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Streaming Services Must Hike Songwriter Payments Nearly 50%, Court Rules (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:
Songwriters will get a larger cut of revenue from streaming services after a court handed technology companies a big defeat. The Copyright Royalty Board ruled that songwriters will get at least a 15.1 percent share of streaming revenues over the next five years, from a previous 10.5 percent. That's the largest rate increase in CRB history, according to a statement from the National Music Publishers' Association. The decision is a major victory for songwriters, who have long complained they are insufficiently uncompensated by on-demand music services like Spotify and YouTube.
"The ratio of what labels are paid by the services versus what publishers are paid has significantly improved," argues the NMPA, "resulting in the most favorable balance in the history of the industry.
"While an effective ratio of 3.82 to 1 is still not a fair split that we might achieve in a free market, it is the best songwriters have ever had under the compulsory license... The decision represents two years of advocacy regarding how unfairly songwriters are treated under current law and how crucial their contributions are to streaming services."
Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress has introduced a bipartisan "Music Modernization Act" to overhaul the rate court, and to create a new governing agency to issue blanket licenses to streaming services and then collect and distribute the resulting roylaties.
"The ratio of what labels are paid by the services versus what publishers are paid has significantly improved," argues the NMPA, "resulting in the most favorable balance in the history of the industry.
"While an effective ratio of 3.82 to 1 is still not a fair split that we might achieve in a free market, it is the best songwriters have ever had under the compulsory license... The decision represents two years of advocacy regarding how unfairly songwriters are treated under current law and how crucial their contributions are to streaming services."
Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress has introduced a bipartisan "Music Modernization Act" to overhaul the rate court, and to create a new governing agency to issue blanket licenses to streaming services and then collect and distribute the resulting roylaties.
Nothing prevents you from paywalling your page.
Other than the lack of a widely used multi-site micropayment service that respects viewers' privacy.
Credit card processors charge a merchant on the order of 30 cents per transaction plus 3% of the value, and the 30 cents greatly overwhelm (say) 2 cents to view an article. Nor is a user who wants to view a single article on a particular site going to want to spend $6 on a 300-pack of article views and waste the other 299 because the purchased views aren't portable to another site.
A multi-site micropayment service would work in one of two ways.
Flat fee Adult Check (because grown-ups can pay for nice things) was a flat $10 per month and paid participating publishers per page view. It was sued out of business when too many participating publishers displayed infringing scans of photos taken from Perfect 10 magazine. Page views Google Contributor charges for a pack of page views. It's pretty much ideal except for two things: First, it charges for reloading an article that the user has already seen recently, which could encourage sites to engage in view fraud by failing to invest in a reliable connection so that the viewer will reload the page more often. Second, it's run by the same company that also runs an ad network. This means Contributor views still get counted toward the click-stream for Google's "interest-based advertising" features, even though the page is served without ads.