One of the biggest issues musicians face today is the pricing of their music in the digital age.
David Lowery, frontman for the rock band Cracker and a Richmond resident for 25 years, has become an outspoken voice for how musicians are paid — or not paid — by streaming services, such as Spotify, Pandora and now Apple Music.
“It’s odd, because I didn’t set out to be a spokesperson for this,” the 54-year-old musician said, taking a seat in his Westover Hills dining room.
With Cracker, Lowery released a string of hits in the ’90s, including “Low” and “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now).” He has continued to release albums over the years, including Cracker’s latest, “Berkeley to Bakersfield.”
But lately, he’s also becoming well-known for speaking out about artists’ rights. The New York Times profiled him for “demanding a musician’s fair shake in the Internet age” and quoted him last week in an article about the recent dust-up between Taylor Swift and Apple Music.
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His role as a spokesman began innocently enough in 2012, when Lowery responded to a blog written by an intern at National Public Radio. The intern, Emily White, wrote about how her generation didn’t believe in purchasing music. A music lover herself, she had amassed a music library of 11,000 songs but only purchased 15 CDs in her life.
Lowery responded to the post, calling the then-20-year-old to task. He asked her to consider the moral and monetary consequences of her actions. He compared file-sharing and streaming sites to looting. He wrote: “Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!”
He posted the response as “Letter to Emily” on his own blog, and it went viral. It received more than a half-million visits in two days.
Not all of the responses were positive.
Many pro-tech bloggers accused him of “old guy moaning” or pining after a past that didn’t exist anymore. Dave Allen of the legendary ’70s post-punk band Gang of Four criticized Lowery and claimed he didn’t “understand the Internet and how people use it.”
But that didn’t stop Lowery from writing about it. If anything, it piqued his interest.
“I thought, ‘Wow, why did that happen?’ So I just kept going,” Lowery said.
“I realized after awhile that I could bring something to the conversation that nobody else could,” Lowery said. “Record labels are tainted by their past. Music publishers are a little better, but again, they’re not the most popular organizations on Earth. There really wasn’t anybody speaking out for artists.”
Lowery runs a blog called The Trichordist, where he and a handful of anonymous writers discuss current news and trends affecting songwriters, performers and musicians. He is open about his earnings and wrote a post called “My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89, Less Than What I Make From a Single T-Shirt Sale!”
In his writing, he goes after the biggies: Google, YouTube, Apple, Pandora, Spotify, even NPR.
“He’s smart, super smart,” said John Morand, who co-founded with Lowery the Sound of Music, a Richmond recording studio. Although Lowery no longer produces music at the studio, Morand continues to work with Lowery on his albums, including Cracker’s latest.
“He’s an amazing musician,” Morand said. “And he’s always been interested in the business side of things. He’s somebody who brings credibility to this issue. It’s definitely one of the biggest issues that (musicians) face today.”
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Pricing in the digital realm is a hot-button issue. Last week, Swift and Apple Music got into a high-profile public tiff over pricing in the digital age.
Apple announced it was finally getting into the music streaming business with the release of Apple Music, which is slated to launch Tuesday. The service will cost $9.99 a month, or $14.99 for a family plan of up to six individuals, with a free three-month trial.
And while offering a paid-model seems to be a step in the right direction for streaming services, Lowery wrote on his blog that Apple should pay artists during the free trial period — a sentiment that many artists shared, most publicly Swift. She called Apple Music to task for not paying musicians during the three-month trial.
“I find it to be shocking, disappointing and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company,” she wrote on Tumblr. “Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing.”
Apple quickly changed its tune and said it will pay independent labels and artists during the three-month free trial.
The argument brought to the forefront how little musicians are making with streaming services.
Streaming music services, such as iHeartRadio and Pandora, pay low rates to rights holders. Because the services basically work like traditional radio, where users can’t pick an exact song or album to listen to, they are eligible for a statutory license, where they can pay a government-set rate. It works out to roughly 1/10 of a penny to rights holders.
“With Google and Pandora, you have these big firms that are taking advantage of these statutory licenses,” Lowery said. “There are laws that force us to let these services use our work at prices that are set by an administrative court in Washington, D.C. Those with more power can affect those processes in such a way that they pushed royalty rates to performers below market rates.
“I think we need to rethink this whole process. Is there a need for these statutory licenses? If there is, we need to insert some sort of real mechanism to get to a fair market value for the use of our songs and recordings.”
Spotify won’t disclose its rates, but they are estimated at a half-cent per stream.
“The first thing we need to do is dismantle this rate mechanism that we have in D.C. so that we can figure out what the price of a song should be,” said Lowery, who has testified before Congress and submitted written arguments to the Justice Department.
And incremental change is happening.
This year, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., have introduced the Fair Play Fair Pay Act of 2015 that would update the law to ensure that all artists are paid fairly on digital and AM/FM radio.
“The current system is antiquated and broken. It pits technologies against each other and allows certain services to get away with paying little or nothing to artists,” Nadler said in a statement when the bill was introduced.
“A whole host of incremental changes that they propose in that bill (are ones) that I advocated on The Trichordist,” Lowery said. “I don’t know what the end solution is, but there are certainly incremental changes we can make.”
In addition to Apple doing a quick turnaround on its payment stance, Pandora recently lost a legal battle with Broadcast Music Inc., of which Lowery is a member. The lawsuit will raise Pandora’s payments to BMI songwriters and composers from 1.75 to 2.5 percent of its revenue.
The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers applauded the decision, saying it was a step in the right direction for obtaining fair compensation.
“David’s been an unyielding force in the battle we’re fighting to make sure songwriters are paid fairly for their work,” said Paul Williams, president of ASCAP.
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Like many businesses in the online age, navigating the waters of a changing economy takes constant adaptation.
“I was one of those people who thought we’d just post our songs on YouTube, sell some CDs at a show. But if people can get it for free, they’re not going to pay (for it). I don’t know why we ever thought otherwise. I naively believed in those new models. When you’re in a band, you always giving stuff away for free,” Lowery said with a wry smile.
He thinks the “everything is free” model on the Internet is going to have to be scaled back. “We’ve tried it for 10 years, and it’s not working. Some of it is going to have to be behind a paywall.”
Lowery made the comparison between TV and the music business, saying television found a model that works and that music would be wise to follow.
“You could argue that television is in its second golden age with Netflix and streaming. Look at Spotify — everything is available on there for free. Netflix has shows behind a paywall. It’s not like there is a government mandate that Netflix has to have every single television show produced for free,” Lowery said. “The way the music business works, it’s like if ABC released a new show, it would go on every single network plus HBO, HGTV and the rest.”
In 2014, on-demand streaming was up 54 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. With streaming becoming the way people consume music, there must be a fair way to monetize it, advocates say.
On his blog in response to last week’s Apple Music news, Lowery wrote: “There is nothing more important to the future of the recorded music ecosystem than removing the unlimited ad-supported free access to on-demand music.”
He went on to say that Apple Music “is a step in the right direction. Even if you’re ambivalent on streaming, a subscription service pays eight times as much as free streaming.”
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Lowery, who was raised in California, met his first wife at a show at Richmond’s Landmark Theater in 1989.
“Richmond was a funky backwater with a really vital music scene,” Lowery said. GWAR was going strong. House of Freaks had just gotten their record deal. Dave Matthews Band was just forming and playing at places such as The Flood Zone.
Lowery decided to settle in Richmond after taking a break from touring Europe in 1990, and he has kept a home here ever since.
He helped start Sound of Music, where he worked on records for Sparklehorse and Counting Crows, as well as Cracker and his other band, Camper Van Beethoven. He continued to put out records for both bands, as well as a solo effort, and toured. He also worked as a consultant and was on the board of advisers for the company that eventually became Groupon.
Now he splits his time between Richmond and Athens, Ga., where he lives with his second wife and teaches music and economics at the University of Georgia. His two teenage sons live in Richmond.
This summer, Lowery is on tour to support Cracker’s latest album. In May, the band played its first Richmond set in years with a sold-out performance at The Broadberry.
The release of “Berkeley to Bakersfield” marks 25 years of making music and more than 20 albums from both bands and his solo efforts.
“I’m in a unique position,” Lowery said. “I made 95 percent of all the money I’ll ever make in the music business. I teach at the university. My wife is a concert promoter. We have all these other things that we do aside from playing music.
“I’m not dependent (on my music),” Lowery said. “What’s a streaming service going to do, boycott me? What’s that going to do? So I won’t get your $37 a year or whatever? We have a fan base. We’re established. I have interests outside of the music business. A lot of artists are terrified that they’ll be banned from the radio or that NPR’s ‘All Songs Considered’ will give them a bad review.”
Even though he’s on tour, Lowery has been continuing to speak out on issues affecting the music industry. Most recently on The Trichordist and elsewhere, Lowery has written about the Apple Music model and has even suggested that the federal government is partly to blame for low digital music royalties.
“David has a unique way of cutting through the clutter and telling it like it is on the ability of artists to get remunerated for their work in today’s climate,” said Craig Harmon, a lawyer at McGuireWoods who has performed with Lowery on several albums.
“There is a powerful and vocal contingent of folks out there who really seem to believe that protection of copyright in just about any form is a bad idea,” Harmon said. “What they really want is for artists … to give up and allow (their work) to be dispersed into the ether free of charge. David Lowery stands with a few others … yelling ‘stop.’ ”