Metrics are the Thief of Joy

Where you can stick your Spotify Wrapped

At the start of every month, I get an email from Spotify about the songs I have on there under the name Simon Indelicate. This is not my primary concern—these are just my weird solo projects that really lean into the "make-music-for-myself-and-if-anyone-else-likes-it-it's-a-bonus" cliché that musicians used to trot out in interviews back when artists still had shame.

Every month it arrives, and if I forget to delete it before I automatically click open, it makes me miserable. There will be some derisory little number there that feels like an insult, and it will be twinned with some hollow congratulation from a corporate citizen who has all the clinical indicators of psychopathy.

This is the internet, after all. The internet operates on large numbers, not little ones. Things on the internet get a million views, a billion subscribers, a trillion gigawatts of compute. The numbers on my monthly slap in the face from Spotify look like rounding errors for zero by comparison.

As such, I have never claimed the artist account for my actual main band—The Indelicates—because although I know that there are more zeroes at the end of the stats for my listenership there, I also know that the numbers are no match for those of the true behemoths of our culture like Taylor Swift or that one kid who opens toys. For every order of magnitude that the music I make with my wife improves on the listenership of the music I make alone, there are several orders of magnitude more before it would start to sound serious in internet terms.

And it would never be enough—I know that too. There is no number that could appear in my monthly Spotify decking that would make me happy. It will always be less than it could be, or less than some ungrateful band who wronged me a decade ago, or less than some band that I dislike, or that I do like, or more than some band that I dislike but not by enough… It’s just terrible all around for everybody.

Metrics are everywhere now. I suppose it’s a consequence of Web 2.0 making everybody be their own brand. It hasn’t just turned us into products—tawdry and dismaying as that is—worse, it has turned us into advertisers.

I’m pretty sure that advertising mostly doesn’t work at all—but in order to pretend that it does, advertising has developed absurdly villainous data collection techniques. Services will squat behind the scenes of websites, tracking the mouse movements of every visitor in order to identify "hotspots" where calls-to-action will most readily be clicked. The dismal pseudoscience of metrics is born of such malignancy of purpose. Metrics aren’t designed to tell you the truth or to give you actionable information—they are designed to dazzle you into continuing to pay advertisers in a marketplace so drowning in variables that it is simply impossible to know if the money you’ve spent was vital for your success or spaffed, to use the Borisian phrase, up a wall. They are lies in their essence.

What the fuck is a view? An impression? A follower? A listener? A "play"? We can be fairly confident that they can’t be tied down to a person somewhere actually valuing your work in any tangible way.

But they are lies that can be placed into graphs, and they are lies that float etherically in the hyperbolic millions and billions, so they flatter and taunt and demean by taunting and flattery.

By shoving metrics into the grimy, upturned faces of artists who have allowed themselves to be rebranded as "content creators," horrible fuckwads like Spotify’s gruesome Daniel Ek do exactly what advertising agencies have always done to credulous marketing departments—they are using graphs to distract their customers from the money.

Musicians are Spotify’s customers, after all. We are renting space on their platform and paying for it with a percentage of the value of our music. Metrics are placebos. Nutritionless manna for starving pilgrims.

You can look at a metric and feel like you’ve achieved something, and for a little while, that will do—it’s a simulation of how it feels to sell something to somebody. But in the end, none of it counts. The only thing that matters is an actual sale, an actual transfer of funds—the rest of it is an appetite suppressant when what you need is a meal. And more than that, the abundance of metrics manages to hugely devalue the real-world achievement of actually selling something you made to somebody. I think it’s because in the confusion of content platforms, we start to lose sight of what is real—the transfer of funds—and what is bullshit—metrics. We start to hold the small numbers of people who actually pay us in contempt because the real numbers are so unerotic when compared to the lascivious allure of the millions and billions and all their many zeroed sisters.

As a result, a measly hundred digital sales becomes wholly divorced from how it would feel to actually have that number of people in front of me purposefully asking me to, say, imagine a theme park at them.

That would be fantastic—a hundred people is LOADS. It’s a whole village. And here we are, human artists, sad because only a hundred people have paid us money to have us sing to them. We’ve lost our minds. We should be all delighted with our success.

And fuck it, why a hundred? Thirty people is loads. Ten is loads. There are things I’ve made which (over time, admittedly) have sold more than a thousand copies. One thousand is an unfathomably large number of people. How dare I be miserable about it?

And once we’ve extended this charity to paying listeners, we can turn back around to the casual, unpaying consumers of our work and think, hang on, metrics have pissed on these chips too—100 views on a YouTube video is something we would all consider a derisorily low number.

YouTube lets you literally look at a graph that shows how long the average person watched before turning your video off. What the fuck is the point of that? What on earth does that incentivize that anyone on earth could desire? You go along with the demands of the metric, and you hack your art to pieces trying to make it more like an advert so that people won’t turn it off, and in return, you get… what? A slightly less depressing graph? A higher view count? A tiny bit closer to the possibility of one day earning pocket money? This is the misery of metrics. In reality, a whole hundred people taking ten minutes to listen to your thoughts on some video game you dislike ought to satisfy you to the depths of your soul.

We really, really need to renormalize being happy about double digits, delighted with three, and profoundly satisfied with four.

Step one toward achieving this, as a musician, is to have absolutely nothing to do with Spotify Fucking Wrapped. Especially Spotify Wrapped For Artists—that shit right there is nothing but a big fat bow of lies tied around a bagful of soma to distract you from the fact that they aren’t paying you any money. I already know who my top fan is, because their name was on the receipt I gave them when they PAID ME.

I don’t even subscribe fully to the idea that Spotify is drastically underpaying the artists who constitute the entirety of their value proposition—they aren’t really. In a supply-and-demand situation, the value of a good that is as abundant as recorded music naturally tends toward zero—I’ve been banging on about this forever.

A stream is worth a tiny fraction of a penny, and the correct approach as a recording artist is to 1. not sign any record deal for less than the price of a house, 2. not treat streaming as a source of income at all, 3. make a real connection with your audience, and 4. create physical works of art by yourself that are genuinely worth lots of money and sell them to your core audience. This is the answer, and it isn’t complicated.

The pittance paid by Spotify is another layer of distraction that prevents artists from actually bringing their best to market. It’s an unfixable problem because even if we were capable of the kind of genuine mass pressure that would force Spotify to the negotiating table and get the most generous settlement imaginable from them, it would STILL be a pittance that isn’t worth having. Double it! Quadruple it! Get them to commit to 10x higher payments! That would still only move your payments per stream from 0.003 cents to 0.03—$30 really worth that much more to you than $3? For all that effort? For 1,000 whole streams? And remember, there is absolutely no chance of this happening because nothing about the basic economics or business model would allow for it.

The stupid, pointless value of your copyright here just feeds into the nonsense of metrics. Tiny numbers to accent the absurdity of the huge ones. Because of Spotify Wrapped for Artists and because of metrics, that ludicrous, insulting $3 payment becomes absurdly overinflated in its importance. You’ll lose sleep over the difference between $3 and $3.22. Every pointless cent becomes a hit of dopamine you could earn if you just compromised a bit more, fit yourself a bit more into the system that pays out these rewards—like spending all day feeding money into a penny-pushing machine to win tokens to swap for a cuddly toy that is on sale for a tenth of what you spent.

How do you go from $3 to $3.22? You release tracks often. You don’t make cohesive albums that function as single artistic statements. You tailor your music to a generic mood that will fit into a playlist for people who don’t care about anything but mood. All these things can boost your metrics and make your Spotify Unwrapped for Artists feel more orgasmic—but they are worth less than nothing.

In fact, all of those things will harm your ability to sell high-value works of physical art to your core audience. Release vinyl LPs too often, and you’ll hit diminishing returns. Failing to create cohesive albums will make it much harder to craft collectible, valuable artifacts to go along with them. Becoming generic will make it far, far harder to find a hardcore group of people who don’t just like having your music on in the background but actually like it best, out of all the music. These things are how you make scarcity; scarcity is the only thing of value that musicians control in this whole business.

The point is that metrics aren’t just depressing and the cause of anxiety; they don’t just force you to behave like an advertising exec rather than an artist; they don’t just devalue the real achievement in finding anybody to sing to at all; and they aren’t just a distraction from the financial rewards, which are the only metric that matters—metrics actively harm your ability to make art.

You should stop looking at them.

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I don’t really like writing to schedule, it turns out - even if that would be better for the metrics. So it’s been a while since the last thing on here. I think next I’m going to do a countdown of my top things of the year. That sort of thing all being horribly arbitrary at the best of times I can’t be bothered trying to pad out a list of albums so that Brat isn’t lonely. I’m trying to decide if I should exclude any things made by people I know irl - even though some such things would be on the list, I wouldn’t want to feel like I was including other things that wouldn’t out of loyalty. I’m leaning towards exclusion - which means that this song:

Won’t be on it - which is a shame, so I’m sharing it now.

Alongside

Microfictions by James Burt

and

Whispers of Desire

and

Writing a Better World

Also, listen to this song that my son released, he’s 9 and it rules:
https://christmas.indelicates.xyz

Happy happy xxx