Streaming Services Must Hike Songwriter Payments Nearly 50%, Court Rules (bloomberg.com) 88
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.
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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.
2c for you and 30c for the payment processor (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Other than the lack of a widely used multi-site micropayment service that respects viewers' privacy.
You could use satoshis [bitcoin.it]. They are currently worth about a hundredth of a US cent, so can be used for very small transactions.
Of course, there is also a $30 blockchain transaction fee, and it takes a week to clear, so it isn't a perfect solution.
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Reddcoin or Dogecoin would be perfect for that.
SOunds like a Beatle's song (Score:2)
Tax Man
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Other than the lack of a widely used multi-site micropayment service that respects viewers' privacy.
Actually, coinminers could do that easily. The problem is sorting out how much of your cpu usage is fair. I would argue that anything that uses roughly the same or less than the energy that it takes to stream an automatically playing audio ad (no video) in real-time.
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There's an issue of mental cost. Even if it's only 2 cents, the reader has to decide if it's worth it. Maybe they only have six cents left in a bundle and don't want to bother with refilling it. The money is not really the obstacle.
http://nakamotoinstitute.org/s... [nakamotoinstitute.org]
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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 actuall
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" a web page I have coded"
Oh, is this *your* page? Or your clients'?
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Have you heard music from the past ten years?
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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)
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"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.
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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?
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Apparently the Copyright Royalty Board, and say your work was an 'artistic interpretation performance'.
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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
Good thing we don't have Royalty in the USA (Score:2)
or are they talking about the Kanas City team named after Lourde's song
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If the money really goes to songwriters... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... 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.
One could be fairly ambiguous with the title "artist", but songwriter I would hope would be pretty damn specific from a legal perspective, and focus the rewards on those who actually deserve it.
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... songwirters are special snowflakes who deserve to get paid forever for a few hours/days/months of work..
Unlike publishers who sit back and make money off the work of others.
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Publishers do an important job in the process.
The problem is that they essentially get to choose their own percentage when signing an artist, and unsurprisingly choose to benefit themselves greatly at the cost of everyone else involved. Basically anyone who gets to decide on their own wages (these guys, corporate board members, etc) is going to end up with a significantly larger fraction of the pie than they deserve. But that doesn't mean they do nothing or deserve none of the pie.
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The natural order is the hunter-gatherer, who only works a few hours a day. However that can only support a few tens of millions of people on the Earth.
You need farming, which requires security from non-producers or the effort doesn't get made.
Forget all other definitions of civilization you've read, by hacks all. Civilization is the thwarting of the hunter-gatherer impulse so humanity can be secure in longer-term efforts.
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Civilization is the act of living in cities. Anything else is just a bonus.
Re: If the money really goes to songwriters... (Score:2)
Afaik sedentary agriculture is a universal requirement for having cities.
Happy to be corrected with an historical counterexample, if you know of one.
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Upon that basis copyright is entirely artificial, a fraud, the artificial ability to sell an item more than once beyond it's initial creation, a lie based upon greed. You get paid for the perfomance, that is all beyond that is entirely unnatural. So you allow limited restrictive selling, to promote development of worth while content, for only that reason, promote development of socially worth while content. Otherwise you are using artificial means for no other reason than sheer unadulterated greed, putting
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...IIRC Michael Jacksons rights to many of his songs, which he also wrote afaik...
Michael Jackson also owned the rights to Beatles songs at one point.
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... songwriter I would hope would be pretty damn specific from a legal perspective ...
Since it was a publishers' association that brought the case to court, I'm not optimistic. I'd really like to be wrong, though. It wouldn't not be the first time I've heard about publishers diverting a lot of the money to themselves while saying it is going to artists.
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My concern is that the publishers and "music catalog owners" will get an overwhelmingly large share of the money
Speaking as an artist, I can tell you that the publishers do get a huge share of at least the compulsory license royalties, This is because, by law, compulsory royalties are collected by organizations operated by the publisher associations. Besides the publishers' "cuts", these organizations also take a percentage as a processing fee and require artists to pay "annual membership dues". Any royalties intended for artists who don't pay said dues are kept by the organizations.
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Yeah, most of the articles on this emphasize "songwriters", but when you look into the details, it's actually the labels and publishers who get an increased percentage and if someone who actually wrote or performed the song gets any more money it'll mostly be because of the details of their contract after the labels and publishers get their cut. So to call this an increase for "songwriters" is fairly misleading. At best, an increase for rights-holders and music distribution/promotion managers.
Spotify and Pandora Should Closedown (Score:2)
Let the music industry try to make their own streaming service. I'd love to see the crap that produces.
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The music industry should closedown the music it sends to Spotify and Pandora.
Let the streaming industry try to make their own content. I'd love to hear the crap that produces.
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Whoever wins, we lose.
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It's hard to get away from them entirely, given that (for example) the majority of radio stations in the country are owned by them, but I do my best. I flip the radio off, plug my phone into my car by 3.5mm cable (no Apple tax either), and listen to whatever MP3s and FLACs I damn well please. Plenty of it's made by people with no industry affiliation I paid directly, or by dead people, or people who have chos
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See also: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon...
My prediction, should they try this, is exactly what happened to video streaming services. They would make a modest amount of good quality music that, apart from one or two minor hits, essentially nobody will listen to because it's too niche or only those who use their particular service has a chance to hear it.
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I think we're already hearing it. But, if you get into the science of it, you'll find that it is what the mainstream user wants.
As the traditional music industry has lost control, music has been gradually becoming simpler, louder, and more homogenous. Why? Because there is no elitist industry determining what we get to hear for us. The mainstream users are finally getting the upper hand and they don't want to hear what more musically "gifted" people say is good.
There are many fields or aspects of culture th
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music I pay attention to has been gradually becoming simpler, louder, and more homogenous
FTFY. More music of all sorts is generated. But without the gatekeepers telling you what you should like, you have to put in the effort to search it out yourself. And frequently as you note, short-term "popular" songs are not the same as long-term "good" songs.
Of course a lot of the websites don't make it particularly easy. Their algos will certainly take into account the things you've marked as "Like" (or whatever they call it in their system,) but it also takes into account things like "most popular"
"insufficiently uncompensated" (Score:1)
Well, that sounds easy enough to fix.
Re: "insufficiently uncompensated" (Score:2)
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Check your contract with him. It'll indicate whether or not you're owed anything.
Money breakdown (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Brilliant (Score:2)
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.
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Musicians have always made their money on concerts. Thats one of the reasons The Grateful Dead never gave a shit about bootlegs. The draw and money was you paying to come see them. These days thats too much work. Musicians, and I use that term very generously, these days want to release an album and then go party and buy shit to show their bling.
Music just isn't what it used to be. I look at the top charts and I struggle to find one that even plays an instrument. I haven't been to a concert since the 90's b
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"... if you crave music, you can easily raid your parents or grandparents record collections...."
What?
Clearly, we missed something that needs to be immediately legislated away. OBVIOUSLY handling music to your children is EXPLOITING desperate musicians.
Thanks for the reminder.
- Your friends,
The RIAA
Free market (Score:1)
"Songwriter" or "copyright holder" ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Always "of revenue" never "of profit" (Score:2)
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.
killing the golden goose? (Score:2)
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.
Massive overreach (Score:1)
Why is the Government Mandating This? (Score:2)