Music Royalties in the Age of Streaming

The music business and music artistry don’t always intersect happily. You might have heard stories about Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Badfinger, and many others who were so thoroughly screwed by the powers that be in the music industry, that you could be forgiven for thinking, “How could in the world could they have been so naïve?” But I take pity on those whose sole aim in life is to create art and who put their faith in others to look out for their best interests. Hell, I have a background in finance and am pretty adept at investing and tax strategy, but that hasn’t stopped me from being completely clueless about the music business.

Which brings me to a conversation I recently had with my friend Phil, who – like me – has uploaded his original compositions onto DistroKid, a platform that enables you to direct your songs to whatever streaming platforms you choose. It’s a good service and it doesn’t cost much. I’ve been using it since 2017, and I’ve uploaded most of my songs onto Apple, Tidal, Spotify, etc., but I never thought to investigate whether all the streams I’ve amassed (and I say this quite facetiously, because there haven’t been many) have led to some income.

When Phil asked me if I’d made any money through Distro Kid, I said, no, that I wasn’t a member of ASCAP or BMI, the performing rights organizations that collect royalties for artists whose songs are played on the radio, TV, or through streaming services. It’s always been my understanding that membership in one of these companies was a requirement to earn royalties. Turns out not.

“You don’t need to be a member,” Phil said. “DistroKid tracks streams and pays you directly.”

Say what?

That’s right. I’d been paying an annual fee to Distro Kids for nine years without noticing the tab on top of the website that says in big bold letters, “BANK.”

Oops.

Phil showed me the tab and how things work, and when I returned home I logged in and discovered that over the past nine years, my compositions have earned…drum roll please…

$79.08!

That’s right. I am officially a professional musician whose compositions are earning cold hard cash! What’s particularly interesting is that DistroKid actually tracks all the streams for you, so you can see which compositions were streamed, when, and through which specific platform. It didn’t take long for me to realize that my biggest-streaming composition is by far – by a multitude of 1000 – the soundtrack I wrote for my daughter’s short film, Preheated, but because it streams primarily on Facebook/Instagram – who pay artists virtually nothing – it’s only made me 47 cents!

Regardless, I’m thankful that there are people out there who have more of a clue about the music business than I do. Thanks to Phil, I can now pay for approximately 3 hours of health care for my wife and me. I sure hope she appreciates all the hard work I put in for our benefit.

Transgressions and Misunderstandings

The great film director Barry Levinson once told a story about a perceived slight he’d received after asking a high school classmate to go to the prom with him. She responded, “I was hoping that someone else would ask me, but…okay.” Levinson still took her to the prom, but he was furious, and two decades later at a gathering that included his former prom date, he reminded her of their conversation from high school. She said, “I remember saying that – there was someone else. But I meant what I said: It was okay to go with you.” 

Levinson concluded, “See, it was a put-down for me, not for her. I carried something around for twenty years that had no meaning for the other person. And that’s life. It’s all about misunderstandings.”

Goodness knows I’ve carried around baggage from when I was the recipient of various bullying and nastiness that had no meaning for the perpetrators, and I know the reverse is true. I once had a long conversation with a friend who recited a litany of ways I’d needled, insulted, or otherwise hurt him. I was clueless to all of them because none of them were purposely hurtful, and if I’m being honest, I didn’t understand how some of the things I’d said could even be perceived that way. But that’s life – full of misunderstandings, like an episode of Three’s Company. We all bring different things to the table, and it’s impossible for us to truly know how what we say affects the other person.

A friend of mine recently lamented about what an asshole he’d been earlier in his life, blurting out one-liners without even an inkling about the ramifications. On a particular occasion, a female classmate of his had to read an original poem in front of English class, and afterward he took his friends’ dare to say to this teenage girl, “That was good trailer park poetry,” resulting in tears, as she apparently came from a poor area and likely lived with the burdens associated with it. Looking back on it now, he said, “I had no idea what I was saying. My friends dared me to say something, and I said it. I didn’t even think about it.”

With drinks in hand, I toasted him and said, “Here’s to our evolution into decent human beings.”

We carry around our worst transgressions forever. The only things I truly regret in life aren’t the risks I didn’t take, that girl I didn’t ask out, the opportunity I let pass me by, or even the dumb thing I said that someone took in a way I hadn’t intended – it’s the times I was purposely cruel. Fortunately, these have been fewer and farther between in adulthood, but there are a few offenses from childhood that still make me shudder in shame. Hopefully if there’s an account of our time on Earth, we’re not held responsible for the misdoings we committed when we were impressionable children, so easily swayed by the goading of friends, convincing us to do something we know is wrong.

But dang, there are also things I’ve said as an adult that I’d like to take back. Hopefully Barry Levinson’s life lesson cuts both ways: perhaps there are dumb things I’ve said that I still carry with me in shame that the other person doesn’t think of in the slightest, a completely unnecessary burden.

So I’ll amend the toast I previously made to my friend: “Here’s to our continuing evolution into decent human beings.” It appears to be a lifetime pursuit.

Cherishing Real Human Contact

Miller beer has a current ad campaign that focuses on doing: “Make the plan. Forget the couch. See them in person. Do the thing. Play the game. Say hi to that stranger. Live a little.” It’s a message that probably wouldn’t have resonated before, say, social media, or the internet in general; people went out as a matter of course. But in an age when countries are setting up programs to help men and women meet each other, goodness, maybe a message that reminds people that being human means interacting with fellow human beings needs to be heard, even in a beer commercial.

Interacting with fellow humans can take many forms. A few weeks ago Melissa Kirsch of the New York Times wrote of the joys of running errands, something I also value. She described a friend who “praises the ‘soft-touch socialization’ you get while out and about: the salesperson you chat with before going on your way, the neighbor you catch up with when you run into them at the dump. ‘I cherish the connective tissue of errands, when you’re between stops, driving or walking. Bursts of activity followed by respites of solitude, each stop its own tidy episode.’”

I love this, and I too cherish the little niceties that I exchange with fellow shoppers, the local mail carrier, store clerks and cashiers. Kirsch goes on to encourage all of us not to stay in and hibernate on the weekends to chill and recharge, but instead to go out into the world and run errands.

Here again – we need coaxing to actually leave the house on the weekends to get stuff done. Yikes.

And sure, a quick chat with a cashier at a store can be pleasant – on some days even life-affirming – but this of course doesn’t constitute a relationship. Nothing is required of either party except being kind to each other (which, granted, is not always so common these days).

And this feeds into another essay I read last year, this one by Elizabeth Oldfield, who wrote a guest essay in the New York Times that addresses our declining social muscles and how we need to rehabilitate them. One thing she addressed was our impatience with human relationships that naturally lead to occasional conflicts. Instead, she says that we increasingly “avoid ties of mutual obligation in favor of frictionless transactions.” I’ve seen this in my own life; so many of my casual relationships go no deeper than a talk of the weather and sports scores.

But people need to do so much more to experience the value of real, honest, human relationships. There’s nothing more frustrating, more exhilarating, more stupefying, more joyful, more heart-breaking, or lovelier. It is the be all and end all.

But don’t take my word for it – trust the wisdom of a Miller Beer commercial. They got it right this time.

Rainy Days and Monday

After three and a half weeks without rain in the Chicago area, the skies finally opened up on Monday just as my wife and I exited Costco, $250 poorer than when we entered. The rain was such a welcome site that we opted to get wet and load up the car, but after arriving home the weather got more serious with a deluge of rain, wind gusts, hail and tornado warnings – none of which, I might add, had been forecasted by our weather apps, which had merely predicted a “chance of rain.”

As we hunkered down in our basement, I marked the occasion of this wonderful, beautiful rain (granted, with a side of danger) by playing a recording of The Carpenters’ song, “Rainy Days and Mondays,” as it was both raining and a Monday! How perfect! Well, the gods were having none of that nonsense, and one minute into Karen Carpenter’s glorious delivery, the power went out, flashed back on for a second, went out again, flashed on again, and then went out for good. There would be no music for the time being.

Once the worst of the storm had passed, I headed upstairs and I took matters into my own hands, sitting at the piano to pluck out the 1971 tune penned by Roger Nichols and Paul Williams. The chords were no problem, but I botched the melody pretty badly. It brought to mind how much easier it had been to play the song when I could just hide behind my daughter Jessica’s singing voice, who performed the tune with me from time to time when she was around 12 years old. Playing chords while someone else took the melody? No problem. Melody on the fly? Not so much.

On one occasion in 2009, Jessica and I performed “Rainy Days and Mondays” for my mother and her husband. Jessica had – and still has – a very good voice and vocal technique. We picked the proper key, I played the intro, and she took it away from there. I added some silly backup vocals behind my daughter’s controlled performance, but overall it sounded good.

After we finished the tune, my mother said, “Oh Jessica, why didn’t you use your pretty voice?”

Now, it would take years of psychoanalysis to understand what prompted that remark. I had gotten used to callous comments from my mother over the years, but this one left me dumbfounded. I stood up, looked at Jessica with eyebrows raised, wiggled my finger toward her and said, “Follow me.”

When Jessica recounts the story today, she says that she thought she was in trouble, that she had possibly embarrassed me in front of my mother, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

We walked to the back room of our house, I crouched down to her eye level and said, “Do you know what tactless means?” She said she didn’t. “It’s when you say something rude, something unkind. You sang beautifully, and what Grandma said was tactless.”

Jessica and I will occasionally recount this story when reminiscing about her childhood. It was one of my prouder parenting moments and one of my mother’s weaker moments. But Jessica wasn’t deterred. She went on to sing throughout high school and college, and even made a career as a music therapist for half a decade.

“Rainy Days and Mondays.” I love that this wonderful song that accompanied me during my early childhood now has a personal history with my daughter. However, I’d be much obliged if the next time I choose to play the record, the skies let it go to its completion.

Remembering Siskel and Ebert

The film reviews that Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert aired on various television channels, formats and names from the mid-70s through the end of the 90s are indelibly stamped in my memory. These guys had a weekly presence in my household, as my mother and I watched them religiously when I was a teenager, and I continued to watch religiously into early adulthood. I can actually recall certain lines verbatim: Roger, when addressing the criticism by those who felt that the 1988 film The Accidental Tourist was kind of slow, “You know what my answer to them is? ‘You’re kind of slow!’” When both Gene and Roger gave an enthusiastic thumbs up on a film, it got my attention, and more often than not I’d seek out the film. I didn’t always agree with them, but I respected them enough to give them the benefit of the doubt.

There was a brief moment when Siskel & Ebert episodes were available at the online archive atthemoviestv.com, with over 5000 searchable reviews. Sadly, Buena Vista/Disney-ABC dropped the site when they discontinued At the Movies in 2010. Years later, an unofficial fan-initiated site, SisketEbert.org, also went down. Today, it seems that the best way to view old episodes is on YouTube. Though not ideal, it’s terrific that people have gone through the trouble to upload so many of these episodes, and I’ve spent countless hours rewatching the show.

It’s mind-boggling to me that two intelligent people (though that might be the first problem) offering short reviews of new movies can’t generate a consistent following. There are a few podcasts I’ve listened to, but none are as appealing to me as the old format of Siskel & Ebert, who typically reviewed five new movies an episode, sharing clips before offering their opinions and giving their trademarked “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Yes, the film clips and the reviews got shorter and shorter as the pair transitioned from PBS to network TV, honoring new time constraints, but they were so articulate, fun and knowledgeable that they could communicate a lot in a short period of time. Today, I find so many film discussion to be too short or too long, too immature or too unrelatable, and often lacking succinct, intelligent observations.

It’s such a shame that Gene died in 1999 and that Roger’s health was so significantly compromised prior to his passing in 2013. An additional decade or two of Siskel and Ebert episodes would be such a gift. What would Gene have thought of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? What would Roger have thought of The Big Short? What I’d give to hear them spar over Tropic Thunder or Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, or First Reformed or Spotlight. But we’re fortunate that these two offered their insights for a quarter century of movies.

The film industry could use another pair of film advocates with as much gravatas as Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. If they’re out there, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.

(note: as if I needed reminded, I appear to be repeating myself, as I wrote a very similar blog entry back in 2013 after Roger Ebert dies. Eerily, I’d just watched a Siskel and Ebert episode two nights prior to learning about Roger’s death. This is especially eery given that last year I watched The Natural the night that Robert Redford died, and Spinal Tap II basically at the same time as Rob Reiner’s murder. I’d forgotten about the Ebert coincidence, but it does make me wonder whether I’ve got to stop watching videos of the living!)