Throw
Skee-Lo a Buck For God’s Sake” by Eric Steuer, Wired,
Aug 2015
I have a soft spot for old pop-rap, and on a surprisingly
regular basis I fire up Spotify with the sole purpose of listening to Skee-Lo’s
one and only hit, the 1995 paean to the little guy “I Wish.” It really holds
up: great beat, clever concept, funny lyrics, catchy hook. Still a jam, 20
years later. At home the other night, it came on as a part of my “Hip Hop You
Can Play in Front of Your Kids” dinner playlist. “I wonder where this dude is
now,” I said to my wife. “I’d love to throw him a couple of bucks for having
made something so fun back in the day.”
Problem is, I can’t. I could go to iTunes of Amazon and
download the track, hoping that some small fraction of my small payment would
find its way around the array of suits and stakeholders to wind up in Skee-Lo’s
pocket. But that feels like a pretty inefficient way to show my support. (Also,
it’s 2015, MP3s? Yuck.) At the same time, I’m well aware that streaming a song
isn’t a meaningful way to financially support its creator.
Don’t get me wrong—I like Spotify. And Beats and Rdio and
the other on-demand music services I use. But the reality is that most artists
are paid next to nothing per play. Listeners like me have transitioned from
buying music to using streaming services because they’re easy and inexpensive.
We love the access and the immediacy. But I suspect that even the most
enthusiastic Spotify user shares at least a vague sense that getting so much
music for so little (or for free, if they’re willing to put up with the ads) is
an unfair trade. And while I don’t believe that these services are to blame for
the record industry’s current financial woes, it’s pretty clear that they haven’t
gone too far out of their way to help
artists either.
Many music fans want to be able to do something tangible
that would help support the musicians they love—there’s just no easy, effective
way for this to happen. But it wouldn’t be hard. Streaming music services
should take a cue from mobile payment systems like Square and let users offer
tips.
If you’ve been to a coffee shop or restaurant in the past
few years—or if you’ve used an on-demand-service app like Lyft or Postmates—you’ve
noticed how easy Square and its ilk have made it to tip workers: Just select
the percentage and you’re done. From 2013 to 2014, tipping on Square increased
in frequency by 35 percent; tips for New York City cabdrivers have more than
doubled since taxi companies started since taxi companies started making it
easier to tip digitally. Plenty of writers have thus done plenty of hand-wringing
about how tipping has been made too easy, with some going so far as to call for
abolishing it altogether in a crusade against “tip creep.” One thing’s for
sure: In an opt-out scenario like this, people are far more likely to throw a
little extra dough around.
So what happens when you apply that model to artists? Well,
we might have a way to do what most reasonable people wrote off years ago—make being
an Internet-era musician a financially worthwhile endeavor.
To be clear, this is totally different from the Internet tip
jars you used to see languishing in the footers of musicians’ personal websites
15 years ago. Remember that magical time? The Napster free-for-all was on the
rise, and the market for physical media was beginning its long, steady
collapse; in our naiveté, we thought that artists might weather the storm if
enough fans stopped by to say hi and drop off a few bucks via PayPal. That didn’t
work, because the process was cumbersome: First, go to an artist’s site; second
… nope, sorry, two steps is too many.
We’re a culture of centralized platforms now, and turning
payment into a side quest isn’t exactly a recipe for success. You know what is,
though? Leveraging the infrastructure of the services that we’re already using
and automatically paying for with monthly subscription fees. Imagine a button
on your favorite band’s Spotify profile that allowed you to send them a buck
while you’re listening to their song. Spotify already has your credit card
info; more critically, its platforms already enable musicians to set up
verified profiles. By allowing artists to link their profiles to digital
payment accounts, and by employing some UI magic, the streaming services could
make tipping artists a seamless, nearly trivial process.
Obviously, other online media outlets could apply this
approach to help compensate other types of creators too. How many times have
you watched an amazing documentary and wished that you could help support the
almost certainly under paid filmmaker who spent years researching,
interviewing, shooting, and editing it? More than once, I’ve swiped through the
last page of an incredible novel on my Kindle and wished I could give the
author a little something extra. Netflix, Amazon: Make this so.
Recent news that Facebook will soon begin to facilitate
payments means that the company could build a similar system to make it
possible for people to tip journalists, video makes, photographers, and anyone
else whose work is published to the social network. (Imagine: a positive,
productive way to use
Facebook!)
In the age of free, plenty of people won’t be willing to
pony up—probably even a vast majority. But with passionate fans, an approach
like this could substantially impact the financial lives of many artists. Look
at Patreon. Since earlier this year, singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer has used
the crowdfunding site to get more than 4,500 fans to collectively pledge
$31,000 for every new song, web comic, podcast, or video. Doubly interesting is
that the fans are doing it without expecting anything in return except the art.
This isn’t Kickstarter-style backing, where people contribute money in exchange
for stuff like exclusive vinyl records and T-shirts. With Palmer’s Patreon
campaign, they don’t get much more than the satisfaction of knowing that they’re
helping someone whose work they like and respect continue to lead a creative
life.
The trick will be figuring out how to make fan transactions
a reality for all artists—not just those with audiences as large, rabid, and
motivated as Palmer’s. By enabling tipping inside the platforms that we already
use to consume creativity, streaming services could make it possible for fans
to easily support any artist they love. If this happens, you can bet I’ll be
shelling out like crazy to all the old-school rappers on my dinner music
collection. They just have to get in line behind Skee-Lo.
Comment (Robert Tischer):
Online tipping through existing centralized services one
already subscribes to is a pipe-dream. There is no financial motivation for the
centralized service companies and their shareholders to share the pot with the
artists. Eric Steuer needs to think one step bigger and reverse the financial
equation: Let the musicians remain the owners of their content and they can
through a few bucks to the Internet distributors for sending their content to
their fans. Has sort of a revolutionary sound to it. So be it.
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