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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.
... 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.
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.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.)
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.
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.