David Lowery’s Spotify Lawsuit
I ain’t no fortunate one.
A week ago, musician and activist David Lowery filed a $150 million class action lawsuit against Spotify for knowingly, willingly, and unlawfully reproducing and distributing copyrighted recordings without obtaining the proper licenses.
In other words, this is huge. And more importantly, it changes the conversation.
David Lowery isn’t some mega-wealthy superstar like Taylor Swift complaining. This is a smaller artist seeing his livelihood threatened by a big, bad company.
While he has had success with Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, David Lowery has never been a star. He’s a touring musician, and that’s how he makes his living.
He doesn’t have his own fashion label or his own brand of headphones. He hasn’t raked in millions upon millions of dollars in endorsement deals like 50 Cent or Taylor Swift. He’s never owned a sports team like KISS or Jay Z. You’ll never see him in a commercial—and if you did, you would never know who he is.
Rather than having the likes of Jay Z, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Adele, Madonna, or Kanye West acting like Norma Rae (see my previous post, “The Beatles and Streaming”), here’s a guy who doesn’t live a lavish life we see and hear about with Robin Leach’s voice describing it.
He’s not upset about having to downgrade from a Learjet 75 to a Learjet 70. He’s upset about not being able to pay his bills.
Boasting over seventy five million active monthly users—twenty million of those users pay monthly subscriptions, Spotify has become a heavy hitter in the music industry. They may be newcomers, but those numbers are huge—they have clout.
Though they dispute this number, they can also afford to pay artists more than an estimated $0.0011 per stream.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m no class warrior. But let’s be honest here: who would you rather be the face of the fight, Madonna, or David Lowery?
That was the biggest issue with Tidal. They shouldn’t have had a who’s who of rich and successful musicians up on that stage during their nightmare of an announcement. They should have had smaller artists discussing their issues with other streaming services and payment plans. We don’t relate to Kanye or Madonna, and any complaints they may have, whether justified or not, comes off as disconnect. (Often times, it is.) When a smaller artist does it, though, it’s a fight for their livelihood—something the public can relate to, and something we can get behind.
When everything is said and done, music is a business. The art always comes second. Always has been, always will be. And just like any other business, it’s all about the bottom line. No amount of romanticism about the power and majesty of music will change that. And just like every other industry, people are going to get dicked around… especially when it comes to the almighty dollar.
But when the public face of the victims are multimillionaires, good luck trying to get people to care.
