The award-winning musician reveals what he has learned a year after taking the plunge.
Just under a year ago, Tiki Taane quit Spotify. He left behind tens of thousands of listeners on the world’s biggest and most powerful music streaming service. His biggest hit, ‘Always on My Mind’, had clocked up 26 million streams. But a handful of factors – compensation to artists, the march of algorithms and AI, and the military investments of co-founder Daniel Ek – tipped him over the edge.
The highest-profile New Zealand musician to join a global walkout, Taane did not go quietly. The Papamoa-based musician-producer deleted his catalogue from the streamer and left one in their stead: ‘Bye Bye Spotify’. With an incendiary disdain, he sings: “I don’t want to be part of this fucking streaming war machine.”
How’s that going for him, a year later? No regrets, said Taane, talking to The Spinoff for the podcast At Large with Toby Manhire. Audiences haven’t collapsed, they were just meeting him elsewhere, he said. “I had to build these other platforms up, start funnelling traffic to my website, and to YouTube music and Bandcamp.” He’s posted a good chunk of his catalogue on Lume, the new music service that eschews streams in favour of letting people buy and keep albums in digital form.
When asked by other artists whether they should follow suit – and those questions come a lot – Taane, who also removed his music from Amazon, says “stay there”. Or stay there, at least, if it is going to have a meaningful impact on your ability to survive without them. He’s independent – without the tangle of contractual obligations that others might face. And he had those other digital platforms up and ready to go.
But if they are ready to take the plunge, he’s all about sharing his own experience. He’ll walk them through “the steps I’ve done, and how long it took me to get to that point where I could go: I can pull this off now”.
“It’s not easy. it’s one of those things where you’re going, shit, have I done the right thing? But you know, it’s nearly been a year now. Everything’s fine. All the other platforms are building even faster. People wanting to listen to my music are going, shit, he’s not there any more. Where is he? Oh, he’s over here.”
That doesn’t mean he’s made up for the lost Spotify income. But “things are going to level out at some point. It could be next year where things are at the point where it’s a where it’s like, OK, Spotify is out of my life now, I’m getting no income from that from the tunes, but the other platforms have have gotten up to the same point, and I’m playing more live shows as well.”
Live performance has always been important, but never more integral. Taane is close to chalking up 50 gigs for the year already. “I’ve consciously gone: I need to go out there and do these gigs, and [finding] OK, the gigs are going off, I’m selling merch, all that kind of stuff. So it can be done, but it takes a lot of thought to put those things in place.”
All in all it makes for an exhilarating time, he said. “It reminds me of the early days. It’s super exciting to be alive.”
The business has changed dramatically since Taane’s early years in Christchurch, where he began working with Salmonella Dub, at first as recording engineer. Having hit rock bottom and struggling with addiction after leaving the band, he rebuilt himself as an artist, determined to have control and ownership of everything he made and a direct, unfiltered interface with his audience.
“I started to invest in my studio and some property, and built Tikidub Production and step out as a producer. So I wasn’t putting all the weight on my songs and my creative output. I could also produce other stuff as well for other people. So I’ve got it to a point now where I’m super happy with the balance. I’m out there playing gigs, doing my thing but I’m also in a studio producing all this other stuff as well for other people. It’s a beautiful balance now.”
For Taane, that’s a decent place to be a few months out from his 50th birthday. And another milestone is imminent. He’s preparing for a show to mark the 20th anniversary of the Past, Present, Future and has released a special edition of the album on Lume, the new platform co-founded by Duncan Greive (who also founded the Spinoff).
“I’m excited to see where they take it, and I’m stoked to be part of that first wave of 25-odd artists to be on there,” he said. “I like the idea of music lovers and super fans having access to content and material that they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else, and it’s all in one spot… When the Lume team were explaining it to me, I was instantly, like, ‘I’ve got a hard drive full of demos. I’ve got a hard drive full of live stuff – this will be perfect.’”
Hear more from Tiki Taane on At Large with Toby Manhire, which you can find on your podcast feed: follow here for Spotify, or here for Apple. Or YouTube, if that’s your cup of tea: subscribe to the Spinoff here and find all the episodes here.
