What if musicians – tired of having their music used to grow subscriber numbers for streaming services – pulled their music from these services? The Reddit revolt may be a harbinger of things to come for the music business.
I’ve watched with fascination the travails that are befalling Reddit. Certainly, the furor over the firing of Victoria Taylor was the most visible initial sign of discontent. And the resignation of Ellen Pao did nothing to quell the frustration of the moderators. However, as the days have gone by, a larger more systemic problem has emerged: The Reddit moderators feel ignored and/or under-appreciated. As Reddit moderators Brian Lynch and Courtnie Swearingen recently wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed:
We feel strongly that [the firing of Ms. Taylor] is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site. Dismissing Victoria Taylor was part of a long pattern of insisting the community and the moderators do more with less.
Lynch and Swearingen go on to enumerate the ways their work as moderators brings value to Reddit and is related to its growth in becoming one of the most-visited sites on the Internet.
In sum, it appears that much of the frustration of the Moderators revolves around their contributions not being properly acknowledged, and feeling that their efforts are being cavalierly used to serve the financial imperatives of the owners, they state:
We are concerned with what a move like this means for for-profit companies that depend on the free labor of volunteers…
Without doubt, Reddit has grown via the the moderators time and expertise and from the contribution of users who post content that is viewed by vastly more people who do not contribute.
The participation of these contributing users and moderators is ultimately fodder for Reddit to attract eyeballs.
Increasingly, I’m hearing a similar sentiment from recording artists.
Musicians are beginning to understand that their musical works – their compositions and sound recordings – are fodder for streaming services to attract listeners/subscribers.
We know, of course, that the payments – such that they are – to artists for the use of their music on streaming services is far less than from the sale of downloads (not to mention CDs), and, arguably, these payments are immaterial.
