Music Without a Business Model

Damon & Naomi

Music Without a Business Model

Damon Krukowski shares his thoughts on music streaming services.

The musician Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi wrote in Pitchfork recently about his income from music streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora. He has calculated that one LP sale is equivalent to 47,680 plays via a streaming service. But it’s not all doom for musicians, he writes:

As businesses, Pandora and Spotify are divorced from music. To me, it’s a short logical step to observe that they are doing nothing for the business of music — except undermining the simple cottage industry of pressing ideas onto vinyl, and selling them for more than they cost to manufacture. I am no Luddite — I am not smashing iPhones or sabotaging software. In fact, I subscribe to Spotify for $9.99 a month (the equivalent of 680,462 annual plays of ‘Tugboat’) because I love music, and the access it gives me to music of all kinds is incredible.

But I have simply stopped looking to these business models to do anything for me financially as a musician. As for sharing our music without a business model of any kind, that’s exactly how I got into this — we called it punk rock.

pitchfork.com

Published on 19 November 2012

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