LEVI WEAVER

Empathy.

The “chameleon” of human emotions. The ability to “feel” what others feel.

With empathy, just like any emotion, some are more capable than others.
ANGER: some of us fly into blind rages while others seethe.
HAPPINESS: one 8-year old who screams as she unwraps the gift she’s asked for all year, another silently fights back a tear of gratitude,
SADNESS: Some collapse into tears while others internalize their grief.

Empathy operates the same way: there are some who cannot help but feel the loss of others, almost as if it were their own, and there are some who can somehow internally justify the pulling of a trigger or the pushing of a button.

Me? I found my empathy taking a weird form yesterday and today.

There was the predictable: putting myself in the place of a victim, a first responder (“I would have done that“), someone fleeing from the scene (“I would have done that“) a family member of an 8-year-old boy whose life ended because he was at the finish line to hug his dad.

The Dad.

The Good Guys.

But I also, against my own will, began to attempt to put myself in the place of someone who triggered the bomb.

My empathy paints in dark colors sometimes.

It’s all projecting. It all is. It would be offensive to say that I am capable of manufacturing anything close to what the victims lost, just as it would be offensive to say that I can understand what would cause someone to follow through with detonating a bomb or pulling a trigger.

But I can speak to what resonates in me to mirror those emotions: loss, grief, disconnect, the desire to be a part of something bigger.

The anger that can be so easily misdirected at predetermined enemies in the aftermath.

I don’t have any answers. I have vague guesses, the same as anyone. Whether the bomber was an angry white “Patriot” or an angry brown Muslim, or an angry green teenager, I imagine that they thought they were doing something bigger, something more important than the lives that would be lost in the process.

That generally seems to be the way.

It’s the same thought, by the way, that sends young men into wars, drops bombs on civilians, fires rockets into neighboring countries, and considers “bombs” over “families” as the most powerful suffix of “Nuclear”.

I’m not here to cast a blanket statement that all such causes are wrong. I’m aware that it’s a sliding scale; all wars are hell, but some wars are just.
Some are for the purpose of preventing more things like what we saw in Boston yesterday.

(I’m also not here to definitively say what percentage of those wars accomplish their stated goal, though I am also aware that “I’m not here to…” comes loaded with implications.)

But I do suspect that if the bomber had spent a week in Dorchester living with the Richard family, he could never have detonated the bomb, knowing that instead of “*AN* 8-year-old boy” who died, it would be Martin. And it wouldn’t be “*A* 5-year old” who lost a leg, it would be Jane.

As best I can assume empathy for those devoid of it, I just can’t imagine things would have turned out the same.

So now the onus falls on us.

To have empathy where a lack of it has ruptured the lives of so many.

I’m not reminding you to swear and punch a wall like I did yesterday when I heard about Martin Richard. That visceral reaction is easy to have. I’m asking you to do something much more difficult: I’m asking you to temper your initial reaction with Empathy.

I’ll tell you what that initial reaction will be.

If he or she claims to uphold beliefs that you have, you will internally distance yourself from them. “they got it wrong”, “they don’t represent me”.

If he or she claims to uphold beliefs that you don’t have, it’s going to be easy to decry everyone in that group as evil.

Muslim brotherhood, Tea Party, Anarchists, Palestinians, Israelis, Russian Drug-lords, Siths, Donkey Kong…

But I’m asking you to imagine if it was your own brother or husband or child who did this. Imagine what circumstances took place to put them in a position to believe the deception that whatever cause they were championing was worth this loss of life. Imagine the disconnect they began to feel in the months and years leading up to this. Imagine the guilt, watching the news and seeing the faces of the victims. Alternately, imagine the darkness of living in a mind who felt no guilt when they saw those faces.

I’m not asking to you justify this horrific action. I’m not even asking you to Not Be Angry. Of course we’re angry. We should be angry.

But in addition, I’m asking you to have empathy for the bad guys.

Because that’s what keeps you from becoming one of them.

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As most of you know, I released a 5 song covers album entitled Antipodes a few weeks back. Two of the songs from the album landed on a great blog called Cover Lay Down.  Below is an excerpt from the blog but do yourself a favor and go visit the entire site – you won’t regret it. The full blog post is here.

“Intelligent yet accessible singer-songwriter Levi Weaver loves his fans, and his brand new covers EP Antipodes is plenty of proof: the daring indie set runs from contemporary folk to grungy-and-grandiose alt-pop, though there’s a good acoustic underpinning on every track, and though the overall set ends up quite diverse for a 5-song collection, his love for his contemporary influences shimmers throughout every beat and pick.”

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I’m doing a multiple-part series on how Independent Artists get paid. 
Part one (iTunes).
Part Two (International / Other Downloads).
Part Three (Streaming: All But Spotify).

PART FOUR – SPOTIFY

I get asked this question a lot: “How much do you make from Spotify?” It’s a fair question: Spotify launched, and suddenly we had (practically) the ENTIRE HISTORY OF RECORDED MUSIC! For free (with commercials) or $9.99/month!!

“HOW DID THEY MAKE IT LEGAL?!”, we rejoiced.
“I DON’T EVEN CARE, LET’S LISTEN TO VANILLA ICE ON REPEAT!!”, we decided.

Then came the backlash:

“Spotify is detrimental to music buying.”

Musicians started sweating.
Listeners shrugged, mostly. (Word to your mother.)

Lady Gaga got paid $167.00 for over a million streams.
Or not.

Musicians  did what we only do when we are significantly spooked: we looked at our books.

Some pulled their music out. Some tweeted, blogged, and gave interviews. (note: if I’d just posted this last week I might have made it into this article which includes a lot more talk from artists about Spotify.)

You can read how much I get paid from other streaming services here, but the more research I did, the more I realized that Spotify was going to have to be its own article. So here goes: (Spoiler: #5 is the most interesting point)

1. IT ACTUALLY PAYS OKAY, COMPARED TO RADIO

As a musician, when you’re used to selling things for $10/album or $0.99/song, it’s a splash of cold water to see a number like $0.005205/play.

I don’t come to all the same conclusions as Kieron Donoghue, but he brings up a good point when he says, in response to @John_Hopkins_:

“…his mistake is to compare a Spotify play against a Radio 1 play. Radio 1 has approx 11,000,000 listeners so if you do the maths that’s 0.0000045p per listener.”

I guarantee you, I know not a single musician that would be upset about getting a song played on BBC Radio One.

In fact, we even seem excited about getting on the radio here in the U.S. Care to take a guess how much your band (not the writer) will get paid in Public Performance Fees for one play on KISS-FM in Los Angeles or Z100 in New York City?

I’ll give you a hint, it starts with zero.

(it also ends with zero.)

(okay, it’s zero.)

2. IT ACTUALLY PAYS OKAY, COMPARED TO OTHER STREAMING SITES

I posted this on the last blog, but here are the numbers again:

Average Payment (To Me) Per Stream

Deezer: $0.0219
XBox Music: $0.01473
MediaNet: $0.009972
*Rhapsody: $0.0091
Spotify: $0.005205
iTunes Match (Aus): $0.002926
iTunes Match (Can): $0.002837
iTunes Match (EU): $0.002832
iTunes Match (US): $0.002457
Rhapsody Mechanicals: $0.002228
iTunes Match (UK): $0.002139
MySpace Music: $0.002043
Last.fm: $0.00055968

Here’s another bit of fun math. Daniel Ek (CEO of Spotify) has claimed that 200 streams will earn you about the same amount as one download.

Let’s test that using my numbers: I was paid $0.005205/play in 2012. Multiply that by 200, and you get $1.041.

Well, that’s actually more than I make from an iTunes download.

I’d actually only have to hit the mark of 123 streams to match the $0.637 I make from an iTunes sale.

This sounds encouraging, but let’s apply a bit of practicality to this math: check your iTunes play counts. How many songs have you listened to 123 times or more? (I have 9, out of 15,412 songs)

3. IT PAYS A HECK OF A LOT BETTER THAN YOUTUBE.

4. IT’S NOT MEANT TO BE MY ONLY SOURCE OF INCOME …YET.

Full disclosure: I had 31,400 streams from Spotify in 2012, and I made $112.52 (after CDBaby’s 9%). Considering the fact that I paid them $120 to subscribe to their service, I basically just got a really nice employee discount.

I would never make a living from people listening to my music on Spotify at this rate. To earn $40,000 a year (I could pay rent and other bills, feed my family, pay for health insurance, and never ever record another album or buy another pair of socks), I would need 7,686,395 streams on Spotify. But that’s missing the point. Spotify is not the only revenue stream for me or any other artist. At least not yet.

5. SPOTIFY IS *WILDLY* INCONSISTENT WITH THEIR PER-STREAM PAYMENTS

The lowest rate I was payed for a single play was $0.00026547. That’s two and a half hundreths-of-a-cent.

But the highest rate I got from them? $.03395283.

In a world of “point-zero-zero-zero…” payments, three cents for one play is astronomical. I was curious, So I dug deeper. 
..

The $.03 payment rate happened in August of 2012, and it was for a handful of tracks (154 total plays at this rate, for a payout of about $5.23). The three most-played songs were I am Certain I am a Train and Dark Clay (11 streams each for a total of $.3735 each) and Drink (Drink, Drink) (9 streams for a total of $0.3055)

How is this possible? Maybe everyone took a break from listening to music except for my fans?

No.

You see, in the same reporting period of August 2012, one column reports “We’re Tornadoes When We Dance” being played 180 times, for which I was only paid .00171/play (that’s a total of $0.3095
, or almost-the-same-amount-I-was-paid-for-9-plays-of-Drink).

Well, that’s weird.

But this is weirder:

As I dug a little further, I discovered that in the SAME REPORTING PERIOD, 11 other columns appear for Drink (Drink, Drink). They report totals of 2, 49, 49, 62, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 1 times played that month, with a payment-per-play ranging from $0.00050669 to $0.01027848. In fact, as I arrange by song, within the month of August 2012 alone, there are as many as 21 different reports (We’re Tornadoes When We Dance, total plays now up to 427) to as few as 4 (a half-dozen titles) for any given song. Most had around 10 different reports for that same month, and the payment per play varied widely.

As to why there was such a huge variation: I have …guesses?

Maybe each of the reports was from a different country. I’m sure some of these listens were from paid subscribers, and some from free listeners. Maybe commercials pay more during peak listening hours?

Probably, Sure, and Maybe.

But the fact is, I don’t know. Nobody does. And Spotify refuses to give any further details (citing “strict confidentiality requirements”), other than to acknowledge that major label artists do, in fact, get paid more than indies per play (68th paragraph on that article, about 2/3 down).

Look, I know I’m a tiny fish in this very deep pond. But as far as I know, no one outside the 4 major labels signed that confidentiality agreement, so even if they don’t tell YOU why I’m getting paid what I’m getting paid, and even if they can’t tell me how much more (than me) major label artists are getting paid, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to ask how I’M getting paid what I’m getting paid.

“But we do tell you”, says Spotify. “In fact, we released an official statment about how artists get paid.” they say.

To quote: “…Spotify pays royalties in relation to an artist’s popularity on the service. For example, we will pay out approximately 2% of our gross royalties for an artist whose music represents approximately 2% of what our users stream.“)

“Approximately”.

Big word, bigger meaning.

Based on my numbers, “approximate” either means false or, at best, incomplete.

6. IT GETS BETTER (MAYBE?)

There is evidence, based on Spotify’s history in Sweden, that the longer the service is in place, the more people will become paid subscribers, and the bigger that “70% of the income” pool for artists will get.

I will say that I wildly disagree with the part of Spotify’s official statement that states “if the 40M paying downloaders in the US became Spotify subscribers, artists would earn twice as much for their music than they currently do.” (Typing this statement without so much as a “The Onion reports” or  “LOL HAHAHAHA JUST KIDDING” at the end is the written equivalent of Jimmy Kimmel Math.)

But for now, I’m content to weather the initial storm and see what happens. I would love to get to the point where 30-50 plays meant I was making as much as I would from a download. That seems fair. However…

7. IT ALSO GETS WORSE.

Ultimately if Spotify doesn’t ever get any better for us indies, it won’t be because of us angrily tweeting about it, or getting all rage-faced about wanting to know if our streams came from Texas or Italy or New Zealand, or why we get paid such wildly varying numbers.

If Spotify fails us, it will be for these four reasons:

Universal Music Group
Sony BMG Music Entertainment
EMI Group
Warner Music Group.

Here’s why.

(Even if you don’t click on any of the other links in this article, click that one.)

This also means that even if you have striven to avoid major labels, they are still, on some level, determining your paycheck.

If Spotify does ultimately succeed? Well then, the bigger it gets, the more the “Big Four” will control your income, even if you’re not signed to them.

Not much makes me want to quit making music. But this is close.

(News room is silent, I solemnly tap papers on the news desk. No music as we cut to commercial.)

Next up: Profit Margins on physical merchandise.

-Levi Weaver
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