the times | Thursday November 26 2020 1GT 9

arts

trade body for composers, “There’s

plenty of money being made from

music. It’s just not going to the

musicians.” Hunt was the singer with

the 1990s band Longpigs. He has

worked out that, thanks to the terms

of his ancient contract, he gets about

3 per cent of every penny Longpigs

earn from streaming; 1.2 billion

streams will make him £1. “We’re

dealing with an old world model in

a new world market,” he says.

There are signs of hope. “We have

a morally responsible younger

generation,” Garvey points out.

“Given the opportunity to pay the

artists they listen to, to switch to

a platform that properly supported

the audience they loved, surely they

would do that.” Garvey is pushing for

streaming to convert to a model of

equitable remuneration, so money

going to everyone who contributes

to a recording. Hunt is pushing for

a user-centric model, with streaming

recognised as a substitute for radio. If

an algorithm picks your music, there

should be payments for songwriters

and performers made through

collecting societies, as there is with

radio. The committee is yet to hear

from streaming providers and labels.

Spotify should also charge more.

Its £9.99 Premium monthly fee has

remained the same for ten years. The

artist-focused platform Bandcamp

offers fans a chance to download

albums by their favourite artist and it

generated $5 million to those artists

over the past year, a fraction

compared with Spotify, but a lifeline.

“Streaming is nearly a miracle. It

just needs to pay fairly,” Garvey says.

“Musicians don’t want to admit they’re

skint, and they’re not good at this stuff

because they are dreamers whose

heads are elsewhere, but if more

tweeted, ‘I can no longer make the

rent,’ their listeners would support

them. I don’t want anyone in the

stocks. I’m not asking for Robert

Plant’s third limousine. I just want

the system to be fixed.”

wanted to kill anyone it

would be Jonathan, and

why is he bankrolling

the most expensive and

ruthless lawyer in town to

defend him?

The dark horse in all this

is the kind lawyer Sylvia

Steinitz — paradoxically

the only prominent blond-

haired person in the cast.

Jonathan says he has been

unfaithful with someone

else besides Elena. Sylvia is

surely a candidate for that.

A mum at the school, she

gave Jonathan legal advice

when his hospital was firing

him for his affair with a

patient’s mother, something

she took her time sharing

with Grace. Now she

ghoulishly turns up at court

for his trial. Yet if she loved

Jonathan and was consumed

by jealousy of Elena, why is

she best buddies with his

primary bedmate, Grace? It

could be her, but the

motivation is shallow.

So who does that leave?

Grace! CCTV placed her

a block away from Elena’s

studio at the time of her killing and

she has properly traditional motives

for slaying her husband’s girlfriend.

Even if she did not know of their

affair, we know that she had sexual

feelings for Elena herself. Could she

have followed her home after the

fundraiser, attempted to seduce her,

then gone berserk when Elena

revealed whom she really fancied?

However, over five episodes Grace

has seemed astonished, hurt and

terrified at every plot turn. She doesn’t

seem to know who killed Elena. That

could be the point, however. She may

be good professionally at sorting out

other people’s marriages, but how

much does she know herself? This

brilliant psychotherapist did not spot

that her husband was a psycho, nor

did she realise her adored father was

repeatedly unfaithful in his troubled

marriage to her late mother. What

I believe we have here is a divided,

repressed personality who is capable

of suppressing not only her feelings

but how she acted on them. She will

not have even realised that she has

tried to frame her son by placing her

murder weapon in his violin case.

Kidman is ideally placed to pull this

off; she plays Grace brilliantly as

emotionally fluent, but unknowable.

The answer to the mystery may lie

in The Undoing’s opening titles, in

which we see, through a misty

montage, scenes from Grace’s idealised

but solitary infancy. The little girl with

the blood-red Medusa locks half-

glimpses reality through a net curtain,

gazes at a tinselly snow globe, then

directs her gaze above the world to

the sky, the trees and the birds.

The titles’ central motif is of little

Grace playing with bubbles — the

bubble, of course, of her family’s

privilege, but also of the mental world

she creates for herself. Perhaps she has

been the victim of past trauma — her

mother’s death, abuse by her father —

but she is living a fantasy of marital

perfection. At the end of the sequence,

which is accompanied by Kidman’s

rendition of Dream a Little Dream of

Me, a soap bubble bursts. And whose

dangerous little finger bursts it?

Grace’s, of course.

The Undoing concludes on

Sky Atlantic on Monday

he has motive. His wife was not only

cheating on him, but has left him

with another man’s baby. He is young

enough and strong enough to carry

out the frenzied attack. His alibi

is probably capable of being

deconstructed. Yet his performance on

the witness stand in court on Monday

was surely that of a man bereaved of

someone he genuinely loved and

outraged that he could be accused of

her murder. And really? The wronged

husband? It would be just too boring.

What about Henry Fraser, Jonathan

and Grace’s violin-playing son? He is

obviously screwed up and we now

know that he inferred from a tête-à-

tête between his father and Elena at

the school gates that the two were

having an affair. At the end of Monday

night’s episode his mother had found

in the lad’s violin case the hammer

that presumably killed Elena. It would

not be the first time a child has done

such deeds. Baby Maggie was the

culprit in the Simpsons episode Who

Shot Mr Burns?. EastEnders divulged

that little Bobby Beale had killed Lucy.

So why don’t I believe it this time?

Because that is what Kelley wanted

us to think by placing the hammer

discovery at the end of the

penultimate episode. Don’t buy it.

So perhaps it is Franklin Reinhardt,

Grace’s insanely rich father whose love

of great art and great music must

surely rule him in, Hannibal Lecter-

style. Franklin is played by 85-year-old

Donald Sutherland, but while he is too

old to be doing much bludgeoning

himself, he has the money to spend on

a bespoke murder contract. He has

always hated Jonathan as much as

he has adored Grace, and would be

outraged at his affair. What is more, it

is a TV thriller trope that the crime is

committed by the most distinguished

supporting actor in the cast. Yet

although Sutherland carries the most

lethally pointed eyebrows on TV and

can reduce a headmaster to a grade-

sixer being threatened with detention,

how much sense would it make? If he

Above: Matilda

De Angelis. Left:

Hugh Grant and

Nicole Kidman

‘Musicians can’t eat or pay the rent’

Guy Garvey talks to Will Hodgkinson

about the music streaming scandal

S

he has been nominated for

a Mercury prize, made a

series of acclaimed albums,

and sold out the 1,700-

capacity Roundhouse in

London. Yet the Newcastle

singer Nadine Shah told

parliament yesterday that

in a year of no gigs her revenue from

streaming is not enough to “keep the

wolf from the door”. And Shah, who

was joined by the Elbow singer Guy

Garvey, the Radiohead guitarist Ed

O’Brien and Tom Gray of Gomez to

give evidence before the culture select

committee on the economic impact of

streaming, is not alone. The classical

violinist Tasmin Little reports that for

more than five million Spotify streams

from albums she recorded in the 1990s

she earned £12.34.

“I don’t think labels realise how

serious it has got,” says Garvey, who

is also a presenter on BBC Radio 6

Music. “It is the speed of the land grab,

the streaming technology becoming

available so quickly, which has

created a bad business model.

Streaming favours young solo

artists, and even they aren’t happy.”

Streaming platforms pay out

roughly 60 to 70 per cent of their

annual revenue to rights holders,

a group that includes musicians,

record labels, publishers and

songwriters. In a recent letter to

shareholders, Spotify projected a

total revenue of between $9 billion

and $9.5 billion; about $6 billion to

rights holders. That is then divided

between artists and labels according

to their market share. It sounds

good, until you realise this favours

those with bigger streaming

percentages. That means the £9.99 a

month you pay to listen to a favourite

artist doesn’t necessarily go to them.

Your pay is not based on how well

you do, but on how well everyone else

does. The better they do, the less you

get. Spotify’s average going rate is

about $0.00437 per play. It means

Shape of You, the most-streamed track

of the decade at 2.3 billion plays, has

made Ed Sheeran about $14.6 million.

Tasmin Little has a small streaming

percentage by comparison, hence her

piddling amount earned from streams.

Amid the collapse in physical sales,

streaming has been a saviour for the

industry, but the system is riddled with

problems. Spotify recently introduced

a feature in which artists could get

an algorithmic boost on playlists in

exchange for a lowered royalty rate.

“A band is the most difficult thing to

be in this era,” Garvey says. “How the

hell do Radiohead or Elbow pay five

people through streaming? We won’t

have bands like that again under these

conditions. I was speaking to Ed

O’Brien about this and he said that,

even though Radiohead released [their

2007 album] In Rainbows themselves,

they kind of liked being on a label. It

made them feel less lonely. This is not

about throwing stones at the big bad

moneymen at the majors. This is

about: musicians can’t eat, they can’t

make the rent. ”

According to Crispin Hunt, the

chairman of the Ivors Academy, the

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The Victim

Streaming

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t p m m t w o 3 e s d a a g “

From top: Guy Garvey

of Elbow; Tasmin Little