About sharing of legal income of digital music on the internet.

 

The business of music, also known as the "Music Industry" has always ripped artists off in one way or another. Now the term is "content creator". There really is no modern business model for making money from your "content". Do it for love, shits, and giggles, or art for art's sake if you want. If you seek fortune or fame, you may as well buy lottery tickets and make cat videos while you are at it. I put content out there for free on occasion, but not all my things. And the stuff that's out there is, in theory, still protected if somebody steals it and makes money (neither likely, but you never know. The Who song is my only stab at a cover. Let Pete come and get me- ha). Registered with ASCAP. Mostly I put free content out on occasion to create interest and traffic , because I am still in the self promotion biz. Have passport, will travel. If I had 100,000 plays instead of 2000, maybe somebody would take notice.

 

Last edited: Aug 31, 2015

In work for a company that makes a streaming music product, intended for bussiness-to-business (like in bars and such), and it's a national thing, so we're not international around the globe.

Since we're a small company making individual deals with the record companies to get their music is impossible. So we do it the way music companies have always done it -> go to the national music-rights-coalition and deliver statistical data of every song that is played, and we pay accordingly. Just the way radio stations have done it for years for example.

This way it's hard for us to give competition on the price (since we can't broker deals with record companies ourselves) but it also means we get access to every single song released no matter what they think of a certain service. We still have all of Taylor Swift's and Prince's music for example . We kinda follow the rules of how the music rights work and how the music industry itself built it up for the last 30 to 40 years and it still works alright.

Well, the CEO of that government-approved-music-rights-coalition company drives a way too expensive car with driver and still has a yearly income of over 150.000... so clearly not all of the money we pay to stream the music gets up at the artists, but at the collection companies in between... that the music industry wanted themselves.

Which is the point I'm hoping to make: Stop blaming the f*cking music stores and streaming companies for stuff like this. They brokered a deal with the record companies.. it are the record companies who went "yes this is a deal we like". They get the money _they agreed on_. If that money doesn't end up in the artists hands, look at the record companies. They have it, they're just not paying the artist with it. It is the job of the record-company to look after the artist and (maybe more importantly from their point of view) look after the music they have the rights to. If _they_ sign a deal with (for example) Tidal, Apple Music, Spotify whatever... they're signing a deal. If the deal is not good enough for the artist, go after the record companies then for not doing their job.

If you don't like the deal, no go and the streaming service doesn't get your music. Kinda like Taylor Swift did with the whole streaming thing.
Problem is, that the money she WAS getting from services like Spotify and the likes, was not enough for her. Trust me, it's more then she received through the 'conventional' methods the music industry approved on from from the whole of western europe combined. So much money is going into the pockets of the 'in-between-guys'. This is true for retail products like clothing, gadgets but also for rights. All the companies world wide managing those rights and royalties and making sure companies pay for those rights all want a piece of the cut. And it suddenly becomes clear how much is taken from random companies in between and how little ends up in the artist's pocket.

The whole arrival of streaming companies and the deals the broker means that the chain for the rights is much shorter. The streaming companies pretty much cut out all of the 'middle men' and go straight to the record company owning the rights. This should be a _good_ thing, because there is more money now to go into the artist hand's... that this is not happening, is clearly a case of 'evil record companies' and not of 'evil streaming companies'.