26. OUGHT WE BE PAYING MORE FOR MUSIC? - How A Charity Single Opened My Eyes to Exploitation

In September of this year I released a charity single for Cancer Research UK. At my school, one of my jobs is coordinating the Student Council, and they had decided at the end of the summer that for the 2019/20 academic year all their charity fundraising efforts would go towards a range of cancer charities, from the national to the local. To kick this year’s charity efforts off, and to scratch an itch I get every summer as we traipse out of the hall with the turgid chorus of the dire school song echoing in our ears, I recorded a more exciting punk rock version of the song during the summer break. I was recording a song for my own band anyway at the time, on my home Garageband set up, and set myself the challenge of seeing if I could figure out the school song, and record a version of it, before my wife came in from doing some gardening. Lo and behold - I did! And so sprung the idea of releasing it as a surprise for the school, with all proceeds from the song going to Cancer Research UK. Having recently got all my own band’s music electronically distributed I knew I could get the song into online outlets like iTunes and Amazon, as well as streaming services like Spotify, and thought it would be a fun source of additional income for the first charity we were supporting. As I had also already agreed to do a small concert for charity as part of the fundraiser, I also thought it would be good promotion for that - I would play the punk version of the school song live as my finale.

So the first weeks of term came and I unveiled the surprise in assembly - playing the song over a video advertising the first fundraising day and letting everyone know where they could buy it. I implored the staff and students: “please make sure you buy it, not just stream it. Even if you never normally buy music, even if you’ve never bought music before, if you want to give money to the charity you have to buy it as 100% of the profits will go them. If you just stream it, instead of giving them 99p you’ll be giving them something more like 0.99p”

The song was a hit. Well, within the school at least. Students and teachers alike told me they were listening, the numbers rose on my Spotify Artists app, and the live version at the charity gig was demanded by the audience. Former students at the school shared the links and told me they were listening too. And my response was always the same: “cool…but make sure you buy it. Don’t just stream it.”

The music industry is a shady place, and already I knew I wouldn’t get any reporting on the money the song was or wasn’t making until a few months after the fact. I also had my doubts about how much money a charity single could actually make in a world no longer used to paying for music. I therefore set aside £100 of my own money as backup. In my wildest hopes, I imagined about ten percent of our near one-thousand school community listening to the song, and maybe about fifty percent of that number actually buying it. I hoped the song might make us about £50 or so, but knew that whatever it made, it would actually make a minimum of £100 because of my own planned backup donation (though no-one was told about the backup until now, if they’re reading this).

Personally, I actually hate the idea of using a single to raise money for charity. This is because I hate the idea of needing to do anything for charity beyond telling people why the money is needed. The idea that you have to get a cake back for your money, or a song, to me is a moral failing on the part of the giver. When I hear how my money could help save or improve lives, and I know I can afford to give that money, the next question should not be “and what else do I get for my money besides helping”, it should simply be: “where do I donate?” Which is why a few Comic Reliefs ago I made over £200 from a “sponsored do nothing” where I said on a JustGiving page - look, people are dying and need your money, and that should be enough. If my school community really wanted to give a little extra to Cancer Research UK, rather than buying my song from iTunes and limiting their donation to 99p, they should just go to Cancer Research UK’s own website and donate directly as much as they can afford. But culture doesn’t transform overnight to meet your principles, and in the culture of giving to which I am thrust the single seemed necessary.

I have already transformed the way we gave to charity at school in the first place in a bid to change the culture. It used to be that we had a non-uniform day with a fee - £1 to wear non-uniform if you pay before the day, £2 on the day, and £3 after the day - and I hated this system. (Not least because it sent the message that giving more to the charity was a punishment one should try to avoid.) What I hated the most was the fact that no-one actually gave their money because they wanted to help people; they were giving their money because they wanted to wear their own clothes. So the change I made was this: the non-uniform day became free. But on that day, an envelope is given to each form where each student can donate as much, or as little, as they want based on how much they can afford and how much they actually care about the charity. The results were dramatic: we doubled what we used to make and students actually knew why they were giving. While some students gave only pennies, others gave £5, £10, £20…even giving personal donations in the hundreds depending on the chosen charity. And students wanting to earn even more for the good cause began adding further events - cake sales, performances, sponsored silences, etc. on top of the passing around of an envelope.

I have no problem with all those extras if they are extra. The more money to the charities, the better. But what soon began to happen was students stopped putting as much money in the envelopes as they had been, keeping coins in their pockets for the food sales or charity football matches. They wouldn’t give away their money for nothing - they needed something in return. And if the samosas ran out at the samosa sale, or there were no more spaces left at the Super Smash Bros tournament, that money stayed in their pockets. Without getting something in return, the act of donation was held back. We still make more under the current system than we did under the old “fee-based” system of charitable giving, but there is a notable decline in donations on fundraising days where there are no “extra” events added on. And we have yet to once hit our target of every person in the school donating a minimum of £3 each.

Which brings us back to the charity single…

The song has been listened to over a thousand times since going live in September to the end of reporting the following month. Over a thousand listens in a calendar month. Not bad for a nobody with a home recording. And it has earned for Cancer Research UK a whopping…$10.34, or just under £10 in pounds sterling. Of that $10.34, $7 comes from the seven actual human beings who bought the single from iTunes. Just seven out of the 1,000+ listens earned seventy percent of the total money the single generated. The other $3.34 came from 1,000+ streams across Spotify, with a few micro-cents here and there earned across other platforms such as YouTube and Apple Music.

There are two issues here. One - how out of a school community of nearly a thousand, only seven people actually paid for the song despite the clear message given that this was the only way it would actually earn any money for the charity (and one of those seven was me, checking it and chipping in my own 99p. Of the remaining six, I know at least three were fellow teachers, not students). And two - how surprising it was to see over a thousand streams of a song can earn it so little.

The first issue speaks to the original issues I have with the way charity-giving seems to have lost its way - if you only give when you’re going to get, if you can stream the song for free, or as part of something you have already paid for, then why would you buy it even if you know not buying it does not help the charity? It’s saddening, but not surprising. The second issue, however, makes one question the ethics of streaming music at all.

For me, recording the single was a bit of fun. I spent no money on studio-time or an engineer - I just banged the track out with what I had on hand. Even getting it distributed online was free through the label I use to distribute my other music. It was out there only as a means to bring in some extra charity money for a good cause, and with a healthy scepticism underwritten by my own back-up donation if it didn’t. But if I was someone actually trying to carve out an existence as a musician, paying for studio time, instruments, other musicians, food, drink, and living expenses, etc., then the fact that I have written a song hundreds of people have liked enough to listen to multiple times and yet it only earns me less than the cost of a cup of coffee is, perhaps, morally disturbing.

Except for a few vinyl aficionados, many of us have long moved away from expensive compact discs and other physical forms of music. In my house, shelves of the things gather dust, acting essentially as clunky backup hard drives for the hours of digital files stored on my computer and phone that I actually listen to. And even then, the files are starting to feel antiquated as I try to move away from clogging up machines with large archives of digital data and begin to evolve to a world of cloud-stored streaming. Why contribute more wasteful plastic and paper to the planet with a physical product when you no longer need to?

But while I currently can listen to all the music in the world that I want to, wherever I am, on any device, through streaming services such as Spotify, the moral philosopher in me begins to ask should I? By not properly compensating the artists I listen to with renumeration for the work they’ve done and the joy it brings me, am I not absolutely complicit in their exploitation? Am I not personally forcing these musicians to leave their families behind and head out on the road on endless tours to make ends meet? Am I not personally creating financial roadblocks that mean it is far less likely for people from disadvantaged backgrounds to break into an industry which cannot pay for itself and therefore becomes the enclave of only those with disposable income to burn? Am I not forcing a kind of indentured servitude to those artists lucky enough to find funding from one of the larger labels and thereby getting themselves into massive debt as their music attempts to pay off the outlay of expensive PR teams, slick videos, overpriced studio time and touring costs they then owe their label masters?

If music today has returned to a system of benefactors and patrons, how can we ensure we are better patrons? One way of ensuring artists get paid, of course, is to make sure you pay them. Sometimes I buy albums digitally that I never listen to simply to pay a band back for the hours of enjoyment I’ve had streaming their music for free on other platforms. Other times I buy their merchandise - t-shirts, beanies, badges, hoodies, etc. - to make up for it. I need another t-shirt about as much as I need another CD clogging up my house, but I’m not buying it for the clothing, I’m buying it as thanks for all the band have done. Of course I try to go and see bands I like live too, giving them further income from my ticket sale. But I have even, on occasion, guilt-bought a ticket to a show I didn’t go and see out of some sense of obligation to put money in these people’s pockets after paying nothing to them to listen to their music for years.

But such things do little to make the system in any way fair or sustainable, and even within my own listening bubble the acts of generosity are sporadic and not at all universal. I am definitely listening way beyond my means were I to suddenly have to pay real money to hear each song or album I enjoy. And the rate at which I do try to pay back those artists I most admire is seldom the full price of the entire back catalogue of their albums which I have devoured.

In short, my failed attempt to make money through music for charity has drawn attention to the significant need for far more charity when it comes to listening to music if we want musicians to ever be able to earn a decent living from their art.

Of course, this begs the question that they should. Why should your hobby impose a fee on me when, without my ears, your hobby has no purpose (if a song is played in a forest and no-one is around to applaud afterwards, was it ever played at all?) If the purpose of your playing music is the personal satisfaction you get from doing it, you get that regardless of if it makes you any money. If the purpose is to make money, well there’s no inalienable right to make money just because you want to…

But the above debate, like my dream of charitable students giving thousands of pounds out of sheer goodwill and for nothing in return, speaks perhaps to an ideal which is at odds with the actual world in which we currently live. For in this world, in capitalist society, things don’t come for free and if we want to have artists of any stripe - musicians, writers, actors, filmmakers, etc. - we need to ensure they can afford to create their art. And that means ensuring that they can pay the bills. While we should applaud anyone who chooses to give their art away for free and accept such gifts gladly, imposing zero value on someone’s hard work in a capitalist society tends to make that work no longer economically viable to any but the richest. So, perhaps, think again next time you listen to that new single for free on your favourite streaming service, or as you look through your “decade wrapped” overview from Spotify regarding your listening habits of the last few years, and consider how the artists you listen to and love are going to feed themselves and their families if you continue listening to them without putting any money back into their pockets?

And if you’re not going to pay for your music, or even if you do, you should probably give more to charity than you currently do…and without expecting anything back in return. A good place to start this christmas would be with Cancer Research UK.

Author: D.McKee