You can help get this to the top of his inbox by retweeting https://twitter.com/DrownedinSound/status/1401825617499377665
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I’m a musician, although not a professional one.
I don’t understand how streaming equates with radio; surely they are conceptually completely different? One is curated, one is on demand. Podcast is like radio, but that would be a tiny percentage of what we’re talking about here.
For spotify (for example), isn’t both the musician AND the end user the customer, and as such both are free to reject the terms of use?
I guess when the co fouder of spotify has a net worth of more than 4 billion dollars for just providing a platform, it should figure that the artist should get a better cut for providing the content.
I think PRS revenue from being played on the radio is based on number of listeners… so as people leave listening to radio and replace with streaming the PRS would go down.
Not sure what the figures are these days but a play on radio 1 / radio 2 used to pay artists a PRS income of £20 per minute
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I’m fairly ambivalent about this stuff, but I think it comes over as selective capitalism which is what grates for me. Elton John is happy to make money in any way his management company sees fit, but isn’t so happy to pay for the use of a software platform.
For me the least morally/politically bogus answer is to reject these platforms entirely if an acceptable deal can’t be struck with them, and create some sort of cooperative alternative. I don’t see how/why in a capitalist society a government should legislate against an entirely optional software platform.
Seems a strange argument to me.
I’m neither pro-capitalism, nor pro-Tory BTW.
WTF mate.
To massively over simplify:
Radio pays a performance royalty for broadcasting music. The royalty rate is based on a license to share music with the number of people listening. The writer of the song gets paid for the performance of their material (also happens when you cover a song at a concert and the royalty is based on size of venue).
A stream is a performance of a song and classed as accessing (or purchasing/renting) the recording. For the latter, a mechanical royalty is paid to the copyright holder (the distributor who then sends to record label or if the artist is unsigned to the artist).
You would probably assume that the songwriter would get paid better than the recorded version right? However the recording copyright holder currently gets about 4 times what the song copyright holder (publisher or artists) gets.
There’s a campaign to balance that out but arguments that the record companies invest in marketing, development, etc but where would we be if someone didn’t write the great song in the first place?
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Super interesting, thanks for that! I’ve probably got the wrong end of the stick as usual!
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