“Streaming incentivises songs to be consumable over and over again”: St. Vincent says “excellent” music is missing out on streaming payouts because it doesn’t fit the mould

St. Vincent has voiced her opinion on the current state of streaming, saying the current model “incentivises songs to be consumable over and over again”, and music which holds emotional value but is not constantly replayed is unfairly missing out on royalties.

In a new interview with Billboard, the guitarist and songwriter – real name Annie Clark – also says AI is only as “interesting as its holder”.

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“In some ways, I’m more concerned about artists sounding like Al than I am [about] Al sounding like artists,” she says.

She says that greater than her concern for AI is her concern about the current state of music streaming and the way big companies make payouts to artists.

“If you are a big pop artist, streaming is fine,” she says. “But there is some music that reaches you very deeply but isn’t music that you put on every single day. I’m not going to listen to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme every day. It’s one of the most pivotal records of my life, but I’m not going to stream it over and over.”

She goes on: “Streaming incentivises songs to be consumable over and over again. Now, certainly there’s great music you want to consume like that – but there’s a lot of music that’s excellent and doesn’t fall into that category. And those artists, because of streaming, are wilting on the vine.”

It’s widely reported that Spotify, for example, pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream on average, though the company claims it does not pay on a ‘per play’ rate.

CEO Daniel Ek recently drew the ire of a whole community of musicians and creators when he compared music to professional football. “Football is played by millions of people,” he said, “but there’s a very small number that can live off playing full time.”

In other news, St. Vincent recently got producers talking when she spoke about the importance of committing ideas to tape, instead of allowing yourself to constantly go back on your decisions.

“I like committing the sounds, because instead of building a house on sand, you’re building a house on a firm foundation of an idea. It would make me too crazy, I think, with unexplored possibilities, to record everything dry and then put a bunch of plugins on them,” she said. “That would make me crazy – because you’ve made no decisions.”