Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Oh, wow, that’s a good question. With Spotify, I think the consumer captures all the value. I love it as a platform. It knows me. It knows what I like, what kind of music I like. It feeds me. It’s very user-friendly, but the artist doesn’t capture any value. I play in a band. We’re only three or four years old, but the checks that we get for something like 5 million listens over time, I put myself in other bands’ shoes, that that is their living. It’s hard to reconcile the value creation relative to the value capture. What it’s causing the industry to do and artists to do is figure out new methods of monetizing their talent and their value. They’ve got to tour. They’ve got to sell merch. They’ve got to associate themselves with brands. It’s just a totally different model disrupted by these DSPs, for sure. As a boomer, I have the sense that from the years, say 1964 to 1973, music was very, very original. It changed every year. Often, you can tell what individual year a piece of music came from when you hear it. Now, I often hear pieces, and I don’t know if it came out yesterday or 20 years ago. Do you disagree with that impression? I don’t disagree with it. I think that makes sense. I will say that given the technology that’s available, the perfect processing of a song that you listen to now and how every artist has that technology at their fingertips and they can record it at home now almost on a phone with high quality, I think that’s very different than listening to an old 1970s Led Zeppelin album, where you feel that you can tell that was in the studio and the grit of the song and the album. I think that’s different. I just think there’s been so much innovation in the space that there’s a good and a bad to it. I think anyone can sound polished and perfect with the technology that we have now, but sometimes you like that old grit of a song from Pink Floyd, or Led Zeppelin, or Grateful Dead, or whatever the band is.…

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