long since moved to a situation in which many artists are part-timers, or live off academic grants and foundations.
It’s clear that the world of streaming can provide us with better recommendations from a wider canvas than we enjoyed before, at a much lower cost to us as consumers.
It is less clear that it can provide pathways for artists to develop their talent when they aren’t paid enough to afford the rising cost of essentials. It can give star showrunner Shonda Rhimes a deal to make movies, but it is not clear it can train her successor.
The surplus that Netflix and Apple have given us as consumers could yet become a supply side crisis.