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Justice at Spotify

unionofmusicians.org

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Re: Justice at Spotify

#371

Post by cwkoss »

falcolas wrote: post #159
breck wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone who threatens to stop creating content if they can't enslave ideas, were to stop creating content, the world would be a better place. The idea that people would stop creating is absurd. I work in Cancer Research and the absolute least contributing people in the medical industry are the ones obsessed with patenting and copyrighting their work, which is usually garbage and of frivolous value compared to the…

> the world would be a better place. Really? Sounds pretty terrible to me. Few books. Few videogames. No movies. No TV shows. Most of the internet obliterated. Any content that is created is copied and regurgitated so much you'd be hard pressed find out who actually created it. I personally like consuming entertainment. I work with the creative side of my brain all day long, and being able to go home and turn it off…

You are also discounting the cost to society for all the works of art that are created due to copyright.

Copyright criminalizes remix culture and leads to evils like Youtube arbitrarily giving strikes because 5 seconds of a taylor swift song was in the background, suppression of criticism, and depriving the poor from access to modern culture.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#372

Post by cwkoss »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #16
breck wrote: post #7

#abolishcopyright. Musicians if you’re listening, find a different way to earn a living than depending upon the enslavement of ideas (and by extension, individuals). Copyright is abhorrent, and needs to go. There are better ways.

Well, in the article it says that they are doing this partly because coronavirus has wiped out a lot of live music. If they can't stream for profit and they can't do live shows what do you suggest?

Get a job that pays. Not everyone is talented and lucky enough to be paid a comfortable wage for the products of their hobbies.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#373

Post by cwkoss »

falcolas wrote: post #68
juancn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright and patents creates artificial scarcity. The things protected are not scarce, they are abundant. Ideas and information are easy to copy/reproduce. So we built a fake framework on top of something plentiful and cheap to copy, to make it more expensive so some people can make money out of it.

I agree, they're easy to copy and reproduce. But more importantly, they are not easy to produce in the first place. How do you suggest an author (artist, musician, etc) make a living, if it takes them 6 months of normal working hours to produce a book and they get an expected $0 of revenue from that book?

Maybe NFTs

Re: Justice at Spotify

#374

Post by cwkoss »

falcolas wrote: post #124
ccsnags wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patrons. Sell merch. Sell tickets. Super chats. Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper that one is claiming legal dominion over. Unless you are making physical media, your products are your ideas. It’s a tradeoff, not a cure for problems artists face. The current system favors wealthy institutions over artists. No one is willing to donate to a giant record company but fans of the work will readily gi…

> Patrons. Sell merch. Sell tickets. Super chats. None of those scale. I pointed this out elsewhere, but how much money would a creator on Patreon make if all creators were on Patreon, hoping to make at least $1 per month per follower? Musicians alone would push me into the hundreds of dollars (which really means a vast majority of musicians would make nothing from me; less than they're getting via Spotify). How much…

The majority of artists will not be able to support their entire lifestyle with their passion.

Same as it is currently and ever was.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#375

Post by nerdponx »

tschwimmer wrote: post #242

The hard truth in music (and in many creative industries) is that there's a huge oversupply (many musicians are willing to make music for free or very cheap) and demand has a low willingness to pay. The result is that there isn't much money to be made for musicians. In my mind, there's really no way around this fact. You can argue (as these folks are) that Spotify could take a smaller cut and give more to musicians.…

That's not the issue here. The issue is that "number of listens" is not correlated with "payouts from Spotify", even if we ignore the record labels taking their cut.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#376

Post by baobabKoodaa »

capableweb wrote: post #178
nindalf wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the artists have a contract with the record labels to share revenue. How is it possible for Spotify to decide to split that revenue differently? Or is the demand to increase payout to the point that artists make $0.01 per stream?

I assume Spotify has agreements with the record labels about how much the royalty owner gets for each stream. Spotify could argue to change that so it's now 50/50 between the royalty holder and the artist. Depending on how much leverage Spotify actually has here, they can of course try to change the existing agreements they have. Nothing in impossible and harder things have changed before.

That's not how any of this works. The split between artist and record company is defined in a contract that Spotify is not a party to.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#377

Post by bogomipz »

cratermoon wrote: post #73
Eridrus wrote: post #27

So I wanted to try put this into perspective since "a penny per stream" is intentionally meant to sound insignificant. This seems like it would roughly double Spotify's costs: https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/apps/how-much-... And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to royalty holders: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-pr... So unless you believe that Spotify is bad…

> And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to royalty holders Realize that the royalty holders are not the musicians, but typically the major labels. The musicians get virtually nothing.

There is no such thing as a "royalty holder." Record labels are copyright holders. The record labels pay out royalties. Royalties are paid to performers, songwriters and publishing companies. For streaming the record label pays two types of royalties - a mechanical royalty and a performance royalty.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#378

Post by Closi »

mikepurvis wrote: post #367
Closi wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In any case, obviously the conversation is DOA if you start it from a foundational assumption that "a play is a play" That's not my foundational assumption, but I've also not heard a compelling argument that one play / minute streamed should be inherently more valuable than another play / minute streamed. It's also not clear how this value would be calculated, because I also don't think it's clear that proportion o…

I don't think it'll necessarily happen via Spotify renegotiating it. It'll happen via a competitor offering this scheme, and indie labels pulling their content from Spotify. The obvious player to offer this competing service is Bandcamp. They haven't yet, though an awful lot of the pieces are in place— they have a mobile app that lets you trivially stream anything you've ever purchased and listen on trial to things y…

It's tough, because indie labels will likely find it hard to both remain popular/relevant while pulling all their songs off the worlds most popular listening platforms.

It's a bit of a catch 22 - these platforms are now where people discover new bands, so if you are not on them people don't discover you so can't buy your album, and if you are on them then people can listen to your album without paying.

Unfortunately I think the truth is that in the future bands will have to think of slightly different monetisation strategies - maybe a mix of subscriber content (see Pomplamoose Patreon as the creators of this concept), fan engagement, merchandise, shows, premium albums that aren't on streaming platforms e.t.c. rather than pulling from Spotify & Apple Music entirely.

Re: Justice at Spotify

#379

Post by bogomipz »

metajack wrote: post #93
antihero wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a problem generally in the music industry?

Music rights are split into two traditionally, the songwriting copyright and the mechanical reproduction right. Previous to the internet, media sales mostly went to the labels who held hte mechanical rights and songwriting copyright was earned directly to the artist. So if you bought a CD the label gets paid, if you play a song on the radio an artist gets paid. The music industry lawyers were incredibly smart when th…

>" Previous to the internet, media sales mostly went to the labels who held hte mechanical rights and songwriting copyright was earned directly to the artist."So if you bought a CD the label gets paid, if you play a song on the radio an artist gets paid.

This is not correct. Mechanical royalties have always belonged to the songwriter. A record label pays mechanicals to a songwriter's publishing company who then passes it on to the songwriter. When a record label sells a record that contains a song an artist owns the copyright to the record label must pay that songwriter a mechanical royalty. When that songs is played on the radio at least in the US the songwriter gets a performance royalty. The songwriter gets paid a royalty in both cases. The label as a mechanical license holder is obligated to pay out a mechanical royalty.

https://www.bmi.com/news/entry/Understanding_Mechanical_Roya...

Re: Justice at Spotify

#380

Post by HeyZuess »

> We are asking Spotify to raise the average streaming royalty from $.0038 to a penny per stream. Doing so would give artists a better chance at making a living from their art, and begin to restore the public valuation of music.

The public valuation of music is that it is a commodity, and yes while it would be nice to make a living from art it would then be a product.

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