A few years ago, someone who worked at Bandcamp told me that what makes them “different” is that they are a marketplace. Though this contrast was unspoken, it was clearly intended to distinguish Bandcamp from the likes of “service providers”—such as Spotify, Apple Music, & the rest. This was not meant as insult or competitive slander, but simply an explanation of something about the digital music economy I had not yet grasped.
This begs the question: why is this distinction between “marketplace” and “service provider” important today? Fundamentally, a service provider is selling a technology that makes products more useful and accessible. Utilities (internet, gas) are services, as are specialized skills that make consumer experience smoother (car mechanics, personal shoppers). There may also be a number of services included within a service, too (think library, radio, and playlist services of Spotify, itself a music streaming service). At the end of the day, a DSP (Digital Service Provider) is selling their ‘service’ and (ideally) engaging in a symbiotically value-adding relationship with content/product. In other words, DSPs are not really in the business of selling music, but instead in selling a proprietary & monistic way of using and engaging with music.
Alternatively, a “marketplace” such as Bandcamp is an arena in which buyers & sellers negotiate. It is where capital and goods change hands and where “value” (otherwise ever intangible) is set on a transactional level. In such a space, different goods can have different availabilities and cater to different audiences. Historically speaking, it is the standard model of pluralistic & decentralized power structures. This decentralized structure is the result of producers’ having control over the presentation & scarcity of their products and in consumers’ having the final choice of where their bread is spent. This results in a dialectic model of engagement within a product system.
Furthering this phenomena of dialog, sellers can change prices or enhance products if they feel a need to adjust and buyers can respond in turn. This kind of commerce is conversational, its by-product is relation. This dialectic/social model empowers both parties and can foster the creation of ancillary, specialty niches & communities of shared values (i.e. the “independent” sector in music) that might follow different rules than the mainstream. A marketplace is a setting in which micro-economies can exist within larger economies where rules of one do not necessarily effect the another.
The “way of using music,” that DSPs enforce is, in itself, not outright bad. But as several music industry journalists including Liz Pelly, David Turner, & Cherie Hu have argued, this situation leaves musicians in a position most comparable to that of human labor capital at the service of factory-boss-DSPs. If the producer’s only access to market is through a service that doesn’t let said producer set their own terms, the pluralistic model of commerce collapses. This is especially problematic when this singular “way” of using music is paradigmatically enforced & protected as in-the-interest of multi-national corporations.
The general nature of these writers’ critiques are right to point out the negative effects of these DSPs’ behaviors on creators in the ‘services’ model, often invoking Marx’s ideas around labor & commodity fetishism. The argument generally boils down to various service providers’ silencing of the productive class in favor of a smooth consumer experience. Fundamental to Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism is the “fantastic form of relation” among things in an industrialized commodity system. For the sake of brevity, this “form of relation” is the fetish character and it replaces the dialectic/social form of relation when a supply chain is made unclear . “Commodity fetishism” is another way of saying that when the means of production and the producer class is hidden from the consumer, the fruits of their labor take on a dissociative quality that prevents the endowment of things with the concrete social significance of their makers: commodities appear as if out of thin air.
The “social” marker of commodity production is an especially important quality in any art, be it in commercial art or fine art. Until recently, the “marketplace” has been able to preserve these social qualities in art because separating the art from the artist is akin to separating product from brand. Our commercial paradigm has almost required such association.
Last week, though, I found myself disagreeing with Pelly’s most recent comment on some of Spotify’s recent platform changes. She had criticized a new feature that Spotify was offering where artists can build links into their profiles to directly fundraise for themselves or for a charity of the artist’s choice. This feature has been colloquially termed “tipping.” The aforementioned Marxist critique does not work in defining this new form of “tipping” as more of the same problem. In actuality, “tipping” may be a crack in the one-dimensional façade of the so-called services.
Like the marketplace of Bandcamp, “tipping” will ask a consumer how they might value a particular artist and their work. The consumer’s answer is less important that the fact that they are being asked to consider this question at all—and that the consumer has a real opportunity to answer. The question itself shows a basic level of respect for the work that hasn’t been asked on a mass scale in nearly twenty years.
For however small a step “tipping” may be towards creating a more equitable & direct commercial relationship among fans and creators, “tipping” might just begin to tip some scales in the favor of creators. It admits that a service provider could sell its service and allow a marketplace to grow organically within its enclave. The $9.99/month can be a gatekeeper’s toll for access to a diverse and engaged marketplace made positively liquid by services like editorial playlisting, radio, and seamless UI. An artist that desires a small audience could decide to bill 1,000 fans $0.25/month and make enough to buy a day in a studio—not much, sure, but vastly improved upon the same 1,000 fans generating about 200 times less according to the current model. An artist that wants to scale to a medium audience (100k) can charge $0.05/month and generate a comfortable living. It is these small and medium scale acts that suffer the most in our current system, and creating a commercial ecosystem in which they can at least break even would encourage a resurgence in creativity and community that our world so desperately needs. All of this would not require levying one penny of mainstream & mass acts or platform shareholders.
Currently, music is treated as a means to an end, that end being the commercial success of a service. This has taken shape in our culture as a profoundly passive approach to consuming music. Much like an all-you-can-eat buffet, the one-size-fits-all approach to music cheapens the work & encourages one to over-eat. If, instead, the services become a means to accessing & enjoying music, creative workers could be much better off and in more control of their own business. If “tipping” is a step towards more thoughtful commercial engagement with the arts, it needs to be given a shot.