Bjrn Ulvaeus How music streaming transformed songwriting TED
Transcriber:
I’d like to start with a quote,
but it’s very embarrassing because
I don’t know where it comes from.
But it’s very well put,
and it goes like this:
“Copyright is designed not only
to provide fairness for authors,
but also to enhance
the quality of life within a society
by promoting the progress
of science, art and culture.”
In other words,
the concept of making it economically
feasible for creators to create
is now globally recognized
as a social imperative.
I have very few memories
writing lyrics to songs.
But there is a particular one
from long ago that I do remember.
I was lying on my stomach on a bed
in a small guest room
with a writing pad in front of me.
In the master bedroom next door,
my then wife, Agnetha,
was sleeping undisturbed.
The music was playing in my head,
so no need for speakers,
not even headphones.
A melody that still lacks words
is virgin territory
upon which a lyricist must tread lightly.
Some of the time,
the final words on the page
are the result of hard work, deep thought
and the intuition that a songwriter
must learn to trust.
But sometimes,
extraordinary things happen;
closed curtains are suddenly drawn,
and the melody speaks to you
and starts to conjure up images
and even sequences of events.
All you have to do is write it down,
write down what you witnessed.
A song can come to its creator
in bits and pieces.
But when it once in a while appears
out of thin air in its entirety,
it seems to suggest it had already
lingered there, God knows how long,
perhaps impatiently waiting
to be plucked down
by someone with a keen and sensitive ear,
as if it needed the right vessel
to flow through
from the realm of ideas
all the way down to earth.
I was deliriously happy
when I had finished.
At that moment, I was grateful
for music itself,
for the sheer existence of this elusive,
undefinable phenomenon
that seems to ignore our brains
and go straight to our hearts.
I wanted to sing it out loud,
but it was two o’clock in the morning,
and even in my euphoria,
I had the good sense not to wake the woman
who was to sing my words the next day.
If Benny Andersson and I
had written that song today,
you might not have gotten to hear it.
It could have been
just another lost dream,
[one of] about 80,000 new songs
uploaded to streaming services
every single day.
The competition today is fierce,
much fiercer than it was back in 1977.
And even if our song had been clicked
very often by Spotify subscribers,
chances are slim that the royalties
would have paid anyone’s rent.
So what I want to talk to you about today
is how I see the changes
in the song economy
using my perspective of what
it was like to be a songwriter
when the music industry was simpler
and perhaps more predictable.
These days, everything
is tracked by our data.
And data from streaming tells us
that listeners much more often
click their favorite song
than their favorite artist
on a streaming service.
Sometimes they’re not even sure
who it is they’re listening to,
if it’s a playlist, for example.
So if we’re paying more attention
to the song, though,
what about the songwriter?
Songwriters have been
forced into the back seat,
and I would even say,
bungled into the trunk.
My concern is that songwriters are at risk
of becoming invisible victims
of the change that is taking place.
The music business is now a song economy.
Yet the creators of the songs that fuel it
get the smallest slice of the pie.
How did that happen?
I am not, for one moment, about to suggest
that we should turn back the clock,
which you may have suspected
from an old pop star.
But what’s happened in the last decade
has the potential to be
incredibly positive for songwriters.
Now, instead, I’m going to describe
the unintended consequences
of the streaming revolution,
how they are reshaping
the lives of songwriters.
And then, I will present some proposals
for how the impact of these unintended
consequences can be addressed.
It has never been a better time
to be writing and making music.
Anyone today has the potential
to find a global audience,
and if they so choose,
they can even try to do that on their own,
without a record label or music publisher.
A whole music software
industry is emerging,
serving the needs of a new generation
of artists and songwriters.
Streaming has enabled
this new music paradigm.
Once the pandemic stopped
live music in 2020,
many artists realized that they couldn’t
pay their bills on streaming alone.
Some have moved back in
with their parents,
and others are driving Ubers
to make ends meet.
Previously, streaming had more or less
been promotion for their tours,
and live appearances, by far providing
most of their revenue.
It’s funny, but it was exactly
the opposite for Abba in the 70s.
We hardly toured at all,
and when we did, we lost money.
But, I mean, the touring was supposed
to be promotion for the album
so that didn’t matter.
And I can’t recall that we ever complained
about the size of our royalties,
which the artists, during
the pandemic, have done bitterly,
when streaming and royalties suddenly
were the only source of income.
“If this is the impact
on artists,” I thought,
“welcome to the world of songwriters.”
Most professional songwriters don’t tour,
they don’t sell T-shirts
or other merchandise …
They rely on the song itself.
But even that seems to be changing,
because the song has evolved
in response to streaming,
and it’s increasingly common
for record labels
to get large teams of songwriters
to work together,
creating almost genetically modified hits.
Songs are written and structured in ways
that are optimized for the algorithms
that streaming services use
to decide what music you and I listen to.
Some research has been done
to suggest that these days,
a Billboard Top 10 hit has,
on average, five songwriters –
not one or two, but five –
and sometimes even 10.
And on top of this, they’re having
to write more songs and more quickly,
simply to keep up
with the insatiable demand
for new music that streaming creates.
After ABBA had won the Eurovision Song
Contest in 1974 with “Waterloo,”
royalties suddenly came pouring in,
and Benny and I could afford
to write songs full time,
nine-to-five.
That made such a huge difference.
We could afford to throw away
95 percent of what we wrote
and just keep the very, very best.
We learned how to recognize garbage,
and that’s essential
if you want to get good at your craft.
Royalties simply gave us time
and creative freedom.
Needless to say, you will have neither
if you’re in a hurry and someone
is breathing down your neck all the time.
The industrial approach to songwriting
is making it harder
for many songwriters to build
sustainable careers.
Those that are successful
are very successful,
but those in the layers below,
who used to be able to make
a living from songwriting,
are really suffering.
They are becoming parts of a system
that they serve more than it serves them.
And here are three key pain points.
Firstly, streaming services typically
pay out about four times more
for the recording
than they do the composition,
which means a streaming income
is even smaller for songwriters
than it is for artists.
It’s a legacy from the past,
when recordings and the packaging
of physical products were very expensive,
so a larger share
for the recording was justified.
But that has changed.
But the change has not yet been reflected
in the division of royalties.
Secondly,
even the way that streaming services
pay royalties is problematic.
A listener’s monthly 9.99 subscription
goes into a central pot,
which then gets divided by the total
number of streams that month.
That decides the value
of one stream, or listen.
This means that you if you have
streamed Arne Jansen’s jazz trio,
if you have done that 50 times
in the past month,
and the neighbor’s teenage daughter
has streamed Justin Bieber 5,000 times,
only a small fraction of your 9.99
will go to Arne Jansen.
Nothing wrong with Justin Bieber,
but how does that reward
your favorite artist?
And thirdly, bad metadata
is a big problem,
metadata being the relevant information
about a song and its recording.
Very often, recordings are injected
into a streaming service
without accurate data.
The name of the writer
is missing, for instance.
That means that the streaming service
doesn’t know where to send the royalties,
and the money is put
in a so-called “black box.”
Just sits there.
Recently,
20 streaming services
distributed 424 million dollars
to a US nonprofit organization,
which is supposed to try and find
the rightful recipients of all that money.
It will take years –
if they ever find them.
The combination of all
these issues and others
are creating a perfect storm
for songwriters.
Over the last decade, I’ve watched
this situation get progressively worse.
And during the past five years,
I’ve been engaged in projects
that aim to do something about it.
So how can I help?
Well, first of all,
I have you all here today listening to me,
and that’s, of course, what I want
to do – to raise awareness.
But I want to do more than just
raise awareness of the issues.
I also want to help the industry
identify solutions.
And here are a few suggestions,
out of many.
One: fan-centric royalties.
In order to ensure
that all songwriters get paid fairly,
I suggest that streaming services
allocate their royalty payments
based on the behavior
of individual listeners.
The individual description should be
divided by the number of songs
the individual listener
has played during a month.
That gives each song a value.
If the subscription is 9.99,
and the listener has played
10 Arne Jansen, again,
songs that month,
each song has the value
of .99, almost a dollar,
and that’s the amount
that will be paid to Arne Jansen.
Under the current system,
you can be sure that Arne would get
the value of .00-something dollars.
So this fan-centric approach to royalties
will bring much-needed fairness
and can build on the important starts
made by Deezer and SoundCloud.
But perhaps the simplest
and most effective way
to improve streaming royalties
would be for streaming services
to increase how much they charge.
Streaming pricing has been stuck at
ridiculous 9.99 for more than a decade.
Meanwhile, Netflix seems
to increase its pricing every week.
Research shows that
subscribers will pay more;
9.99 could quite easily become 11.99,
perhaps even 12.99.
And thirdly: the tedious but absolutely
necessary registration.
Wherever the 80,000 new songs per day
make their entry into the music industry,
there should be user-friendly
registration portals
to make sure that relevant information
about the work is captured early.
This would diminish the problem
with black boxes and conflicts.
In my view, it is an obligation
for collecting societies,
who collect creators' royalties at source,
to modernize and to adapt
their technology to the digital age.
I know it’s easy for me
to stand here in front of you
and reel off a list of suggestions
for the industry –
much easier than making
these changes happen.
But change does need to happen,
and soon.
Crucially, this change needs
to be brought about
by the music industry as a whole,
each part working together.
The song and the songwriter
fuel everything,
from the recording
through to live performances,
even a T-shirt would not sell
if the band hadn’t good songs.
I have created memories
to some of those songs,
from the Everly Brothers
and then the Beatles,
Elton John and many more,
songs that sometimes would surprise me
with a stab of ending,
quickly washed away by their sheer beauty
and the inspiration that they gave me.
I know what they mean
and what they meant to me.
I’ve often wondered:
What would we be without music?
Less human, I’m convinced of that.
If we couldn’t hear music,
then what else would we be deaf to?
But we never seem to think about that,
even though music is all around us
all of the time.
This is the moment for the entire
music industry to invest in supporting
what is, without a doubt,
its most valuable asset.
Far too many songwriters out there
are suffering in this creaking system.
Solutions like those that I have outlined
could help rebalance the song economy
so that more songwriters
and their listeners
will be able to lean back
and say, in all honesty,
exactly what I said in the song that I
was talking about in the beginning:
“Thank you for the music.”