At the Web Summit in Dublin this week DJ and one-third of Swedish House Mafia Steve Angello and Brian Message, manager behind Radiohead, Nick Cave and others, spoke to Music Ally about the pros and cons of streaming. Here are some of the main points they made so you can read the opinions of two successful artists ingrained in the music industry on the (sometimes) touchy topic of streaming music.

Music Ally: How optimistic are you feeling about the digital world for musicians in 2015?

Steve Angello: I feel great, I think it’s been a really good year for streaming, first and foremost. I think competition is always good. It’s good for us because all these bigger companies are going to fight about who can give us the best and who can work the hardest. As an artist I think it’s been great. It’s a big world of music out there, so it’s good to be noticed and it’s good to have people talk about it.

Brian Message at web summit“Having been in the music business for 20-odd years, it’s a good time.”

Brian Message: For me, one of the great things that I’m seeing is new talent, new artists coming to the market at some level, when they’ve got this interest in both being creators, and being involved in their business as well. And starting to really understand that the whole thing is not just about trying to find a record deal and trying to find an advance. For me that’s probably one of the most exciting things: having been in the music business for 20-odd years, it’s a good time.


Music Ally: How do we judge streaming’s impact on musicians? When artists talk or tweet about tiny royalty cheques, is that the start of a bigger conversation about how they make their money, and the role streaming plays on that?

Steve Angello: Personally I think artists should go back and talk to their record labels. The record label still makes 70 to 80 percent of your revenue. So for me it’s different because I’ve always owned my own rights, I always own my masters, and I get 100%. So for me it’s always different.

Most of these guys have a really poor deal with the record label from the beginning, so obviously they’re going to make less money. But at the same time there’s a lot of artists saying ‘hey, streaming is not paying’. But also artists still have their videos up online without getting paid.

So for me, it’s one of those: it usually falls on a time when they need to market a record, y’know? When they attack the streaming services, because they get a lot of publicity out of it. But for me it’s like, I started making music because I want to create music, I didn’t start making music because I want to make money.Steve Angello at web summit

“It usually falls on a time when they need to market a record… When they attack the streaming
services, because they get a lot of publicity”

Brian Message: I couldn’t agree more. In fact, just recently with out last Nick Cave project, we very much saw streaming as the language of his business that was going to allow other revenue streams to propagate. And so Nick didn’t do any TV, no promo, nothing in advance. We just used streaming to get to as many people as we can, and off the back of that built his business further up the food chain, at some level. That worked out very very well.

It’s almost the language of that business – I think you made a good point Steve, actually: if you’re an artist signed to one of the major corporations, then you are going to absolutely have a question mark over where’s the money? Because those labels will, on the whole, keep the vast bulk of it. And it’s very difficult to see how you can actually quantify what you’re supposed to be getting.


Music Ally: What about new artists, though? How do you help the early-stage artists you both work with navigate this streaming world?

Steve Angello: For us we go after the money. If we’re a record label, we’ve got to make sure our guys are getting paid. If they have 10 million plays, it’s a lot of money for these guys, because they don’t make any money. It’s just about going after it and making sure they do get paid, because every streaming service does pay.

Today it’s really transparent: I can pin down one person in a country that’s listened to my song. With Spotify’s new services that they do, I can go in so deep into it that it’s the most transparent I’ve ever had in the record business. Not even in the vinyl days was I sure about the plant pressing too many vinyls, I had no idea. Now it’s pretty transparent, for me at least.

Brian Message: Look, the streaming thing, what I really like about it: we are in this era where somehow streaming and digital has become more important than radio, which certainly for me and my artists is really great.

Nowadays, if you’ve got a focused track, you launch it and radio is one of the things you want, but the streaming of that track will carry on forever. So you just want to keep working and building and adding more music to it, and building up something that’s interesting. So it’s not just about this promo, promo, radio slog.

Music Ally: What does it mean when big artists opt out of streaming, or window their albums from some or all streaming services like Adele and Taylor Swift?

Steve Angello: For me it’s more a publicity thing. People always tend to talk about bigger companies when they’re about to release an album. Because a lot of people talk about it. At the same time, yeah you can stop a couple of stores. I see it as record stores. Why would I not allow a couple of stores to release it?

There’s fans everywhere, and the fans… a 15 year-old might not be able to afford Apple, Spotify, and Tidal and Google. So if you have 15,000 fans at Spotify, why would you limit those guys to hear your music? Us bigger touring artists, we make enough money touring. We should just be happy that people support us, and try to make the best of it.

Brian Message: For me, the big picture of it, it’s an irrelevance. It’s a big news item, it’s a story, it’s an event. And it’s great if that’s what some artists want to do and it’s their principles. Go for it. If their management on their business partners are creating events, that fine. I don’t think it has too much of an impact on the real big business stuff.


[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdqWXJ-tUrM?t=2h49m0s=rel=0&showinfo=0&w=640&h=360]

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