Written evidence submitted by Simon Lasky

Simon Lasky testimony to the DCMS Committee

Streaming is a great idea but, in it’s current form, the business model does not work for minority genres such as jazz. It is destroying our ability to create the music which contributes so much to the U.K’s cultural and economic life. By means of my personal real life example, I will illustrate why.

I am well established London based jazz pianist, composer an recording artist. And I am band leader of the 6-piece jazz ensemble The Simon Lasky Group. I have released two albums of original jazz compositions on independent British jazz record label, ‘33Jazz’ Records.

My composition ‘Close To Ecstasy’ (from my second album ‘About the Moment’) won the 2018 Ivors Composer Award in the Jazz Composition for Small Ensemble category. My music has received outstanding critical reviews in the U.K, Europe and America, and has been broadcast on BBC radio, JazzFM, as well as on NPR in The States. The Simon Lasky Group has sold out jazz club performances at some of London’s leading jazz clubs and has performed all over the UK to great acclaim. BUT, the maths of streaming in its current form, doesn’t add up for me and similar jazz artists:

My 2018 album ‘About the Moment’ took two years to create. The compositions are all my own and took 6 months to write. The album cost £7,500 to record. The recording process involved hiring some of the UK’s leading specialist jazz instrumentalists, rehearsing the music for weeks, hiring a rehearsal space, recording studio and recording engineer, mixing and mastering the album + additional expenses like CD duplication and album promotion. If someone wants to listen to a track from ‘About The Moment’, a streaming service (e.g Spotify or Apple Music) will pay me approximately £0.004 for that. The point is that a fan – a ‘customer’ - is not going to pay £9 for a download of my album or around £12 for a CD of my album if they can get it for free (Spotify offer a free/ad based subscription to their service). I would need around 1.7million streams just to break even on releasing my album.

Jazz is a niche music, so it’s not possible for me to achieve the streaming numbers of someone like Ed Sheeran, for example. So, even with my basic grasp of maths, it’s evident that the way streaming services currently compensate composers/creators means that it’s impossible that I won’t make a major personal financial loss from releasing a successful album of my music. Apart from literally a handful of people (e.g Ed Sheeran) the economics of streaming doesn’t work for the people who create the streaming companies product, i.e the music!

I can’t think of any other industry where the balance between what I’ve invested in making the product (my music/my album = c.£7,500) gives a such a low return from that investment (Please see my latest PRS royalty statement which I have emailed to [email protected]: the contrast between my royalties from the BBC with those from Apple Music, for example, is staggering!). This is how the business model for minority musics, like jazz, used to work:

Typically, following the release of a successful jazz album, a jazz career would be sustained by touring the album, radio play of the album, and selling physical or digital copies of the album. Following a successful album release, the profits from that album release would then be used to fund the next recording project and so on – that’s how a career used to progress.

Streaming – in its current form – is making my working life unviable and unsustainable. No business can survive in a climate where the balance between the cost of creating a product is so high in comparison to the income recouped from that product. The 2020 pandemic has ended another source of our income (performing) and has further highlighted how the current climate is existential for musicians.

Many thanks for taking the time to read this. On behalf of those of us in the ‘middle class’ (not the superstars and not the amateur sector) of the music business we look forward to a legislative response to swing the balance back into the creators favour.

Simon Lasky