In the days of Web 1.0, some musicians had their own web sites and whenever you ran through (on your 56K connection) you could drop off a few dollars in a kind of “internet tip jar,” reminds Eric Steuer writing for Wired. Those were interesting times. Napster was punching a raging hole in the music industry, and like Pacman devouring “Pac-dots” (those little white dots you had to eat to finish a stage), the music industry ghosts couldn’t keep up. All of a sudden, the entire music industry was knocked out of their distribution model. What was the point of “making” music, if you could not control the way to deliver it? The “pirating” age then began in earnest.
Regardless, peer-to-peer sharing became de facto, and there is now a group of people growing up who don’t even know you once had to go to a brick-and-mortar store to buy music. The hole was created by technology, though, and for a while people thought that tech could fix it. Apple jumped into the vacuum and created the iPod and then iTunes, which set off an arms race of people looking to capitalize on leveraging the music industry’s inability to control the movement of their product. Streaming soon followed, with the leaders in that area now being Spotify, Rapsody, Pandora, and the new jacks Tidal and Apple Music. At the same time in the 00s, social media platforms started popping up (who doesn’t remember the ubiquity of Myspace), and they began to sell people’s information. Of course they did, right? That’s the only thing they have.
Technology wins. And, the king-of-the-hill these days is Facebook. The giant network is reported as having upwards of 1.44 billion active users as of the first quarter 2015. They also have a stranglehold on who gets people to come to their website. Facebook is responsible for around 25% of all the traffic on the entire Internet. And they’ve now found a way of capitalizing off all that engagement through Facebook payments. Eric Steuer rightly dropped this nugget of analysis, “..The company could build a similar system to make it possible for people to tip journalists, video makers, photographers, and anyone else whose work is published to the social network. (Imagine: a positive, productive way to use Facebook!)” That means now, for maybe the first time in a convenient way, you can actually “tip” your favorite artist, brand, blog, etc. by sending them a payment through FB. Imagine it, all those people being able to slide someone or something a bit extra for doing a great job. KXNG Crooked agrees, although not for you wack rappers, “I tip 30% of my bill and higher so my tipping karma is up! I should be good if this becomes a new thing out here in these downloading and streaming streets. If it was up to me you wack rappers wouldn’t ever get a tip though. Never.”
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And, tipping is now a ubiquitous part of the Internet economy. Whether you use Seamless, Eat24, DoorDash or Postmates, tipping is a built-in part of your web-ordering experience. The same goes, as Eric points out, if your favorite coffee shop, corner store or cab company uses Square: “From 2013 to 2014, tipping on Square increased in frequency by 35 percent; tips to New York City cab drivers have more than doubled since taxi companies started making it easier to tip digitally.”
If we’re going to buy and consume music online, why not throw your favorite artist an extra buck for a song you love? Right now, with payout rates for music being as low as they are ($0.006 and $0.0084 on Spotify), a system in which 100% of tips go to the actual artist could be a necessary evolution of the platform. This could also have huge effects on the mixtape game, in which freemium might be finally changed free-with-benefits. So, the answer is of course we should be able to tip our musicians for the music they make and that we enjoy ad-nauseum and most times for free.
Andre Grant is an NYC native turned L.A. transplant that has contributed to a few different properties on the web and is now the Features Editor for HipHopDX. He’s also trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot. Follow him on Twitter @drejones.
