On Friday, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers tweeted an interesting tool. “You paid Spotify $120 this year if you had a premium subscription,” the tweet begins. “Guess how much of that went to the artists you love? Guess how much of that went to the executives, shareholders, and artists you didn’t even interact with?”
Source: Under 30% of My Spotify Premium Sub Went to Artists – What About You?
To hear Abigail Disney explain it, there is a tug-of-war between the creativity that built the company’s brand, and a corporate ideology defined by business school best practices. And that something has changed over the past few decades to depress wages for workers at the same time that executives are seeing their compensation skyrocket.
Source: Disney Needs to be Save From Itself Says Abigail Disney
Source: Tencent Doubles Stake in Universal Music, Home to Billie Eilish and the Beatles
The deal comes just six months after global investment giant KKR led a $48m investment in Artlist, which is a royalty-free music and sound effects company that licenses content to creators on YouTube and other platforms. Israel-based Artlist, via its Artgrid product, also offers users a large catalog of stock footage (video clips).
The 76-year-old Heston native voiced his opinion on streaming royalties in an Instagram post. Jimmy Page says he felt compelled to pen the note after viewing the comments that singer-songwriter Nadine Shah, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien, and Elbow frontman Guy Garvey offered when speaking before the Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee on November 24th.
Source: Jimmy Page Demands That Streaming Music Services Pay Artists Fairly
The problem isn’t the amounts. It’s not even that the timings and distribution of the royalties is so tightly controlled (although that is a part of it). It’s the fact that the artists don’t have control. They don’t have a say on when they get paid, even though it’s their hard earned cash.
Source: The Great Royalties Hustle
When the acquisition was announced, the Authors Guild, the American Booksellers Association, and the Association of American Literary Agents (formerly the AAR) all issued statements that were critical of the deal. While each organization had a particular take, all shared one thing in common: they were concerned about the increasing consolidation within trade publishing.
Roblox, a gaming company that had been preparing to go public this month, has decided to delay its initial public offering until next year, in a sign that the enthusiastic market for I.P.O.s by DoorDash and Airbnb this past week has made it difficult to price shares accurately.
The FTC has shown signs earlier this year that it is taking a new look at tech industry transactions that it had originally deemed too small to warrant its scrutiny. In February, the FTC announced that it had issued investigative subpoenas to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google, demanding information on 10 years’ worth of mergers, as part of a study into acquisitions of startups.
Source: Behind Washington’s one-eighty on Facebook: A rethink of monopoly power
T
otal North American concert industry revenues came in at $12.2 billion, with losses of $9.7 billion, Pollstar relays, having based the figure off the aforementioned Q1 growth rate. And by factoring for merch sales, concessions, sponsorships, transportation, lodging, and “other economic activity tied directly to live events…it doesn’t take much calculus to arrive at a full economic impact of greater than $30 billion.”
Source: The North American Concert Industry Lost $30 Billion In 2020