A number of artists yesterday afternoon gathered outside Spotify offices across the U.S. and Europe to protest the company’s royalty rates. The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) – which, in late October of 2020, rolled out a petition calling on Spotify to pay one cent per stream – organized the multi-city protest, dubbed “Justice at Spotify Day of Action.”
Source: Musicians Protest Per-Stream Royalty Rate Outside Spotify Offices
For decades, corporate concentration and the rise of streaming music platforms has shifted power to tech giants, and to a conglomerate that, through the staggering failures of US monopoly regulation, has come to dominate terrestrial and satellite radio, concert promotion, ticketing, artist management, and venue ownership, essentially every revenue-generating slice of the industry.
Source: Big Music Needs to Be Broken Up to Save the Industry
This Thursday (March 18), UK artist Big Zuu is selling 75% of the rights to a song on his forthcoming album, divided up into several different chunks and wrapped up into NFTs. Another Ditto-affiliated act, Taylor Bennett – brother of Chancelor ‘Chance The Rapper’ Bennett – is selling 75% of the rights to an upcoming recording, also through separate NFTs.
The interview kicked off with CEO Geoff Taylor expressing broad support for the parliamentary inquiry into streaming economics’ impact – “a positive opportunity for some of these much-debated issues to get aired, and to hear viewpoints from right across the industry” – but also expressing his fear that the recommendations of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee which is holding it may include “policy interventions that won’t work, or could be counterintuitive or do more harm than good”..
Source: BPI boss talks artists, labels, streaming and equitable remuneration
Livestreaming went from niche to mainstream in 2020, bringing in $610 Million from over 115 million fans, according to new research from MusicWatch. An estimated 115 million people watched a livestream in the fourth quarter 2020 on platforms ranging from the popular site Twitch to Mandolin, one of the new music-focused streamers to have sprouted during the pandemic.
Google revealed its plans to withhold U.S. taxes on YouTube income in an aptly titled article, “U.S. tax requirements for YouTube earnings.” Creators enrolled in the YouTube Partner Program – i.e. those who monetize their videos – may see their worldwide earnings docked by a significant 24 percent if they fail to submit their tax info via AdSense prior to Monday, May 31st, 2021.
Source: YouTube Unveils Plan to Automatically Deduct U.S. Taxes From Creators
The popularity of video and other streamed content like podcasts is continuing to grow at a breakneck speed, and today a startup called Epidemic Sound, a marketplace to source the background music for that media, is announcing a huge round of funding to scale along with it.
Source: Epidemic Sound raises $450M at a $1.4B valuation to ‘soundtrack the internet’
US-based collection society ASCAP distributed more money to its publisher and songwriter members in 2020 than it did in 2019. That’s positive news for a music business that might have feared Covid’s impact on these numbers would have seen payouts go into decline.
Starting April 1, revenue from fans will go directly—and exclusively—to the artists they listen to. While SoundCloud made no mention of this publicly, they’ll take 45 percent of what an artist earns from their listeners through fan-powered royalties, Michael Pelczynski, SoundCloud’s head of rights administration and strategy, told VICE.
How do we as an ever-changing industry ensure that we’re continuing to grow, nurture and support the livelihoods of the creative communities that allow music streaming to exist in the first place? Livelihood means more than exposure and celebration of the craft of songwriting, though I do think that is absolutely important as well. But exposure and visibility don’t go nearly far enough.