The Price of the Drop: From Soul Food to Soul Commodity

When I was younger, music meant something.

Not because it was profitable, not because it charted, but because it connected. It was soul food, made in kitchens of pain, joy, rhythm, and resistance. It was messy and raw and divine. You could hear someone's whole story in eight bars. That connection, that unspoken understanding, that's what made it sacred.

But over time, something shifted.

Art became currency. Creativity turned into content. And the industry learned how to flip culture into commodity, soul into inventory.

And we, the artists, the messengers, started watching our own value decline, even as the platforms profiting from us exploded.

It didn’t happen overnight. The foundation was already cracked. Go far enough back, and you’ll find the music business wasn’t just about music, it was about control. The system wasn’t built to nurture creators; it was built to own them.

I used to think royalties were how we got paid. That if you wrote the song, or played a part in building it, you’d see your fair share. But publishing and mechanical royalties were never structured to protect the artist, they were created to divide ownership and keep the power in the hands of those who never touched the mic or the boards.

Publishing covers the composition, the lyrics, the melody. Mechanical royalties cover the reproduction, the streams, the physical sales. Two separate checks. In theory, that sounds fair.

In reality? That’s two different doors you don’t always have keys to.

By the time a song generates real money, that money’s already promised. It passes through publishers, PROs, labels, distributors, aggregators, managers, admin services, and whoever else managed to get their name in the contract. What's left for the creator is a fraction, and often, not even that. Sometimes you're just happy to see your name spelled right in the liner notes.

And if you're producing the music? Writing the hook? Laying down the verse that makes the whole thing move? You might still get pushed to the back if you don't understand your splits.

This is the part they don’t tell you about when you fall in love with music. The part where your art becomes a product. Where you, the creator, become the smallest stakeholder in your own creation.

The system didn’t just evolve that way, it was designed that way. Long before streaming platforms. Long before viral moments and data dashboards.

Frank Sinatra was a product of that design. He wasn’t just a singer, he was a brand, wrapped up in politics, mob connections, and high society. His relationship with Sam Giancana and the Chicago Outfit wasn’t a conspiracy, it was common knowledge in certain rooms. His shows moved money. Legitimate and not. It was a performance on and off the stage.

On the other side of the tracks, Billie Holiday was singing truths that made people uncomfortable. She wasn’t safe. She wasn’t protected. The industry didn’t know what to do with a Black woman who sang what she lived. So while Frank had the backing of organized power, Billie had to navigate mob-run clubs out of necessity. The Black mob in Harlem controlled venues and access for artists who had nowhere else to go. It wasn’t glamor, it was survival.

Nina Simone was different, but she felt the same weight. She wasn’t tied to the mob, but she was boxed in by a system that didn’t want her politics, didn’t want her voice unfiltered. They wanted her talent. They just didn’t want it to speak too loud.

That model never disappeared. It just adapted. Now, it wears tech and data like a badge. Spotify, Apple Music, streaming platforms, they don’t need mob bosses to control access. They have algorithms. They control the gates through playlists, editorial placement, and backend metrics. And the royalty model? Still broken.

Spotify doesn’t pay artists. It pays rights holders. If you’re not your own label or publisher, you’re not even on the guest list. They cut the check, and that check gets split a dozen ways before it ever sees your bank account.

Even worse, it’s a pooled payout model, pro-rata. So you're not getting paid based on your own success. You're getting paid based on your share of the total platform traffic. You could be doing 100,000 streams a day and still feel broke. Because while you’re making noise, someone else is making the money.

And that’s where the indie dream gets cloudy.

Everyone talks about independence like it’s freedom, and in some ways, it is. But it’s also work. Heavy work. If you’re doing real numbers, you’re on someone’s radar. Labels track streams like stocks now. If you're consistently pushing 100–150K a day, they're watching. You pop up in A&R reports. You become “interesting.”

But that attention isn’t always an opportunity, it’s often a fork in the road.

If they like your song but don’t want you, they’ll shelf your version and give it to someone else. They’ve done it before, and they’ll do it again. Maybe now it’s cleaner, wrapped in legal language and branding. But the outcome is the same. Your creation, someone else’s success.

That’s the quiet violence of the machine.

You start making music from the heart. You build from the soul. And then one day, you look up and realize your catalog isn’t even yours anymore. The same system that praised your talent was just studying your data. Your passion became a metric. Your art became a product. And your value? Negotiated by people who weren’t in the room when the idea came to life.

But the music’s still in you. It still matters. That spark doesn’t die, it just gets buried under contracts and calendar invites.

And maybe that’s the real revolution, unburying it. Reclaiming the ownership, the voice, the impact. Not just for the check, but for the craft. For the culture. For the community that still believes in the power of music to move people, not just markets.

They dropped the price.
But they’ll never match the value.
Not if we remember what this was always supposed to be.

Soul food.