The next time you fire up your favorite streaming service, the music you hear might be made by a robot. Maybe you don’t care; you’re just looking for something to help you kill those 30 minutes on the treadmill. But you should care. The sound you might not hear is a canary in a coal mine that’s gone silent. If “human” musicians can be replaced by bots, so can you.
That’s why we’ve just released a new four-part miniseries on the future of music over at the Debugger podcast, which I host for Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Grammy-nominated folk singer Tift Merritt is our guide through this complicated cultural and economic story. The series is called “Sugar High.”
“I think that everyone is a little shell-shocked from streaming, and it’s very hard to get your mind around things getting worse than that,” Tift told me.
The vast majority of music fans don’t know how much streaming services have changed the economics of the music business, but Tift makes it crystal clear. The series follows Tift as she enters the studio to record her first new album in almost a decade — she’d taken time off to raise her daughter. She’s going to spend about $50,000 to make the record, a bargain by historic standards. But to earn out that advance, she’ll need about 10 million streams on a service like Spotify.
Ten million streams! Just to get back to …$0.
Tift Merritt is, as I explain in episode one, a huge success story. Don Henley covered one of her songs. She toured with Elvis Costello. She has several songs with millions of streams. Her record Tambourine earned a Grammy nomination for country album of the year. And yet, her ability to earn even a middle-class living as a working musician and mom is….well, it doesn’t really exist any longer.
There’s no arguing that tech has made more music available to more people, and it has made it easier for unknown artists to share their undiscovered talents with the world. That was always the promise of the Internet. But along the way, the path towards discovery has narrowed, as the spoils of the system have been siphoned off by tech companies.
“I remember in 2010 I put a record out and I got my first royalty statement and I realized what a huge impact streaming was on our economy. It was a fourth of what I usually got, and I realized that I could no longer live in New York City. I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “So…oh my God, shouldn’t I be a dental hygienist? This is a, an equation that is broken.”
But that problem pales in comparison to the storm clouds gathering around artificially-generated music. Artists and record labels alike are worried that “robots” — trained by ingesting decades of music recordings — will generate endless royalty-free ghost music. Those songs will fill listeners’ playlists, crowding out real art, leaving musicians like Tift without revenue streams.
That future feels overstated. Listeners will reject soulless music, won’t they? Like so much of today’s AI conversation, this debate is full of hyperbole and puffery, investment bubbles and doomsayers. One can imagine AI tools being part of human music creation, just as synthesizers and sampling have been used to make art. But one can also imagine large tech companies making the decisions that suit them, artists and art be damned.
One thing is certain: absent some other force, cost-cutting will drive the outcome. If AI ghost music is more profitable than real music, it will replace art and artists. Just as AI will replace lawyers, and journalists, and….every other kind of work that can be done cheaper by software. How do we prepare for this? How do we design outcomes that benefit society as a whole, rather than a small set of investors? It’s a conversation we need to have right now.
Of course, this conversation deserves far more nuance than I just gave it, so that’s why this miniseries is just the start of a dialogue. Later in the series, we’ll hear from Reid Wick of the Recording Academy of America (the Grammy people) and Jen Jacobson, Executive Director of the Artist Rights Alliance. We’ll be having more interviews at Debugger after we release this four-part miniseries. I hope you’ll be part of the conversation, too.
I do hope you’ll listen to this series by clicking play below, by clicking off to Spotify, or by finding it on your favorite podcast service. But if podcasts aren’t your thing, a transcript is below.
———————-RUSH TRANSCRIPT——————————
Bob: [00:00:00] When I went to buy tickets for your City Winery show, one of the notes on the webpage said, first show in eight years in New York. Is that right?
Tift Merritt: I would imagine that that’s very true.
Bob: First show in eight years, how does that feel?
Tift Merritt: I, you know, the funny thing about the City Winery is that when I lived in New York, which I lived there for nine or 10 years, I lived really near the Old City Winery, and I would actually go there in the mornings before they opened and play their piano. They would let me do that.
Bob: Wow.
Tift Merritt: Yeah. That was a really, ’cause I, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t have a, I didn’t have room in my apartment to have a grand piano. And so that is a really sweet and special memory from New York. But I’m really grateful actually [00:01:00] to this period of time where my life was the most important parts of my life were off stage. I’m really grateful to that eight years and what I learned about myself and what I learned about the world during that time. And I don’t wanna forget that as I start doing shows again.
Bob: But it seems like in some ways you might be able to enjoy this a little bit more than in the past.
Tift Merritt: I think so, and I think I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my sort of personal “why.” I think when you are an artist in the early years, there’s a kind of wonderful, desperate connection that you have with your work. Like, this is your purpose. This is your meaning. This is how you are understood. This is how you make sense of your feelings, and there’s a real urgency and dependency on it.
And, um, at this [00:02:00] point, that’s not why I’m, I mean, I, of course I make work for all of those reasons, but I have other places in my life that give me those things. And I really feel like singing and making music are just a way to put love in the world. And that’s really all I’m trying to do.
Bob: Okay. So this record, I can’t help but now think about…. As you’ve taken this sort of eight year sabbatical and you’ve woken up 200 years later when it comes in the technology. The timeline, right? So, um, TIFF, what, yeah. Has anything changed?
Bob: That dear listeners, is what we call a leading question, maybe a loaded question. Welcome back to Debugger, a podcast about technology’s impact on society. Brought to you by Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and this is a special debugger series about big tech’s impact on the music business. We’re calling it “Sugar High.” [00:03:00] You’ll understand why later. Our guide through this complicated cultural conversation is Tiff Merit, who you’ve just met.
She is a wildly successful musician, as you’ll hear. She holds a Grammy nomination for Best Country Album of the Year. One of her songs was covered by Don Henley, and yet here is what Tift is up against.
{Montage}
Tift Merritt: I remember in 2010 I put a record out and I got my first royalty statement and I realized what a huge impact streaming was on our com, our economy. Um, it was a fourth of what I usually got, and I realized [00:32:00 – original time code] that I could no longer live in New York City. I couldn’t afford it. So, you know, now I’m going in more, uh. I mean more like, oh my God, shouldn’t I be a dental hygienist? I, I, this is a, an equation that is broken,
Reid Wick: And the average consumer doesn’t realize that under one set of circumstances, an artist and the songwriters might be getting paid a certain amount and under another, it might be a completely different amount if they get paid at all,
Jen Jacobson: Certain genres of artists are gonna disappear. Well, we only have like independently wealthy people able to make music. What’s that gonna do to the flavor and type of music we hear?
Tift Merritt: I. I think that everyone is a little shell-shocked from streaming, and it’s very hard to get your [00:04:00] mind around things getting worse than that.
Jen Jacobson: Are people’s tastes gonna change? Are people’s standards gonna go down? Are people not gonna care as much about human art? If they don’t have access to it, they won’t even potentially. Know what they’re missing.
Bob: That’s a really profound thing to think about, that we, we might lose our taste buds, as it were for music.
Jen Jacobson: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Tift Merritt: Changes in technology are gatekeeping moments always, and the people that the gatekeepers find valuable are who benefit from it most and make the successful leap in the technology. Um, and generally that’s he white guys, the major label, 1% the mainstream, easily sellable.[00:05:00]
—Break—
Bob: Okay, so. I played baseball as a kid, kind of Seriously.
Tift Merritt: Yeah.
Bob: Played in high school, played in college, played a little after college. And one of the things you learn when you play [00:06:00] baseball really early is that the numbers are really against you.
Tift Merritt: Yeah.
Bob: So 1% of the kids who play make varsity on the high school team, oh, 1% of those kids make college teams.
Oh, 1% of those kids get drafted. 1% or less of those kids actually end up making it in the major leagues. So the odds are. Really against you when you play baseball. But Tiff Merit, I think the odds were even more against you. If you think about all the kids who ever sat down at a piano, picked up a guitar, sang thought about it’d be cool to sing in front of thousands of people, and then the tiniest percentage of people make it, and you have made.
Tift Merritt: I, I mean, I, I did make it and I’m proud of that.
Bob: I wanna explain to people that, how you’ve made it, who, who might not be familiar with your work. So, first of all, I just looked, you have a song with 18 million streams on Spotify.
Tift Merritt: Oh, really? Do I really?
Bob: You do. You have several songs with over a million streams and,
Tift Merritt: okay.
Bob: You have a Grammy nomination, not just [00:07:00] any Yes. Grammy nomination. You were nominated for Best Country Album. You’ve toured with Elvis Costello.
Tift Merritt: I know I did.
Bob: You have made it in a way that people only dream of.
Tift Merritt: Yeah.
Bob: If you are a person who plays Major League Baseball for 10 years, your life. Is set up. You have four homes, you make money just signing baseballs once in a while. Is your life as comfortable as that?
Tift Merritt: No. No. Um, my, my life is very precarious and I’m okay with that. I’m not here to fight about $20,000 here or there. Um. Uh, Don Don Henley covered a song of mine when I was pregnant with my daughter, and people told me that 20 years earlier I would’ve been able to buy multiple houses off of that money.
{Music}
.[00:08:00] But that’s not what the music economy is right now, and that’s okay. Right? I mean, and we’ve always known that it was hard to be a musician. It was hard to be an artist. I think the story is that it’s untenable and we’re killing some culture in the way that it’s untenable and it’s coming for other mediums.
Bob: Okay? So not only do you not have a nice middle class life as a working musician, as, as a 1% of a 1%, as of a one percenter, but, but it’s, it’s almost impossible.
{Music break}
So you were about to go record an album. Yeah. So I wanna get into the nitty gritty for people because I think it’ll be interesting.
Let’s do,
Bob: I’ve known a lot of [00:09:00] musicians in my life, and I think very few of them could have sent me this incredibly detailed spreadsheet that you did.
Yeah.
Bob: Of what is going to cost you Yeah. For this recording studio. So let’s talk big numbers. First of all, you’re about to try to record some new songs. How much is that going to cost you?
Tift Merritt: It’s gonna cost me $50,000.
Bob: Okay. So just, we have to go over every line. But $50,000 sounds like a lot. How does it add up to $50,000?
Tift Merritt: I mean, it adds up to $50,000 because the producer gets paid. The studio is a thousand dollars a day. There’s an engineer that you have to pay in the studio, then you have to have four to five musicians show up, and they cost $500 a day, which they are worth more than that. Um, if there’s anybody that you wanna fly in or put up at a hotel, uh, and feed, I mean, you know, it’s just. It is 12 minutes before [00:10:00] $50,000 is out the door.
Bob: So $50,000 adds up pretty quickly now…
Tift Merritt: And, and I mean, you know, honestly, 20 years ago we, we spent more on recording. Records than $50,000. Nobody would, would make a record for $50,000. You know, $70,000 was a cheap record, but, um,
Bob: But who paid that $70,000 two decades ago?
Tift Merritt: The, the record companies.
Bob: And who’s paying it today?
Tift Merritt: The record companies.
Okay.
Bob: Yeah.
Tift Merritt: It’s, it’s still the same. I mean, I, you know, and it’s kind of a bad loan. I, you know, if I had $50,000 that I could pay for that record myself, I, that would be great. But what, what is the incentive, right? Because I have to give it away for free to Spotify. I mean, we kind of have to say thank you to the record labels at this point for taking [00:11:00] that risk on us. I, I. Made Traveling Alone with my own money. I was so proud to do that, but it was just like hemorrhaging $40,000 and then you put it on Spotify for free.
{music}
What’s the incentive?
Bob: So let’s talk about that. So, okay, so it costs $40,000 of your own money to make Traveling Alone, but as everyone says. Nowadays is the easiest time ever to get exposure because Spotify or digital tools can make your music reach people immediately. You don’t go press records or whatnot
Tift Merritt:. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Let’s walk that back. Can you go to the dentist with exposure? Can you go to the grocery store with exposure?
[00:12:00]
Bob: Okay, so you spent $40,000 on this record.
Tift Merritt: Yeah.
Bob: How, how many streams are required for you to get that investment back?
Tift Merritt: I mean, I, well, I know I’m about to spend 50,000 on this one because I made that one 10 years ago. So with inflation, um, 10 million streams.
Bob: It’s gonna take 10 million streams
Tift Merritt: Ten million streams for me to break even. And. Bob, I, you know, I’m not a whiner, I’m kind of the best case scenario. I’ve been a musician and a recording artist for 25 years. I, I have never been someone who sold Taylor Swift numbers, but I’m, I’m respected in my industry. I am the, the success model, and this is what it takes.
Bob: And, and again, when I start rattling off [00:13:00] those numbers at the beginning of our conversation, every artist I know would die to have.
Multiple songs with a million more streams on them. And yet that’s you, you, you’re not even breaking even doing that, right?
Tift Merritt: No, not at all. I mean, I, I got something from Spotify for artists in September and I put out a reissue of an old record and some demos, and they said, oh my gosh, you’re a new single has gotten 150,000 streams.
That’s $35.
Bob: I, I really think most people, most music fans, most Americans don’t understand how little artists are paid for each play on Spotify.
Tift Merritt: I, I and, and I, you know, I understand the idea that Spotify is a library. It is a collective, but it isn’t caring for the people that are really the main stakeholders in what [00:14:00] they’re doing. I mean, they are making money off of advertising. They’re making money off of backdoor deals with major labels, and they’re paying artists so little. Uh, you know, I, I, I think the easiest thing I can say is that, and I sound like a dinosaur when I say this, but when I sold a product in 1999 or 2005, I got a dollar no matter how in debt I was to my record label, and I was a commercial failure year as I was told by all the major labels, but I was selling 40, 50, 60, 70,000 records. That was enough of a basis for me to go on tour, for me to take risks, for me to have a life as a family member. And [00:15:00] now I, you know, I’m getting 0.003 cents a stream. If you stream it for 30 seconds or more,
{music}
Tift Merritt: You know, you can look at the executive saying, oh, a million streams isn’t all that much. Have they ever given a concert to a million people, have they ever even tuned a guitar? I mean, this is tech inserting itself into a business that it really doesn’t understand the business model and deflating the price to the extent that it is not tenable.
Bob: I’ve heard you give that a metaphor before, and I would like for you to do it again now. You ask people to just picture a concert hall with a million people in it, that that’s what you’ve done, right?
Tift Merritt: Yeah. I’ve never played for a million people, but I mean, if I played for [00:16:00] 150,000 people, how, how huge is that room?
Right? And I’ve heard people say to me, well that’s just like the radio broadcasting your song to all these people. And I say, oh no, it isn’t. Because they had a product that they could go buy. And at this point, I am simply investing in negative numbers to make my music
Bob: Okay, so can’t you just quit Spotify then?
Tift Merritt: That’s an interesting point and the great point. Um, musicians do not have, we lost the ability to unionize in the eighties in an antitrust exemption. So we do not have the ability to, um,
Bob: to organize Musicians are independent contractors largely. Yes, exactly. So they, they can’t bargain the way Starbucks baristas can.
Tift Merritt: Exactly. Exactly. We do not have. [00:17:00] The Writers Guild, we do not have the Hollywood SAG AFTRA. We are really out of luck. Yes.
Bob:: Okay. But the other thing I hear is that people make money on tours.
Tift Merritt: Oh, really? Oh, really When was the last time you took five people out to dinner and put them up in hotel rooms and traveled with them for. A whole week, I mean you, what is the best guarantee that a small band is getting a thousand dollars a night? What does it cost to travel with five people on salary for a week? It costs between 10 and $20,000 a week.
Bob: And again, you sent me an amazing spreadsheet with various different iterations of what it costs based on flying and driving and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, yeah. So can you just break out again [00:18:00] why it costs, I’m sorry, you said it’s about 20 grand for you to tour for a week, right? Yeah. Just what are some of the expenses associated with that?
Tift Merritt: Okay, so some of the associate, the expenses associated with that are the musicians themselves, and they deserve to be paid. And the first thing that gets cut in any budget in the music industry is the salary of the musicians. So I just wanna say that there’s lots of music. Being made, and there’s lots of money being made in the music industry, but it’s not going to musicians. And that makes me really angry.
Um, the second thing is like, how much is it gonna cost you to put a. Grown person in a hotel room every night. How many people are we gonna put in a hotel room? Are we gonna put four people in a hotel room? No, these are, these are. Really [00:19:00] grown people who have studied their craft.
So we’re gonna need five hotel rooms a night, and that’s a thousand dollars we’re gonna need to fly if we’re going to a festival, we’re gonna need to rent gear. If we’re going to a festival, we’re gonna pay the manager 20%, we’re gonna pay the agent 10%, we’re gonna pay the accountant 5%. So if we’re just working on the basis of a thousand dollars a night, we’ve got only, I don’t know, 600 bucks to work with, and how are we gonna feed everyone?
Bob: And there’s all sorts of other nitty gritty expenses like this 11% payroll taxes, for example.
Tift Merritt: Yes, exactly. Oh, the payroll taxes. I don’t even know how to deal with that. Do you have a tax attorney that I could talk to?
Bob: I was gonna ask you the same question. Um, yeah, and so I, I think one of the other things that’s hard for people to understand is. Yeah, [00:20:00] there’s sort of small, medium, and large venues, right? And so U2 gets a lot of money when there’s 70,000 people in a room.
Um, it’s not worth you playing at a bar that has 50 seats and the medium sized venues that, that might be able to pay 20 grand for a show or something. Those are kind of disappearing, aren’t they?
Tift Merritt: Well, I mean, you say $20,000. I, I mean, that’s, I don’t get that kind of money to these shows. I, I, I, I actually have started referring to touring as the touring industrial complex because I think it has been consolidated, like a lot of our lives have been consolidated and generally, you’re going to a cement block after … success is you’re going to a cement block after cement block. You’re getting airport food at airport food prices, and it’s not fun for the audience, right? You’re not having any [00:21:00] kind of local experience, so I’m certainly not going on tour playing for 20,000 people. I, I, I can’t even speak to that. I’m going on tour playing for like a hundred or 200 or 500 people, and that’s, you know, that’s not a sustainable number, but that’s also because the music business…like so much else in our world is really designed for the 1% and the 1% could fix it.
{music}
Bob: I think a lot of people think, well, artists sort of choose this life. They, it’s, oh, they’re supposed to suffer, aren’t they?
Tift Merritt: Ah, isn’t that nice? I, you know, I get that. I, I get that art, the artistic life is a hard thing. Um, I tell my daughter all the time, [00:22:00] do not do this. Do not. However, I think, you know, I’m actually an interesting person to talk to about this because I wanted to be a career artist.
I mean, my, my models were people like Townes Van Zandt and Emmylou Harris. They weren’t huge commercial successes. They were career artists, and I think that as a path I am an endangered species, and that’s why I’m speaking out about it because I, I actually think it’s not sustainable anymore and. I also have a lot of people that I care about, that I work with who are musicians who have spent their whole life honing this craft, who are so amazing at what they do.
And they couldn’t have done that [00:23:00] if they just did it on Monday night. Right. They mm-hmm. Couldn’t have done it if they were a hobbyist.
Bob: There is a difference between a, a real professional musician and
Tift Merritt: And a blues lawyer
Bob: Yes, of course, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I think this part is really, really important because first of all, it takes, you know, the 10,000 hours, it takes a long time to get good at something. And if we leave music to 22 year olds who are okay with eight people living in a hotel, well, how is a mom ever going to write music? And don’t we want moms to write music?
Tift Merritt: I mean, I, I think this is a huge conversation because I think the music industry is absolutely before streaming an AI not built for single moms. And I’m a single mom and, um, my daughter’s dad is a career musician who’s played with everybody. And I said, oh, I’m gonna go on tour next [00:24:00] year. And he goes. You can’t do that. And I said, why not? I, I mean, it is not built for women. Um, so that’s a whole ‘nother conversation. And I think we want women like Carol King and Aretha Franklin writing and Joni Mitchell writing what they have to say about the world, but I think when technology updates, and forgive me for getting on my platform here, when distribution changes, it’s usually a group of five dudes who decide what music is worth, what music is important, and what music is, and they usually don’t think about women. So I, I think about that all the time.
Bob: You just gave me a shiver with the thought that if Joni Mitchell were born 25 years later, she, she might not [00:25:00] exist.
Tift Merritt: Yeah, I, I think that’s true. So I haven’t made a record in 10 years because I am a mother and. I didn’t wanna drag my daughter around on tour with me to, you know, on behalf of my own dreams. My daughter is awesome and she loves going on tour, but it’s a totally different scenario for women.
Bob: And if we don’t have moms writing songs, this is a large part of the human experience that we’re just not going to be singing about. Right?
Tift Merritt: I, I appreciate that you said that so much. I think that’s true, and I think it’s a really important part of the human experience. It’s my favorite part of the human experience.[00:26:00]
{Music}
Bob: Let’s talk about the Spotify of it all.
Tift Merritt: Um, I mean, I think that the music industry has been consolidated for a long, long time, and I. Am slightly disappointed in my peers for not talking out about it more. Um, and if that’s my place, then that’s my place. But I think from national playlists that eclipsed regionalism on radio, uh, to Spotify, sneaking in AI generated music that they used, your data and my data to [00:27:00] make something perfectly situated and put it right where it belongs in the marketing.
I, you know, I think those are all symptomatic of, of, dare I say, capitalism. Um, and I think there is a. Uh, an illusion of democracy in all of that. I’m not sure what the solution is. I think we definitely need labeling on AI generated material, be it music, political content, content, whatever you, we need to know that this is…I think of it as misinformation myself. Um,
Bob: You know, let’s just define it for people who might not be familiar with it or, or, or how prevalent it is. What, what is AI generated music?
Tift Merritt: A hundred percent AI generated music is ghost music that has been created to take up space on playlist, where you don’t have to pay royalties.
Bob: So it’s just computer generated music and there’s no artist behind it.
Tift Merritt: And just to be clear, we do have the technology to filter that out. Um. We aren’t using that technology to filter that out. We are not showing up for artists that way. So, um, I don’t know. I, I, you know, my friend Professor Hoffman, who works in Brazil a lot of the time, talks about this in terms of cultural appropriation and I think those are the right [00:29:00] words, right? I think. People’s intellectual property is being consumed to replace it. And that is not fair use. And it, it’s, it’s not done with transparency or compensation. And I think that’s, that’s super disingenuous.
Bob: Again, if today it takes 10 million streams, God help us to, to earn back the, the what you spend making an album when AI generated music is half of Spotify.It’ll take you 20 million streams or 40 million streams, so you won’t even get those, right.
Tift Merritt: It will be harder and harder to find me. And you know this as a podcaster and a writer. I mean, you know, the, the. Uh, the world of AI has consumed all of the copyrighted material in the world. And, um, [00:30:00] you know, next time we talk, we can talk about the, the intellectual property of podcasts .
Bob: There are definitely AI generated podcast hosts.
Tift Merritt: Oh,
Bob: coming down the train tunnel at me. Oh gosh.
Tift Merritt: I’m well aware of this.
Bob: So
Tift Merritt: I do not like that.
Bob: Yeah, fortunately people can’t make mistakes quite as well as I do, and I think that’s. That’s what’s my, I love your mistakes, my bread and butter in the future.
Tift Merritt: I love your mistakes and I hope you love mine.
{music}
Bob: Okay, so you are going to the studio for a week. How many songs you’re hoping to rec record.
Tift Merritt: [00:31:00] 13, uh, maybe 11 that week, and then I’ll go, we’ll do 11 in six days, and then I’ll go out to LA and we’ll do two that are just vocals only and we’ll do two out there. So.
Bob: That makes my skin crawl to think you’re gonna have to try to do 11. I mean, under what kind of a pressure schedule. Oh my God.
Tift Merritt: Oh, well, I mean, it, it is, it’s a, you know, I have been trying not to think about it quite frankly, because
Bob: I’m here to help. Yeah.
Tift Merritt: I can’t get sick, right? Yeah.
Bob: Yeah.
Tift Merritt: I have to be in good shape and, um. I know the crew that we’re going in with, and they’re amazing musicians, so I, I do think that we, we have good odds. I, my last record I. Recorded in four days, six months pregnant, so,
Bob: Wow.
Tift Merritt: Yeah. So six days feels, you know, luxurious.
Bob: As, as you’re doing this, as [00:32:00] you’re costing it out, as, as we’re, as with, you know, this, the streaming thing in the back of your mind, does, does it change how you feel about going into the studio at all?
Tift Merritt: Oh, of course. I mean. I remember in 2010 I put a record out and I got my first royalty statement and I realized what a huge impact streaming was on our com, our economy. Um, it was a fourth of what I usually got, and I realized that I could no longer live in New York City. I couldn’t afford it. So, you know, now I’m going in more, uh. I mean more like, oh my God, shouldn’t I be a dental hygienist? I, I, this is a, an equation that is broken, and I say that as someone who has been practicing the guitar [00:33:00] and has calluses at that are 25 years old. Old, and I, I just, I don’t know how. Um, how musicians are doing it. I, I don’t understand how musicians are doing it. I have three jobs, as you know. I, I am
Bob: What are your three jobs?
Tift Merritt: Uh, I am a musician and a writer. Um, I’m. Developing a hotel that will open next summer, and I’m a researcher at Duke University, so I, I have three jobs and that’s how I make my life work because there’s no way to make it work off of…
Bob: I, I, yeah. I’m just sitting here thinking this is a math problem without a solution.
Tift Merritt: Yeah. No, I, I mean, and I’m, I’m sad and sorry that more musicians aren’t talking about it because I feel like there’s this [00:34:00] culture of like, oh, if you’re really a star, you are just supposed to worry about the songs and you’re not supposed to worry about how the equation works. But that historically has been a power maneuver for managers and labels. I don’t really understand why our industry as a whole isn’t talking about this because, and maybe it’s because they’re just so busy trying to make it work that they can’t ask. The systemic questions, um, but I don’t understand why it’s not an industry-wide conversation.
Yeah.
Tift Merritt: I think it’s really important to point out that the whole streaming economy is built for the 1% of musicians, right? Mm-hmm. I’m a major label artist. I, I. Do not make Taylor Swift kind of money. Who is Taylor Swift’s favorite artist? Probably somebody who isn’t a one [00:35:00] percenter. We need a, we need an economy that works for all of the artists, and the one percenters could fix it if they wanted to, but they’re not.
And I, I, I find that a real problem. I, I find that a real problem systemically with our society. So, um. You know, the one percenters are just fine and the rest of us are working with math equations that don’t work.
Bob: So this happened in the news business and, and it’s, it’s a hard thing for me to explain, but I’m sure that you’ll understand. When the internet happened, there was this idea that the doorway to news stories was now wide open and people could get exposed to way more things right? But the reality was the opposite. The, the, the doorways through which people find news are really tiny now, and the average person reads far fewer individual stories than they ever have when they were, it’s rifling through a newspaper. And it’s the same with [00:36:00] music.
Tift Merritt: It’s the illusion of democracy. It’s totally the illusion of democracy, and the more and more that AI and misinformation, which I call AI music are filling our news feeds and our Spotify, the harder and harder it is. Going to be to get to authenticity, be it in journalism or in music.
{music}
Bob: This is where I, I want to end our conversation for now with this idea of the gig economy and why this matters, not just to struggling musicians, but it matters to everybody. Yes. The term gig economy is now used so much, I think we forget that musically musicians were the original gig economy, right?
Tift Merritt: Yeah.
Bob: And so what is happening to musicians is going to happen to everyone eventually. Do you think?
Tift Merritt: I, I do think that, and I wouldn’t waste [00:37:00] your time talking to you about, you know, $20,000 here or there that I deserve for my work, but I would sit here and talk to you about how. Tech has come into an industry that it has no knowledge or business in, and no talking to this actual stakeholders who do the work and devalued the price of the laborers.
And I think that is something that we all need to be thinking about. How are we going to stand up for humans? Because in this way the MP3 has made musicians a canary, a coal mine, and you know, if we’re totally fine taking on saccharin artificial music without human connection, what is, what is, [00:38:00] what is the price of that? Like what is the real human price of that
Bob: Next on Debugger as Tift toils away in the studio, working on that upcoming album, which will be called. Sugar. We talk to Reid Wick about the future of music and we’ll begin by addressing a burning question. Will a computer soon win a Grammy award?
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