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Music

Songwriters Are Getting Drastically Short-Changed In the Music-Streaming Economy, Study Shows (variety.com) 184

Posted by BeauHD from the imbalanced-payment-structures dept.
According to a new report by industry analysts Mark Mulligan and Keith Jopling of Midia Research, songwriters are getting drastically short-changed in the music-streaming economy. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The 35-page report, which is available here for free, lays out both the history of this dilemma and some (admittedly difficult) proposed solutions, but what may be unprecedented is the way that it lays out how skewed against songwriters the new music economy is. A handful of the many statistics from the study follow:

- The global music industry revenues (recordings, publishing, live, merchandise, sponsorship) fell by 30% in 2020 due to the combined impact of COVID-19 and a recession
- Streaming has created a song economy, making the song more important than ever, yet music publisher royalties are more than three times smaller than record label royalties
- Streaming will bring further strong industry growth, reaching 697 million subscribers and $456 billion in retail revenues, but the royalty imbalance means that label streaming revenue will grow by 3.3 times more than publisher streaming revenue
- The current royalty system assumes all songs are worth the same - they are not - and rewards poor behavior that dilutes artist and songwriter royalties
- Music subscribers believe in the value of the song: twice as many (60%) state that the song matters more than the artist, than think the artist matters more (29%)
- They also believe that songwriters should be remunerated properly: 71% of music subscribers consider it important that streaming services pay songwriters fairly

In a section titled "The Songwriter's Paradox," it lays out the ways that the song has become more important than ever, but, paradoxically, the songwriter has less income and influence:

- Big record labels have weaponized songwriting: In order to try to minimize risks, bigger record labels are turning to an ever more elite group of songwriters to create hits.
- The emergence of the song economy: The audience has shift its focus from albums to songs.
- Writing and production are fusing: As music production technologies have become more central to both the songwriting process and to the formation of the final recorded work, there has been a growing fusion of the role of production with writing. This has led to a growing body of superstar writer-producers.
-The industrialization of songwriting: Record labels are reshaping songwriting by pulling together teams of songwriters to create "machine tooled" hits - finely crafted songs that are "optimized for streaming." While the upside for songwriters is more work, the downside is sharing an already-small streaming royalties pot with a larger team of creators and co-writers.
- Decline of traditional formats: Songwriters have long relied upon performance royalties from broadcast TV and radio. However, as the audiences on these platforms migrate towards on-demand alternatives, performance royalties face a long-term decline. Similarly, the continued fall in sales means fewer mechanical royalties for songwriters.
- Streaming royalties: The song is the first in line culturally but it is last in line for streaming royalties. Of total royalties paid by streaming services to rights holders, between a fifth and a quarter is paid for publishing rights to the song. Labels are paid more than three times higher than publishers on streaming. An independent label artist could earn more than three thousand dollars for a million subscriber streams, whereas a songwriter could expect to earn between $1,200 and $1,400, and even then, only if they are the sole songwriter on the track. On average, songwriters will therefore earn between a third and a half of what artists do. After proposing a series of solutions, such as implementing "fan-centric licenses" and revised streaming prices, the report concludes: "What is clear is that today's' song economy is not working as it should and that everyone across the value chain will benefit from a coordinated program of change."
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Songwriters Are Getting Drastically Short-Changed In the Music-Streaming Economy, Study Shows More

Songwriters Are Getting Drastically Short-Changed In the Music-Streaming Economy, Study Shows

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  • Oh noes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @08:03AM (#61293584) Homepage Journal

    I'd rather hear singers sing their own songs anyway.

    There have been some great songs written by others. But also, virtually all throwaway pop songs fall into this category. I'm willing to lose one in order to get rid of the other.

    It seems like the best fix for this problem is to get rid of music labels, which are frankly not valuable in this era, let alone needed. They exist to collect profits and they have seldom acted honorably, at least in terms of percentage of artists represented.

    • Without labels, how will we know who are the hot artists we should be listening to?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Mariah Carey made a killing off her Christmas song because she was a writer.

      Streaming is the new normal which obviously has different economics than buying physical recording. Complaining is like wanted to pay people to type our letters on a manual typewriter

      In particular an artist gets paid one for a record sale. They get paid every time for streaming. An artist gets paid once for the thousands of people listening to the radio. They get paid for each person that streams.

      This is not to say there are

    • Re: Oh noes (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thomst ( 1640045 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @09:52AM (#61293958) Homepage

      drinkypoo opined:

      I'd rather hear singers sing their own songs anyway.

      There have been some great songs written by others. But also, virtually all throwaway pop songs fall into this category. I'm willing to lose one in order to get rid of the other.

      I don't think you understand just how many of the great recordings you've enjoyed throughout your life were not written by the artist who had the hit.

      As just one example, let's take Love Hurts [wikipedia.org]. It was written by, Boudleaux Bryant, one of the most prolific country songwriters of all time. (Between them, he and his wife held more than 24,000 copyrights on songs they wrote separately and together. Neither of them had a hit record that they themselves appeared on in their more-than-40-year careers.)

      Bryant wrote the song specifically as a single for the Everly Brothers (although it was not commissioned by them or their manager, he had them in mind as he wrote it). They recorded and released it as an album track in 1960 to general indifference from country radio stations, and extremely modest sales of the record.

      Roy Orbison recorded and released it in 1961 (because the first authorized recording of a song has a worldwide exclusive window of a year before anyone else can legally cover it). When he re-released it as a double A side (with Running Scared), it made it to number 5 on the country charts, but it was never one of his most popular releases.

      Jim Capaldi (later of the band Traffic) recorded and released it as a single in 1964. It hit #4 in the UK, but barely charted elsewhere.

      Then, in 1974, Nazareth recorded it as a rock ballad, and it became an international monster hit for them, reaching #8 on the U.S. pop charts, and winning a permanent spot on "classic rock" radio and streaming playlists. If you, personally, have heard any of the previous versions, I'd be mildly surprised, but I'll bet a shiny, new, Ohio quarter that Nazareth's version is going through your head right now, because it's such a freakin' earworm.

      Many others have covered the song, but only Cher hit the Top Ten - and she had to take two swings at it to loft it there (with what was essentially a straight cop of Nazareth's arrangement).

      The singer-songwriter model didn't really take off until The Beatles took over rock'n'roll in 1963 (in Britain and Germany) and '64 (in the rest of the world). (And, yeah, Buddy Holly was the first rock star to write all his own material, but the rest of the industry did not at all follow his example, until the Fab Four changed the paradigm).

      There are plenty of other examples of artists whose catalogue of hits is pretty much all authored by other people - and not just the crap factory sausage the industry has been grinding out since the 1990's. And it's worth keeping in mind that professional songwriters rarely manage hits with their own material. Most of 'em toil in profound obscurity their entire professional lives.

      The publishing royalty game in the USA has always been tilted toward screwing the songwriter and enriching his/her/their publishing company, instead. Streaming-era royalties have made things distinctly worse - except for the producer/songwriter crowd that pumps out material written and arranged specifically to create hit singles for solo female dance music and hip-hop artists.

      It sucks rocks - and, by dismissing recordings by everyone except singer-songwriters, you're basically advocating for the extinction of professional songwriter as a career class ...

    • Labels still have a major role and huge amount of influence over the industry. They are tremendously powerful marketing and promotion agencies, and artists are still not likely to come to great prominence in a very-crowded, competitive area without the support of marketing and promotion. You can make great music without a label. You can even try to sell it, and might make a living. But the mega-stars pretty much all have major labels running their marketing and promotion.

    • I'd rather hear singers sing their own songs anyway.

      Virtually all throwaway pop songs fall into that category, but so does an even larger proportion of classical music. Just because all bad X has some people does not imply that something with that property is bad. Otherwise why not reject every piece in C major for the same reasons (in favor of D flat minor of course, the saddest of all keys).

    • "I'd rather hear singers sing their own songs anyway."

      This is just pretentious nonsense. You're enjoying a performance, whether that was created entirely by the performers or had other contributing members makes very little difference to anyone's actual enjoyment. Generally there is a separation between directors, screen writers, and actors and only a very small number of people have been competent in multiple roles in the film industry. People specialize even within the entertainment industry and there's n

  • "The industrialization of songwriting" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @08:11AM (#61293612) Journal

    This is nothing new at all. Tin Pan Alley [wikipedia.org] began well over a century ago.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by k6mfw ( 1182893 )

      I was thinking this video "Why is Modern Music so Awful?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] illustrating many songs using same methods and which it's said just one guy writes most of the songs sung by Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry.

      It is also said need to get away from the big name record companies and venture out to clubs and individual bands.

  • Weaponize... (Score:5, Informative)

    by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @08:16AM (#61293636)

    Big record labels have weaponized songwriting: In order to try to minimize risks, bigger record labels are turning to an ever more elite group of songwriters to create hits.

    "Weaponized" is not synonymous with "optimized," "streamlined," "monetized," or "industrialized." It is, however, a good rage-bait word to fire up emotions, especially among liberals whose moral foundations rest almost exclusively on care/harm judgments.

    Guess what: all "creative" big business draws on the talents of a small number of heavy hitters. There are probably less than 200 influential news and opinion writers in the US with bylines at maybe a dozen or fewer publications. Out of tens of thousands (or more) journalists and hundreds upon hundreds of newspapers, magazines, and electronic/web media companies.

    Emotional language removed, this phenomenon is known as Pareto's principle. And it's not a weaponization of anything.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      Care/Harm is the only paradigm you need. All capitalism is care/harm but along a specific axis. You haven't removed the paradigm, merely obscured it.

      And, no, I wouldn't regard it as optimized. It'd regard it as a cynical cash cow. If it were, indeed, optimized, singers wouldn't claim writing credits they haven't earned, writers WOULD get the credits they have earned, and payments would not go primarily to people who do nothing at all.

      Marko was rather more blunt, but the principle is the same. Or do you rega

      • No, care/harm is not the only paradigm you need. If it were, cultures that elevate care/harm utilitarianism above all else would have dominated the world.

        That isn't what happened.

        In fact many "successful" societies are rather cruel and unforgiving places.

        America is successful by many metrics, but if you make too many mistakes, you've got nowhere to go but down. You probably won't starve, but if you don't swim, you'll sink and not even good pedigree will save you (this is derisively referred to as downward m

    • Hmmm. If that's the case then why does Foxnews utilize the same rage bait words in their article titles? That's because... wait for it... the rage baiting works on both sides of the fence. It's a human thing, not a political spectrum thing.

      • Re:Weaponize... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @10:23AM (#61294086)

        The difference between most liberals and most conservatives is that while they both are sensitive to care/harm rage bait, the moral foundations of liberals are almost exclusively based on care/harm while the moral foundations of conservatives include care/harm in roughly equal proportion to fairness/cheating, loyalty, sanctity, freedom, and authority/rebellion.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        So while a liberal sees this story and (probably) thinks "zomg oppression!1one" and stops there, conservative also thinks
        -it's *fair* that top performers generate most of the revenue and therefore get most of the work
        -it's good the labels are loyal to their most productive talent
        -it's good that there's an objective standard of what a "good song" is and that it's rewarded accordingly
        -no one is forcing people into songwriting; poor performers have the freedom to try their luck in another line of work

        and so forth. So the rage bait works less.

        The fox news rage bait tends to hit the fairness/cheating, loyalty (to founding principles), sanctity (of our traditions and economic and legal systems), and liberty (gubmint gonna oppress ya) buttons more than just the care/harm buttons. But liberals (for the most part) only understand care/harm so they see Fox News and interpret it as care/harm, except they see the victim and oppressor reversed from what they see on CNN and MSNBC, are confused, and conclude that they're seeing nonsense, when they're really just morally blind to the buttons being pushed.

        Generalizations, of course, but useful ones if a discussion (as opposed to a name-calling contest) is in order.

        • Interesting. But contrary to what your saying your link clearly puts care/harm *and* fairness as the primary concerns of liberals.

          "A simple graphic depicting survey data from the United States intended to support moral foundations theory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kisai ( 213879 )

          No no.

          Liberals care about "care/harm" because the news is often focused through the lens of "unequitable/uneven/unfair", where as conservatives are are focused through the lens of "moral failing"

          Compare:
          Liberals see homeless people as those who have mental health, drug addiction, or family issues that prevent them from getting help due to the shame of being labeled so. Liberals want to give them the tools necessary to get a job, and get them off the street, but usually draw the line at letting them into THE

          • If you don't understand any of the other moral axes, this is exactly the kind of paranoid delusion and misapprehension you fall into.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by tragedy ( 27079 )

              It's sort of laughable that you see the details of the article as demonstrating that the music industry has any loyalty to songwriters and performers. I mean, I suppose it's a tossup between the movie industry and the music industry for which is worse, but they're terrible.
              Anyway, the graph in the article you link does not seem to agree with your assertion. It seems to show that liberals value both fairness and care/harm more than conservatives, but also that care/harm is the most important axis for both co

              • You're doing it too. You're explicitly mapping concepts that are abstract for you into concepts you concretely understand...and are fooling youtself into thinking you do.

                A distinction between care/harm and fairness/cheating is that while the former looks for a dichotomy between a victim and an aggressor, the latter attempts to quantify that and can recognize that both parties can wrong each other.

                For instance, care/harm would say "the record company is harming Joe Blow by not paying enough for the rights to

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by tragedy ( 27079 )

                  You're doing it too. You're explicitly mapping concepts that are abstract for you into concepts you concretely understand...and are fooling youtself into thinking you do.

                  No, I'm recognizing that the Wikipedia page you're linking to is a description of one theory among many. A theory in the social sciences, no less. That means a bunch of classifications and lines that someone came up with more or less arbitrarily. Sure, it sounds good, but every part of it could really be rolled into just he one category of care/harm. Or other terms entirely could be used and it might well have just as much value. You're basically acting like this is the one true theory. From my perspective,

                  • I didn't say it was all the truth, but what I did say is that it's a useful approximation to truth. The axes are not orthogonal, almost every human decision along any of those axes maps onto some nonzero value along the others. Whoopdeedoo social science isn't physics or pure mathematics.

                    I think the idea of mathematical truth is sacred. I think the fact that if I say pi=4 I will objectively get the wrong answer and it's knowable ahead of time is sacred. And it terrifies me that a large number of people (som

                    • Just to be clear, does this still hold if your neighbor paid for that bigger house and nicer car with money that came to them through some sort of social program with money that comes from taxes?

                      That depends on what the program is and whether it's something like a child tax credit or mortgage/rent deduction that's available to everyone in some capacity or a subsidy to purchase a Tesla that in practice taxes the many to give a small discount for a luxury car to a rich guy who could have any car he wants without me forcibly chipping in for it.

                      But in general, I won't get worked up over Warren Buffett paying half the tax rate on more than twice what I make if that's your question.

                    • There's different kinds of "welfare." Some of it, like Social Security, is payed out to everyone past a certain age, so if my 66 year old neighbor is retired and his Social Security check puts him into Lexus territory where he might otherwise be driving a Toyota, I can't say I'd be bothered.

                      If, however, my neighbor is unambiguously able-bodied but chooses to not work and somehow manages to collect enough welfare payments to live better than me, I'd consider it a form of theft.

                    • Of course, the failure to recognize that things like unemployment and wealth disparity are often structural is also an extreme wingnut position

                      The mirror image of that statement is the observation that failure to recognize that what we call "structural" inequality is a reflection of the diversity in human talents, work ethic, and yes intelligence is just as much of a wingnut position. Whether you're denying the cause or the effect, you're denying an empirically observed fact that holds in all large societies: whether laissez faire libertarian utopias where top-hat wearing capitalists buy and sell little Tiny Tim's future and Man exploits his Fello

                    • Tosh! Structural unemployment (and inequality, I suppose) happens to people due to factors behind their control, ...
                      So if this isn't a racist thing, are you trying to say that the vast majority of people should just be left to die in ditches or what?

                      I'm saying that people have agency beyond the circumstances of their birth. If the coal dries up, those people have a responsibility to themselves and to their children to make a go of something else.

                      While some people will be "trapped" in mortgages, you have to acknowledge that human beings have found solutions to worse problems for themselves and their families. Entire cultures are built on the young travelling far and wide to earn some money and either send it back home or come back and invest it back hom

                    • All of that is just more philosophy and pop-psychology, just like the moral philosophy you were quoting before. It contains ideas, but should never be taken too seriously.

                      I agree with the "should not." You seem to be missing that too many people *are* taking it quite seriously to the point of teaching elementary school children that they are personally responsible for all the sins committed by people to whom they bear a superficial resemblance and/or share a common ancestry with.

                    • If the proffered answer to one kind of propaganda is its mirror image, count me out. If the answer is the mirror image propaganda with the label "truth," then count me out and fuck you.

                      Perhaps I have the luck of having gone through the public school system in the late 90s at a unique point where the pendulum was squarely at dead center and was told that nearly all the great men to whom we dedicate monuments had unfortunate and regrettable aspects to their lives.

                      Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves as he was w

                    • Columbus was the one whose voyage set off the settlement of what became the US. You remember the guy who did it first. Whether you invest your entire identity in that guy is your choice. I don't recommend it most of the time, but it happens.

                      As for Columbus day being invented recently...well yes and no. Our federal district, a South American country, and a whole host of historical and sociological and anthropological concepts were named in recognition of Columbus as the putative discoverer of the New World l

                    • If you pay attention to what the woke types say in classics departments at universities, you could be forgiven for thinking that July and August are next on the chopping block. Renaming the months in honor of Boudica would be a good guess but then you have to remember that as a native of the British Isles she probably didn't have as much melanin content as seems to be desired these days for an honor like that.

                      Columbus wasn't the only great man in our collective history who was guilty of deplorable crimes. T

                    • Exactly the point. What makes him so special? Why does he get a special celebration? Also, what is actually lost by rededicating that celebration day to something else? If, as you say, the importance of Columbus was his role in the settlement of the Americas and the US, who has a more important role than the people who had already settled the area for thousands of years before Columbus merely passed nearby?

                      What makes him special un regard to his name in particular being used is that through luck and good PR, his voyage was the one that got the most attention from the most influential state and non-state actors in the early 16th century.

                      As for why celebrate or even commemorate with state backing? Same reason we celebrate Thanksgiving and Independence Day. Our cultural norms and intellectual traditions and our system of government is that of a settler society with roots in Europe. As the woke left likes to remi

  • Capitalism was not created to elevate songwriters out of poverty.
    • What does capitalism say about taking the product of someone's work without paying for it, and then selling it yourself?
      • Capitalization in the US? It's illegal.

      • Three (Score:2)

        by nnet ( 20306 )
        3. Profit!

      • If capitalism could say anything, probably "That's awesome! Good for you!".

        Capitalism isn't about free trade, nor is it about open markets - it's about collecting rent on stuff you own, rather than working.

        It's alluring - there's a reason we decided to finance the creation of music by turning abstract ideas into capital objects, e.g. "copyrighted phonograms". Everyone dreams of living of royalties. But it will never work for the many.

    • Capitalism was not created to elevate [insert profession here] out of poverty.

      Which is why we're having stories like this. [slashdot.org]

      All fun and games till it happens to you.

    • You can certainly have capitalism while giving artists a fair deal.

      • My idea of fair and your idea of fair are mutually exclusive. We agree on a price we both can live with and move from there. No one is forcing the exchange to occur. If you think my song is crap, don't buy it. If I don't think you're paying me what it's worth, I won't sell to you. I don't want to hear your life story and you don't want to hear mine every time we exchange currency for lyrics. This compartmentalization enables the economy to function. If every transaction came with a plea for mercy/beneficenc

  • 20th Century Fluke (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HanzoSpam ( 713251 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @08:36AM (#61293690)

    Performing arts never did pay very well. The outsized paychecks artists were earning in the 20th century were a fluke of the invention of recording technologies, coupled with the ability to create commoditizable units (records, films).

    This is just a return to normal. Artists will have to go back to earning their livings by putting butts in seats rather than selling plastic disks. Possibly regrettable (if you're an artist), but certainly nothing new.

    • The majority of musicians, even the big names, have to do this. Only a few, probably under 100, really earned enough money just from selling LPs and CDs that they didn't have to tour.

    • Artists will have to go back to earning their livings by putting butts in seats rather than selling plastic disks.

      Can we please stop calling music performers "artists". The vast, vast majority of them are nothing even remotely close to artists. They are entertainers following a formula, and nothing more. That doesn't mean they aren't entertaining, as the formula has been refined over many years to produce the high probability of commercial success. But it is not art. It is business.

      The term "artist" has been propagandized by the music industry to elicit emotional attachment to the business of making commercial music, m

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

        Can we please stop calling music performers "artists". The vast, vast majority of them are nothing even remotely close to artists.

        Horseshit. Every music artist you can name from your formula make up barely a rounding error of actual performing musicians out there. Turn off the radio and go to a concert that isn't advertised whatever crappy pop station you got your ideas from. The overwhelming majority of music is not by formula, just the overwhelming majority you hear on the radio.

    • Putting "butts into seats"? You mean like the one Covid-19 put a big dent in? At least "selling plastic disks" is safer from a health standpoint, and a lot more global than "butts into seats".

      • Musicians were far from the only profession hit hard by COVID. Global pandemic disasters notwithstanding they are right. Making a living off of selling records is an aberration. The historical normal is through concert revenue. If musicians have a problem with this then they can always pick another profession. Nobody has a right to a leisurely job where they don't have to work every day. That's a privilege.

    • The same argument can be made with code monkeys.

      • Lets call them "entertainers" because darn if their arguments for being special and the rest of us aren't is entertaining.

  • Stop streaming (Score:5, Insightful)

    by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @08:47AM (#61293714) Homepage

    Just release your tracks direct to consumer. The reach is initially limited, but the margins are insane. If you can't find an audience without the streamers, then who really deserves that money?

    • Just release your tracks direct to consumer.

      Tracks? Did you misspell "sheet music"?

      The reach is initially limited, but the margins are insane.

      The reach for sheet music is indeed very limited.

  • Get a real job (Score:3)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @08:47AM (#61293716)

    There's plenty of labels, songwriter aren't suppressed by monopoly but purely by their negotiating power.

    The market has changed, adapt. All this emotive language might play to the naive, but it won't change a thing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      The big problem is people just refuse to accept there value of these culture products simply isnt and never really was there.

      There is this wildly romantic view form the mid 20th century through the late 90s of big acts getting super rich and living this glamours life. They seem to miss all the people who tired and never got noticed.

      The same is true for literature and visual arts, you just have to slide the time window around a bit.

      The fact is there after the distraction of two world wars ( and a lot of pro

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      Oh god, the fantasy of the wide open prairie of the "open market". Get over yourself. It doesn't exist. Not in music (see Marko's resignation post), not in IT, not in anything. The fantasy that if it's isn't a monopoly that you can go anywhere is bullshit.

      • If it's not a monopoly the government isn't going to use their guns to change the market for them. Where they want to go is up to them.

        Marko had made enough money from this evil market to comfortably fuck around for a while, others can get a real job and do it as a hobby.

    • There's plenty of labels, songwriter aren't suppressed by monopoly but purely by their negotiating power.

      You're kind of right. It's a question of supply and demand. There are far, far more very talented artists - of all kinds - than there is (well-paying) demand for them. It's that simple.

      It really doesn't matter how good a songwriter you are, how good a guitarist you are, how good a sculptor you are, how good a painter you are. You're competing for audience against a massive number of people who are roughly as talented as you are. Statistically-speaking, you're not going to get rich doing what you love

  • One interesting suggestion I've seen is to replace the current model ("one big pot of money distributed to rights holders in proportion to their share of the total numbers plays") with a new one: Money from each customer is distributed to rights holders in proportion to their share of that customer's plays.

    This would give more money to many of the artists with a smaller, more grown up following - and less to the ones played on repeat 24/7 by other groups of customers.

  • ISRC and ISWC (Score:3)

    by ktakki ( 64573 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @09:03AM (#61293770) Homepage Journal

    An ISWC is an identifier attached to a musical work by a performing rights organization (BMI, ASCAP, etc).

    An ISRC is an identifier attached to a sound recording by a record label or artist. It's contained in the metadata of a digital audio file like AAC or MP3.

    There is currently no way to correlate the two nor are there any plans to do so. This is an egregious oversight. The ISWC connects the musical work to the author. The solution is staring everyone in the face.

    Like the movie industry, writers get hind tit.

    Georg Frederic Handel used to take his composition students for pork sausages and beer after their lessons, saying "Pigs and composers are only appreciated after they're dead".

    k.

    • Georg Frederic Handel used to take his composition students for pork sausages and beer after their lessons, saying "Pigs and composers are only appreciated after they're dead".

      Handel was pretty well appreciated while he was alive. I also can't find any reference to him ever being a teacher.

  • Song Writers are anoymous (Score:5, Insightful)

    by oshkrozz ( 1051896 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @09:08AM (#61293776)
    Yes there are a few well known song writers, but it is the singer that sold the song. Having a good singer is what make people want to listen because they make it into reality.
    It is the same in any industry. The inventor is only as good as the sales person. Yes some inventors will be successful because their inventions are just that awesome, but many are not even known since they could never sell their product, and others take credit for it (Edison looking at you).
    Theoretical sciences are also the same, Einstein was just that awesome but there were thousands of pretty good people at his time that pushed theoretical physics forward.
    The song writer sure they are important, as is the person that does the mixing, the teachers that gave the singers voice lessons, the teachers that gave the musicians their abilities. The people that feed them, clothe them, and raise them ... do their parents also get a return on investment?
    Peter, Paul and Mary were far more popular in their time and were much more able to sell the songs of Bob Dylan than he ever would have, and most people have no idea their songs were written by him, in fact almost none of the songs were their own work, the music was however. Thus who really should get the largest share? not everyone is equal in making a song a popular reality.
    • Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary had the same manager, Albert Grossman. He was probably as responsible as them for any financial success. From wikipedia, Grossman charged his clients 25 percent commission (industry standards were 15 percent). He is quoted as saying, "Every time you talk to me you're ten percent smarter than before. So I just add ten percent on to what all the dummies charge for nothing."

  • There's nothing in one song that makes it intrinsically more valuable than another when it is remunerated by the play. The relative value of music is something reserved to selling a recurring license to play at one's leisure. If someone wears out their Taylor Swift CD by playing it on repeat until the neighbour came in and hit it with a hammer, then that CD may be more valuable than another which gets played once and never again. But a single song streamed once is no more or less valuable than any other.

    Wan

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      Not sure I agree. A CFD that allows you to design supersonic aircraft might only be run a few times because you don't need to run it more, a game might be run billions because it needs to run that many times. The CFD is the one with the value per run, the game is just bread and circuses until it is in mass consumption.

      You need to think of the system and the dynamics, not the frequency.

      • Not sure why you think engineering work of your own is even related to the discussion. It's not make once stream often. It's not typically done by an artist for a consumer. And it's not at all related to the same kind of market.

        $1.93. - The price of a 12 pack of eggs in China. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out what this has to do with anything. God knows I've tried the same with your example and came up completely empty.

  • ...Where you had to pay a royalty fee to the person who designed your car every time you drove it or your house every time you went inside it or your toilet every time you took a sh*t. Entertainment has a unique business model in that the content creators make money pretty much forever after the content is actually created. I say "has" but that's quickly changing to "had" because more and more of our daily lives are filled with things that we don't actually own but rather rent and you have to pay rent on

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      You pay for the act of using a car - road tax and fuel.
      You pay for the act of listening to a song.
      Ownership doesn't come into play there, although I'll agree we rent far too much and own too little.

      • You pay for the act of using a car - road tax and fuel.

        I pay those things to the people who provide those services, not to the designer, builder, or seller of the car.

        You pay for the act of listening to a song.

        No, I don't. I bought CDs.

    • Most products are "works for hire". The IP belongs to the entity that commissioned the design.

      This is what record labels are doing: Buying songwriter's rights wholesale and then shopping around for performers.

      • Most products are "works for hire". The IP belongs to the entity that commissioned the design.

        Not in the US, which is probably the main place you see the works made for hire doctrine. The Copyright Act is fairly clear. Typically a work made for hire is made by an employee in the course of their employment. Merely commissioning something doesn't count. Federal employment law is looked at if there's a question as to whether an employer/employee relationship existed. You'd think just hiring people and putting them on the payroll would be a common practice in the big copyright industries, especiall

  • ... rhyming is not a real profession.

  • The more they stay the same. The music industry can burn to the ground for all I care.

  • People who used to be able to hold an entire industry hostage no longer have the capability to do so. Boo-hoo.

  • I would like an option on Spotify to directly support the bands I like without Spotify taking a cut.
    I would gladly pay $10-20 or more to support bands I like

    • I would like an option on Spotify to directly support the bands I like without Spotify taking a cut.

      Are you insane? You want a company to create a service for you to use to skip paying them money for the service you want them to create for you to use.

  • 9 writers (Score:3)

    by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @02:13PM (#61294852) Journal

    Producer and all-around industry dude Rick Beato recently did a video [youtube.com] that touched on how songwriting has evolved in recent years.

    The video is about a Justin Bieber track ripping off some semi-obscure 80s song, but he touches on the fact that the Bieber tune was credited to 9 songwriters. Historically, you would rarely see more than 2 people credited as writers. He mentions that this kind of arrangement has became common in recent years.

    The fact that it supposedly takes 9 people to write a song, and it looks like they didn't even actually write it, indicates some serious fuckery.

  • The music industry's business model has evolved to where it is today and £10 seems to be the expected price for "all you can eat" music. I'm sure this will be subject to inflation over time, but when we consider that the cost of one CD used to be £10 then it's evident that the money isn't what it used to be.

    But let's take for a moment the figures quoted in the summary: $3,000 for the artist and $1,200-$1,400 for the songwriter per 1m streams. I researched but found it difficult to get an exact n

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