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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.
How about my rights, as a web coder, to get paid a percentage every time someone loads a web page I have coded?
Nothing prevents you from paywalling your page.
... I'm OK with it. My concern is that the publishers and "music catalog owners" will get an overwhelmingly large share of the money, leaving only cookie crumbs to the songwriters and artists.
I dug a drainage ditch along the road. Water from all of my neighbors runs down this ditch every single day and they pay me nothing!
Where do I apply to force them to pay me?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Apparently the Copyright Royalty Board, and say your work was an 'artistic interpretation performance'.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Let the music industry try to make their own streaming service. I'd love to see the crap that produces.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Well, that sounds easy enough to fix.
Have you heard music from the past ten years?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.Check your contract with him. It'll indicate whether or not you're owed anything.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
It looks like Spotify's share will go down from 29.38% to 24.78%. (The details of the 10.5% "mechanical" rate that's being increased are in footnote 3, which I've read twice and still don't really get.)
Squeeze the guys playing by the rules harder, forcing them to push price hikes to their customers.
It's not like the guys who run Pandora are bajillionaires from it. Yet there seem to be lots and lots of millionaire musicians?
I'm sure this won't drive anyone to piracy at ALL.
-Styopa
Nothing except the hundred thousand competitors who don't charge a percentage and would happily take his business.
Music artists get a bum deal because any fool with an instrument can make music, and even if we want to ignore the complete crap, there's still plenty of people who make reasonably good music in their garage or local pubs yet never make it beyond that. On the other hand there are (relatively) very few publishers which is why they basically hold all of the power. If you want to get your band signed you don't get to go shop around to the publishers and demand a reasonable percentage. You have to beg them and hope they'll give you _any_ percentage.
The internet was supposed to change all of that, and to some degree it helped. But at the end of the day the publishers just have too much control. Consumers want to to go a website that has the music they want to hear right now. Its great if that website also has new music for them to explore but its not the biggest deal. So you can set up a Indiefy (or whatever name:P) site and cater specifically to unsigned bands and do your own curation to ensure the music quality is high and pay the artists a good percentage.. and you will die out fast because you don't have Lady Gaga or Ed Sheeran or whoever the latest fad of the week is. And even if you don't die out and end up becoming a big name yourself.. well, you've essentially become another publisher. And sooner or later you'll come under the same pressures to eternally increase profits that every other publisher deals with. Its an ugly cycle.
"There is nothing original or creative in your use of code. Any AI will be able to do your job inside 5 years."
The same goes for music. After all, it's just the same 7 notes that are rearranged over and over again.
Any AI should be able to do that very soon.
"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...".. How is this not a free market? So many streaming services, where some are even illegal streaming services. The song writer / singer is free to use whatever platform.. No? Or choose not to use their own platform. Didn't a bunch of music producers even create a platform just to give more money back to the artists? How is that going?
or are they talking about the Kanas City team named after Lourde's song
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Tax Man
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I think another part of the problem is that there's at least fifty minstrels for each bard. But who the public sees and want to reward are the minstrels. Not the guy who wrote the song, but the charismatic people on stage.
There's not a lot of incentive to compose great music, and especially so if you're not also a performer.
I'm assuming it's the latter as the CRB likely doesn't have the right to renegotiate artist/label contracts. Which means the record labels are simply going to be cashing in more. Hopefully they won't pull any bullshit like adjusting rates accordingly so artists still get as much of a percentage as before, and artists will benefit equally (whatever that means, given the atrociously low percentages artists get for their works).
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
If you sold SaaS, then you would get paid at least monthly, per user...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
We are still listening to music which was written hundreds of years ago, there's plenty of music which was written in the 50's and 60's which still gets played daily.
How much from the last 25 years do you think will be played daily in 50-100 years? I can't think of anything worth it.
According to the movie "Demolition Man" people will be listening to commercial jingles.... and every restaurant will be Taco Bell.... (grin)
As usual the music cartel want their cut from revenue as if the cost of storing, managing, and delivering their product for them is zero. The cartel well knows that if it was "of profit" their own "Hollywood accounting" would be used against them.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Next up is higher pay for in the music industry, spotify's own earnings decrease and decrease as more and more fees are added to pay for the music industries greed. Then spotify goes belly up, and music industry loses a gigantic boatload of easy money. Comes up with all kind of excuses and why it's not their fault.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
" a web page I have coded"
Oh, is this *your* page? Or your clients'?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Sounds like a massive overreach by the Government. They really need to stay out of private contracts between adults. The only reason the courts should be involved is if someone broke the law. In addition, if the songwriters are not happy with the terms, don't sign. Maybe I am crazy, but I don't see any good long term benefit from this. As always the Government will expand this further. For those of you that support this action I hope some day when the Government starts reaching more and more into your private lives you are happy that you supported this action.
I get the indignity of the percentages, the cut from revenue and not profit, the general disgust for the music industry, but what about the government? Why does the government need to be involved at all? Since when does the government negotiate contract rates and business deals? This seems wrong in all kinds of ways.
People forget a big part of what those publishers do is front money to the band then turn around and advertise for them. Sure, you'll see that they signed "Band X" for 5 albums over N years, but what you don't see is that it is basically all a loan. The publisher will give them some money, but also spend money promoting the band and expect to get a cut of all proceeds.
They get a cut of merchandise, album sales, likely more as the band tours and becomes known. I read somewhere that most artists don't actually become profitable until their third or fourth CD is released. Considering how many one-hit wonders there are out there, you can see how all the power goes to a few rich companies. Not to mention one time people had to buy a whole CD even though they wanted 1 or 2 songs. Today we have that choice thanks to Amazon and iTunes. Here's a couple articles:
Record sales: Where does the money go?
In Shift to Streaming, Music Industry has Lost Billions
Slashdot, once obsessed with the car analogy, is now fixated on hourly work as the one and only true business model. But there are many of them, all valid for different purposes. Consider:
- hourly wage
- per-contract bid (pretty close to hourly wage, but not the same)
- annual salary
- subscription model
- rental
- investment
- transactional (buy low and sell high, irrespective of time put in)
- patronage (mostly out of fashion)
- group patronage (probably not the right term; think Kickstarter)
And then there's the thing that most copyrighted works do, where there's a whole bunch of up-front costs, and the idea is, if there's enough mass appeal, one entity can cover those costs in advance, and as long as a large number of people are willing to pay a fairly small amount for the ability to enjoy a work, it's successful enough for the process to be repeated with another work. It's not illogical. It's worked for centuries. It is a valid and consistent business model, in that if enough people play along, it works out okay.
Now, sure, it's easy to argue it's not perfect, on a lot of levels. But to argue it's a nonsensical business model, or fails simply because it's not an exact duplicate of some other business model, is just silly. You could just as easily ask, why don't I own an apartment after paying a month's rent? Why do I have to pay more than once? Or scold investors for putting in money but not time, because if you don't have hours worked, calculating their hourly rate produces a divide-by-zero error. When one thing is not another, sometimes an analogy between them just doesn't apply.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay