Borkowski Weekly Media Trends: 09-07-21
Spotify vs Artists | 'Deep Woke' & Political Football | Great Week for Boring Stunts
Spotify vs Artists: Battle for the soul of music rumbles on
Spotify is back under the spotlight as another controversy erupts over the streaming platform’s controversial system of royalty payments.
“The problem was to distribute music. Not to give you money, okay?” said Jim Anderson, credited with building the architecture for and even “inventing” the Spotify platform, in a response to a question from singer-songwriter Ashley Jana at the Sync Summit in New York.
The conversation was prompted by Apple Music’s decision to hike per-stream royalty payouts to one penny per stream, far outstripping Spotify’s rate of $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. The recording, released by Jana more than a year after she asked the question, because of fears of retribution from the music industry, sees Anderson responding to Apple’s decision by hitting out at Taylor Swift for not “needing more than 0.0001 per stream.”
Swift, you may remember, has been outspoken about poor payouts from streaming platforms and their impact on new musicians – she even briefly pulled out all her music from Spotify (except one song) in 2014 in protest.
Anderson’s comments, although distasteful, come as no surprise. Spotify’s almost-monopoly over the streaming market means that any attempts to challenge its model, including big-ticket efforts by the likes of Beyoncé with TIDAL, have fizzled out in no time. The writing on the wall is clear: streaming is here, and it’s here to stay.
What does that mean for the music industry at large? For starters, it’s a sign that physical concerts are more important than ever before and will drive revenues for superstars. And that the decades-long obsession with piracy and copyright, which led to the creation of services like Spotify to begin with, may not really have served artists’ interests after all.
‘Deep Woke’: How Football became a political…you know the rest
We’re finally here! After 55 painful years, England are in the finals of a major international tournament. Despite the talent on the pitch, it is the buzz swirling around manager Gareth Southgate and his players off it that seems to offer the most profound talking points, particularly when most of the country’s social interactions are boiled down to the oft-chanted phrase “it’s coming home”.
We’ve spoken before about Gareth Southgate’s effective leadership style in the past, but it’s his essay, published in June, that sparked a viral debate on social media. It centred around the phrase ‘deep woke’ after Gideon Rachman’s FT op-ed said, “some seem to believe that Southgate is becoming a tool of deep Woke, with one Tory strategist telling me that the England manager’s patriotism essay was ‘suspiciously well-written”.
This viral moment sparked a conversation surrounding the Tory government’s desperate attempt to attach themselves to England after 18 months of Covid-19. It has been largely rejected by most, with The Guardian’s Jonathan Liew pointing out the irony of Priti Patel – if she had overseen the Home Office a generation ago, the England team we are cheering on simply would not exist.
We are at the dawn of a wider trend we expect to see in years to come. Politics and football have been forged together for better or for worse. Even with the likes of Atomic Kitten having a moment in this historic cup run, trying to pull us back to a pre-social media era in the age of the WAG – we held firm and shunned the nostalgia trip.
Win or lose, politics in football is here to stay.
A Good Week for Bad Stunts
In PR brainstorms in-jokes that can be relied upon to raise a knowing titter include floating a giant something down the river Thames, Flashmobs, ‘Christmas in July’ and making a puerile joke ‘by accident’ before backtracking in time to ride the wave of attention.
Media professionals were treated to up-to three of these four not-so-deadly sins this week.
Burberry floated a giant handbag down the Thames – because nothing says aspirational luxury like being big and on a raft, right?
Firebrand mavericks Pret then put their Christmas sandwich on sale – get this- in July because people were cruelly deprived of it at Christmas OMG YOU ZANY GOOFBALLS! Seriously, though, even if we judiciously assume that these aren’t literally the same sandwiches from November, most people had other things on their mind last Christmas (PAUL’s Dinde de Noel baguette for one). In fact for most first-world urbanites in the UK, not having Pret for 18 months has probably been one of the silver linings of the pandemic.
Finally, there was Nonce Finance. The American company unburdened by knowledge of British dialect or the ability to google (or Urban Dictionary) their own name. Although their UK press cuttings folder was probably chunkier than expected, it’s hard to say whether they come across worse if this was or wasn’t a stunt. If it was then maybe the next phase of the campaign is at least covered by their Q3 marketing budget…because the rebrand and SEO surgery won’t be cheap.
These practices aren’t morally wrong. They are perfectly functional ways of achieving superficial awareness with an undiscerning audience. All this week’s stunts generated earned media and social coverage.
The issue is the ongoing pretence by some practitioners that these stunts are examples of alchemic creativity, when in fact they’re conceptually equivalent (with due deference to media buyers, the best of whom are geniuses) to a well-placed billboard location, or well-targeted programmatic campaign. It’s a catch-all, identikit approach that doesn’t suggest any kind of personality or point-of-difference, but increases market share of awareness for big brands with money to burn. Nothing more, nothing less.