I am suffering from one of the ailments of our age. It is not coronavirus. It is subscription fatigue, the recognition that I have subscribed to products and services, some of which I hardly ever use, and none of which I have ever cancelled.
There's Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Amazon Prime, a stack of newspapers and magazines ranging from the excellent new British magazine Perspective to London Review of Books. Then there’s English Heritage, which allows me to visit some extraordinary historic sites and … well, I don’t remember them all. But that’s the point.
When I checked my bank account and credit card statements it is dotted with subscriptions to generally admirable organisations. The cost is few pounds or dollars each month, but when I added them up the total was eye-opening. I congratulated myself in avoiding some subscriptions – Peloton for example. I love cycling, but I have no idea why anyone would pay $2495 for a top-of-the-range bicycle, which goes nowhere and then subscribe $39 a month for the pleasure of cycling in the spare bedroom.
January in the UK is, however, the month of guilt about over-indulgence at Christmas. Inevitably gym subscriptions shoot up. Gym attendance increases for a month or two then dwindles, while the subscription payments keep leaving bank accounts because (like me) many of us simply forget the monthly money which disappears until (again like me), we wake up with a shock and start cancelling a few things.
Beyond the bank statement, two other events last month pushed me to think about my subscription torpor. First, two musicians I admire, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, pulled their music from Spotify in protest at misinformation about coronavirus on the Spotify podcast by the US comedian Joe Rogan.
Joni Mitchell was clear: ”I've decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives.”
For Spotify it was Joe Rogan or Neil Young, but not both. Young also did not mince his words: “Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information. I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.”
An open letter to Spotify by hundreds of medical researchers and scientists says that Rogan has “repeatedly spread misleading and false claims on his podcast, provoking distrust in science and medicine” and “spread a number of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories”. Young and Mitchell are of a generation touched – sometimes blighted – by polio. Both are polio survivors. The polio vaccine means it is now a disease of the past and so I share Young and Mitchell’s irritation that Rogan, a stand-up comedian with 11 million listeners, used his platform in a way which may undermine the most important public health campaign of our time on Covid-19.
Nevertheless, Rogan pulls in listeners. Spotify signed a $100 million deal with him in 2020. The loss of Young and Mitchell may cause Spotify a bit of reputational risk, but the loss of Rogan would be a significant financial and strategic hit. Money talks. In the case of Rogan, it talks very loudly.
And that leads to the second reason I have been addressing my subscription fatigue. Where does the money go? To Spotify and Rogan or to my favourite musicians?
There is a row brewing in Britain and elsewhere about how streaming sites compensate most musicians poorly.
Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify in November 2014 and wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is.”
But Spotify’s slice of the American music market was just 7 per cent in 2010 and is now more than 80 per cent, which means only a brave (or very wealthy) musician will cut ties with the organisation. Taylor Swift’s music is back on the platform, and for many music fans, subscribing to Spotify or other streaming services, is a convenient way to consume what is essentially a product.
But the producers of that product are not Spotify executives. They are musicians. Those I have talked to share Taylor Swift’s view that streaming services do not reward individual artists enough for their “valuable” talents.
But since streaming is the gateway to millions of future fans, most musicians cannot follow Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and opt out. So this week I’m looking through my subscriptions to see what I can do without. But I also hope that those creative artists, musicians, writers and others who provide the products that cheer us up, find some way to earn more than just a pittance from some of the biggest corporations in the world. Spotify makes music available. Other people actually create it.
