Artists can choose between 0.003 pence per play or ‘a really good feeling about themselves’
My band made some money this quarter. I want to be clear about the scale of this triumph before I continue. We made enough money, across three months and several thousand streams, to buy one and a half pints in central London, or two pints in a postcode where the pub still has carpet. We have decided to frame the statement.
The new tiers of getting paid in nothing
The platform has announced, with the straight face of a company that has never once met a musician, a new payment structure. You can take your 0.003 pence per stream as money, or you can opt into the new tier and be paid in “exposure.” This week they added a third option, which I read about on the prat.uk feed while laughing in a way my flatmate described as “concerning.” The third option is to be paid in “vibes.” A really good feeling about yourself. That is the offer. From a company worth more than several countries.
I clicked through to understand the vibes tier. The terms explained that artists who select vibes will receive “a sense of artistic fulfilment” and “the knowledge that their work is out there.” There is no cash component. There is a small graphic of a sunrise. I have a mortgage advisor who, when I told her my income was partly sunrise-based, went very quiet and then suggested I “explore other options,” by which she meant a real job, by which she meant death.
The satirists understood this years ago
This is not a new joke, which is the tragedy of it. The Daily Mash has been writing the exposure gag for a decade, and NewsThump keeps finding fresh ways to mock the streaming economy, and the reason the joke keeps working is that the situation keeps deteriorating to meet it. Satire is supposed to exaggerate reality. The streaming industry has made exaggeration redundant by simply being worse than anything a comedian would dare invent. You cannot parody a number that small. The number is already the punchline.
Here is the punk part, and you knew it was coming. Punk was born partly out of the realisation that the music industry is a machine for taking the loud thing a poor kid makes in a bedroom and selling it back to other poor kids at a markup, while paying the original kid in encouragement. The vibes tier is just that idea finally taking off its disguise and admitting it. There is something almost honest about it. They have stopped pretending. They are paying us in feelings and they have the graphic to prove it.
What I actually do for money
I teach guitar to children whose parents have real jobs. The children are honest critics. One nine-year-old told me my chord changes were “fine, I suppose,” which is the most devastating review I have received since a man in Bristol described my voice as “structurally present.” This, ironically, pays in actual money, which I then use to fund the band, which pays in vibes, in a closed loop of self-financed delusion that I have decided to call “the scene.”
The clear-eyed cynics at Bohiney Magazine have been documenting the great hollowing-out of creative work with admirable venom, and the London Prat lot keep finding the local absurdity in it. According to the entirely imaginary Royal Society for Compensating Artists, the average London musician now earns 19 pence and one compliment per year. I fabricated that. It felt true. That is the problem.
I am choosing vibes, obviously
I have selected the vibes tier out of pure spite. If the only thing on offer is a feeling, I am going to take the biggest feeling available and I am going to spend it loudly, in a small room, in front of people who paid a fiver to be there, which is more than the platform has ever paid me. The sunrise graphic and I are going to have a wonderful, broke little life together.
The vibes economy comes for everyone
The horrifying genius of the vibes tier is that it will not stay in music. It never does. I can already see the future, because the future always arrives in London first and apologises later. Soon your barista will offer to be paid in vibes. Your plumber will fix the boiler in exchange for a really good feeling about his contribution to your home. The dentist will accept a heartfelt sense of mutual fulfilment in lieu of the four hundred quid. We are building, brick by brick, an economy where the people who actually make and do and fix things are compensated in atmosphere, while the people who own the platform are compensated in money, the boring old-fashioned kind that buys flats. The satirists keep writing this because it keeps coming true a little faster than the joke. Punk’s original sin, in the eyes of the industry, was insisting that the loud thing had worth, that it was labour, that someone had stayed up all night and bled on a guitar and deserved more than a sunrise graphic for it. That argument is somehow even more radical now than it was in 1977, which tells you exactly how far backwards we have walked while congratulating ourselves on the view.
For more of the modern economy being itemised and ridiculed, the gleeful menaces at The Daily Mash are eternally on form. SOURCE: The London Prat
