Coin

Coin

Legal tender.

What do you call a transaction in which both parties lose money? Spotify. Although I’d gladly snap my way through a dramatic reading of David Ek’s letter to his shareholders, the quick maths don’t yet add up to “giving... creative artists the opportunity to live off of their art.” The global streaming titan reported $1.5 billion in losses last year, all while paying artists as little as $0.0006 (they have a precise machine that splits a penny into almost two thousand tiny copper-plated bits) per play. Take an up-and-coming indie group like Lawrence. If each of their respectable 200k monthly listeners streamed Living Room front to back, the nine-piece soul-pop group would net a neat $1,560—the equivalent of selling a meager 75 $20 CDs. But before we light our torches and set sail for Stockholm, let’s consider being open to paying an extra three dollars a month for unlimited music—that alone would’ve balanced Spotify’s books in 2017, giving them more room for artist compensation.

Coin

To create.

100 kilometers west of Paris, the concrete pitches of Évreux still echo with the name of Ousmane Dembélé. The nimble Frenchman’s shrewed footwork has earned him (for the moment, locally) what few players in the history of football have been inventive enough to achieve—a cemented place in the vocabulary of the game. Johan Cruyff’s trademark turn, Ronaldo’s explosive chop, and Neymar’s coy in-step control represent the legacies of creators rather than players, self-titled iconographies that immortalize the individuality of their inventors. By minting the term “Dembouz,” the youth of Dembélé’s hometown have identified something the world is discovering at the Camp Nou—an artist.

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