On this week’s Cultureteca, Joanna Newsom becomes another preeminent artist to criticse Spotify; Beasts of No Nation, directed by Cary Fukunaga and starring Idris Elba and Abraham Attah, is released as Netflix’s first original feature; the 2015 Wildlife Photographer of the Year is announced; and the first Democratic presidential debate becomes the subject for Saturday Night Live.
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Joanna Newsom on the ‘Garbage System’ of Spotify
Joanna Newsom’s Divers is due out on Friday, featuring the songs ‘Sapokanikan’ and ‘Leaving The City’. The video for the album’s title track – like ‘Sapokanikan’, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and featuring the work of New York City artist Kim Keever, who also provides the album art – is currently showing at cinemas throughout the United States, soon to extend to the United Kingdom and across Europe.
Meanwhile ahead of the release of Divers, Newsom has been speaking to major news outlets, including The New York Times (‘With “Divers,” Joanna Newsom Is Clinging to Her Every Word’), The Guardian (‘Joanna Newsom: “It was a tonic to know I’m not insane”‘), the Chicago Tribune (‘Joanna Newsom’s world in clearer focus on “Divers”‘), and the Los Angeles Times (‘Joanna Newsom calls Spotify “a villainous cabal” and “a garbage system”‘).
As the title of the last piece makes plain, Newsom has emerged as the latest major artist to criticise Spotify’s business model and its manner of treating artists. She says:
‘Spotify is like a villainous cabal of major labels. The business is built from the ground up as a way to circumvent the idea of paying their artists. The major labels were not particularly happy with the fact that as the royalty money dwindled more and more, their portion of the percentage split agreed upon in their licensing agreement got smaller and smaller.
So someone came up with a great idea that if they start a streaming company, they can make those percentages even smaller. Infinitesimal, because they can make their money from advertising and subscription, and they don’t have to pay their artists anything for that. So it’s set up in a way that they can just rob their artists, and most of their artists have no way to fight it because they’re contractually obligated to stay with the label for x amount of time and you can’t really opt out. It’s a garbage system.
If it wasn’t such a cynical and musician-hating system, I would be all for it. If there was some way they could divide the money they make from advertising and the money they make from subscriptions and actually give it to artists, I would have a completely different opinion about it.
I mean, for all of its what seem to be many flaws that the Tidal system – I shouldn’t say “many flaws” because I haven’t researched Tidal enough. But I know it was kind of roundly made fun of because of the way in which it was unveiled to the world, but from what I gather they were trying to address the issues that make Spotify so very evil. I don’t know if they successfully did it. I should look into it. I understand why Spotify is great. I wish there was a way to provide the service they provide and have nobody lose, nobody be victimized by that.’
Spotify continues to assert that it pays 70% of all its revenue – from advertising as well as from subscriptions – to artists in the form of royalties. However the service continues to earn criticism for its lack of transparency, with the claim that it fails to keep track of payments, and works with major labels to circumvent artists’ contracts; for an intrusive privacy policy; and for paying less than competing music streaming services Deezer and TIDAL.
After writing an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal in July entitled ‘The Future of Music Is a Love Story’, last November Taylor Swift pulled her catalogue from Spotify, explaining in an interview with Yahoo:
‘I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists and creators of this music. And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.
[Spotify] didn’t feel right to me. I felt like I was saying to my fans, “If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it’s theirs now and they don’t have to pay for it.” I didn’t like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things.’
And in a February interview with Fast Company, Björk commented on her decision to initially keep Vulnicura off Spotify, saying:
‘We’re all making it up as it goes, to be honest. I would like to say there’s some master plan going on, but there isn’t. But a few months ago I emailed my manager and said, “Guess what? This streaming thing just does not feel right. I don’t know why, but it just seems insane.”
To work on something for two or three years and then just, Oh, here it is for free. It’s not about the money; it’s about respect, you know? Respect for the craft and the amount of work you put into it. But maybe Netflix is a good model. You go first to the cinema and after a while it will come on Netflix. Maybe that’s the way to go with streaming. It’s first physical and then maybe you can stream it later.’
Swift’s music remains absent from Spotify, while Björk’s Vulnicura was added to the service in early July. Beyoncé and Coldplay are among other artists who have withheld new music from Spotify for months following its release. And among Spotify’s fiercest critics are Thom Yorke, who has described the endeavour as ‘the last desperate fart of a dying corpse’, stating:
‘When we did the In Rainbows thing what was most exciting was the idea you could have a direct connection between you as a musician and your audience. You cut all of it out, it’s just that and that. And then all these fuckers get in a way, like Spotify suddenly trying to become the gatekeepers to the whole process
We don’t need you to do it. No artists needs you to do it. We can build the shit ourselves, so fuck off. But because they’re using old music, because they’re using the majors…the majors are all over it because they see a way of re-selling all their old stuff for free, make a fortune, and not die.’
And The Black Keys, whose drummer Patrick Carney has said:
‘My whole thing about music is: if somebody’s making money then the artist should be getting a fair cut of it. The owner of Spotify is worth something like 3 billion dollars…he’s richer than Paul McCartney and he’s 30 and he’s never written a song.’
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Beasts of No Nation and the Netflix Model for Film
On a related theme, as the film industry contends with its own issues of financing and distribution, Friday saw the release of Beasts of No Nation. Directed by Cary Fukunaga – the director of the acclaimed first season of True Detective – and starring Idris Elba and the debuting Abraham Attah, the film is based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Uzodinma Iweala. It depicts the breakout of civil war in an unspecified African country, and the experiences of a child soldier who falls under the fierce Commandant of a rebel battalion.
Beasts of No Nation was shot in the Eastern Region of Ghana. Fukunaga, who spent seven years working on the script, served also as the film’s co-producer and cinematographer. He initially considered using only local non-actors before determining to cast Idris Elba, and Elba’s performance has already seen him tipped for an Oscar come 2016. But Abraham Attah has received equal praise, and the film’s first major prize: at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival in early September, he took the Marcello Mastroianni Award, which recognises emerging actors and actresses.
Netflix bought the worldwide distribution rights for the film in March, for nearly $12 million, making it the company’s first original feature. Thus Beasts of No Nation was released on Friday simultaneously online via the streaming service and in selected cinemas across the United States.
Yet in the US, theatres are typically granted exclusive rights to a film for 90 days before it can appear as home entertainment. Considering the Netflix model for Beasts of No Nation a violation of this exclusive window, AMC Cinemas, Carmike Cinemas, Cinemark, and Regal Entertainment – the four largest theatre chains in the country – announced a boycott on the picture, effectively forcing it to become a limited release at smaller chains and independents.
Beasts of No Nation therefore earned just $50,699 in American cinemas over its opening weekend. In the United Kingdom, the picture was afforded a limited release a week ago with Curzon Cinemas, a small chain based mostly in London. Films have to show in theatres in Los Angeles for at least a week to be eligible for an Academy Award, and despite low takings at the box office, Netflix will be hoping to make their money over the long haul, courtesy of a growing reputation and increased subscriptions.
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Don Gutoski Wins 2015 Wildlife Photographer of the Year
At a ceremony on Tuesday at London’s Natural History Museum, amateur photographer Don Gutoski was named the 2015 Wildlife Photographer of the Year for ‘A Tale of Two Foxes’, which he shot in Canada’s Wapusk National Park. Describing the photo as ‘the best picture I’ve ever taken in my life’, he considered its success as owing to ‘the symmetry of the heads, the bodies and the tails – even the expression on the faces.’
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is international in scope, and owned by the Natural History Museum. It is now in its 51st year. An exhibition which starts at the Museum before going on tour saw 150,000 visitors last year in London, and more than a million worldwide.
The judging panel for 2015 consisted of chair Lewis Blackwell (UK), author and creative director; Sandra Bartocha (Germany), nature and fine art photographer; Stella Cha (USA), creative director of The Nature Conservancy; Paul Harcourt Davies (Italy), nature photographer and author; Sekiji Kazuko (Japan), curator at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Thomas D Mangelsen (USA), photographer; Kathy Moran (USA), senior editor for natural history with National Geographic; Dr Alexander Mustard (UK), underwater photographer; and Thierry Vezon (France), nature photographer. Together they viewed 42,000 entries submitted from nearly 100 countries.
Beyond the award for Photographer of the Year, the competition is divided into eighteen categories. These include ‘Birds’, ‘Under Water’, ‘Urban’, ‘From The Sky’, ‘Impressions’, ‘Young Wildlife Photographer’, and ‘Single-Image Photojournalist’.
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Larry David and Company Send-Up the Democratic Debate
This week’s Saturday Night Live featured a star-studded send-up of the recent Democratic presidential debate, which took place on Tuesday 13 October at the Wynn in Las Vegas, hosted by CNN and Facebook. With Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders variously declared the victor, this was the first of six scheduled Democratic debates, although in the face of severe criticism – back in 2008, twenty-six debates were held in total – the party continues to discuss extending this limited process.
On Saturday Night Live, Hillary Clinton was played by Kate McKinnon, Bernie Sanders by Larry David, Jim Webb by Alec Baldwin, Lincoln Chafee by Kyle Mooney, and Martin O’Malley by Taran Killam, with CNN moderator Anderson Cooper played by Jon Rudnitsky. Bernie Sanders approved of Larry David’s stellar impersonation, saying ‘I think we’ll use Larry at our next rally’.
