Nighttime toured its new album Keeper Is The Heart through O’Brien’s Pub on Sunday, 5 February 2023.

Soft Fangs and Major Stars sandwiched the triple-stack bill.

The music streaming landscape is a war-torn hell for independent artists. The most popular streaming service in the world is Spotify with around 350 million users and 150 million subscribers.

That’s a lot of jabronis hitting the ‘play’ button! Some of that related revenue must be trickling down to the artists, right? Knowing how badly it’s ripping off the music makers, Spotify mystifies its payout process by not tying payouts to streams. But if you demystify it, you’ll find the streaming giant is compensating artists as little as $0.0033 per stream.

There are reasonable arguments as to why you might not want to payout per stream (streaming numbers can be rigged; “overpaying” non-big hitters maintains biodiversity in the music ecosystem; and more), but there is no reasonable argument in favor of compensating artists at such a poor rate. Whether it’s Big Labels or Big Streaming, musicians getting ripped off is an old story. When will there be justice at Spotify?

Congressional Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) introduced a resolution that should be of interest to all music makers. A resolution is not quite a full-fledged bill, but it’s a step in the right direction. The resolution articulates a host of points in favor of more equitable streaming payouts for artists. One excerpt reads:

“it is the duty of the federal government to establish a new statutory royalty program that:

-provides musicians whose recorded work is listened to on streaming music services reasonable remuneration through a royalty payment earned on a per-stream basis,

-ensures streaming music services compensate musicians at fair rates that are not significantly lower than rates earned on traditional physical record sales, and

-avoids falling behind in investing in musicians within the United States compared to other countries that have already proposed legislation to address inequalities in the music industry.”

Will this resolution find its way into legislation to become the law of the land? We’ll see. In the meantime, physical media has been holding out as one revenue stream that actually pays out for independent artists. We could use more sites like Bandcamp that steer more money to the pockets of the musicians on their site.

Another plug for Bandcamp: it has a great editorial wing that shines light on all sorts of fantastic music, including Sunday night’s act Nighttime, which made the “Seven Essential Releases (2/3/23)” list and scored an “Album of the Day” credit. Nice. 

Here’s to hoping that Bandcamp’s recent acquisition by video game giant Epic Games doesn’t kill what the site does well. 

Soft Fangs

Soft Fangs warmed up the room with a riveting set of gazey folk. The man behind the moniker is John Lutkevich, who writes and records the bulk of the studio material. As a live band, Soft Fangs performed as a three-piece.

Lutkevich plays a tender electric guitar, employing a fingerpick-first acoustic method that milks a sweet sound out of the strings. The attention to detail is remarkable: there was hardly a note or chord that went without a gentle whammy or tweak of the tone knob on the tail end. He cradled every sound in every song like it was a newborn baby.

Pro tip: don’t shoot TikTok in landscape-mode.

Nighttime

With strong plugs from Bandcamp (and music maven anjiisan), how could you go wrong with Nighttime on a Sunday night at O’Brien’s Pub?

The Eva Louise Goodman-led five-piece worked through a lot of songs from her latest LP Keeper is the Heart, including “Curtain is Closing.”

The album floats through the freak folk clouds with a nod to Art Garfunkel, medieval lays, and the craftsmanship of longtime outfit Mutual Benefit. As a singer, Goodman deploys a sonorous, Nico-damaged energy that highlights the kind of out-of-time, other-wordly atmosphere Nighttime is cultivating. Even their setlists were written up with the olde thyme font!

Speaking of otherworldly, Goodman quizzed the crowd on their relative levels of belief in the following supernatural entities: werewolves, aliens, Bigfoot, and more. A predictably skeptical Boston was not having it. Shout out to the Soft Fangs fronter doing double duty as the drummer for Nighttime. Extra points for the Paul McCartney-style bass guitar.

Major Stars

Local mainstays Major Stars got down to business like nobody’s business, kicking out feedback-inflected heavy artrock with their five-piece lineup. The band started out with a pure instrumental, then worked a voice into the fray as the set proceeded. Shades of Lurid Purple Flowers meets Lydia Lunch. Big sounds, big noise, major stars.

Quick hits:

• the Bathrobe Guy was possibly in attendance. But he wasn’t wearing his bathrobe, so, like the existence of werewolves, this possibility can’t be confirmed.

• the doorguy was lost in deep discussion with a guy who looks like the bartender at the Silhouette Lounge (not Bill the Bartender, the other guy). But there were four or five guys at the show who looked like the bartender at the Silhouette Lounge, so his identity can’t be confirmed either. The pair were arguing about the name and/or existence of the “other bear Muppet” on the Muppet Show. Not Fozzie the Bear — the other bear Muppet. Was there another bear Muppet?

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