Spotify Hit with $150M Class Action Over Unpaid Royalties
billboard.com
billboard.com
I'd like to see this case actually go to court, if anything so that it would force all three parties - Lowrey, His Label(s)/Management/Publisher(s), and Spotify - to provide some documentation regarding how this system actually works. My understanding, for good or ill, is that Spotify points the finger at royalty collection societies / labels / publishers / etc when possible (and not forbidden by contract or NDA), and royalty collection societies / labels / publishers / etc tell artists to blame Spotify. I'm not fond of the murky arrangements what so ever!
Getting a good, clear understanding of the mechanics would be nice, well, for other artists like Lowery. Could this case show that Lowery's own management and labels haven't been doing their part to get him his money? I'm curious. Will the case ever go to court, or is it maybe more of an avenue to try and get a settlement check? I could see that happening too.
I might be in the minority as an independent, but I've been quite pleased with the reporting and transparency by Spotify, iTunes, et al by way of my distribution firm, and therefore have no real basis to feel compelled to try and join the suit.
>Some artists have clauses in their contracts to get a larger share of the streaming revenue, and some artists are still operating under CD-era contracts that only give them 15–20 percent of their streaming revenues.
I don't think it's right to lift the entirety of the comment from over at the Billboard site, but one person has already noted the Copyright when the files were on Spotify were attributed to what appears to be Lowery's label at the time. It's an interesting bit of investigation that I'm sure the Spotify team would pursue. I do get the feeling that Lowery doesn't have much of a "willful infringement" case when Spotify is, by outward appearances, setting aside proper monies to pay out when they get the right information. If that turns out to make Lowery's label look bad for agreeing to allow streaming and agreeing to the compensation being offered by Spotify (against his wishes?), I won't be surprised really.
Better still - what if Spotify turns out to be right, and he didn't provide the required information to Spotify to allow them to pay him his royalties, so his complaint is really with himself?
You're right though, if he's at fault for not getting himself paid, that'd get a chuckle out of me, and also another facepalm for an instance of a musician who should stick to the music part and not the businessman/activist part.
Both Spotify and the record companies are going to be in for a shellacking if they let this go to trial given that both of those parties are carrying on some very shady money games.
The NPR piece said they asked a copyright laywer to look up the copyright for that song, and it took ten minutes (the copyright holder had filed a copyright). Based on that piece, if I was the judge and jury, I would expect a company valued at over $8B to have done a better job, especially given how the penalties are structured.
His song was played over 20,000 times, for which he received no compensation. IIRC, the NPR piece said the max penalty is $150k per infringement. Ouch.
Nowadays, record labels are a PR-agency at best and should be compensated as such. Artists getting a 10-20% slice[1], the typical revenue-split, sounds like a rip-off to me.
A good artist, using Instagram/YouTube/FB/website + Spotify/Rdio for distribution doesn't need much help from a label. Sure, a producer, studio, PR manager and other staff is useful, but that doesn't motivate a 90% cut of profits (in my view).
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/artists-press-for-their-share-14...
Music, like a long distance telephone call, is basically free now. Technology has made these things incredibly cheap and the people who used to make money off this stuff have to find ways to restrict the supply using lobbying and lawsuits in order to make a profit. I think other industries are allowed to die a quicker death because they aren't so tied into the big media companies which have a lot of political power.
SoundExchange normally pays something like 50% to the copyright holder, 45% to the 'featured artist' and 5% to session musicians and the like for performance royalties (which is what it pays out for). [1]
SoundExchange is the organization set up to distribute royalties when performance royalties were brought to the US. They only are paid, and thus pay out for, digital music streaming, including cable TV, streaming radio like Pandora (when using the statutory license), and satellite radio.
In the case of an indie group that also owned the copyright, at least 95% of the royalties would flow to the members of the group itself.
I should note that there are other organizations like SoundExchange worldwide. PPL [2] is the British equivalent. There are also other organizations that deal with different rights, e.g. rights to the sheet music. The laws regarding each will vary considerably.
[1] http://www.soundexchange.com/artist-copyright-owner/digital-...
But please enlighten me if I'm wrong.
EDIT: These organizations also collect and distribute from and to other countries.
Studios know how to handle images. They know when and where to push something. They can tell musicians what will sell in 6/12/18 months. For instance, a good song today will still fail if it's theme/tempo/key doesn't mesh with the times or has too many similar competitors on the charts. Many artists have no grasp of such external factors. Studios may be evil, but they specialize in turning the good into the marketable.
Still, I'd like to argue that their value-add is much lower today, since they both distribution and marketing/outreach can be handled by the artist herself (more or less).
I remember an interview with Christina Aquilera about doing her first music video. The studio had people on set with reports on exactly what highschool girls in the target market were wearing, how they did their make-up. She was meant to look like the pretty girl at school, every school, not a model or red-carpet celeb with professionals doing their hair. That video was the result of hundreds of hours of market research. She was under no illusions about who defined her image. Net result: massive sales and filled stadiums.
Labels are especially helpful now, when PR job is a thankless grunt work involving a lot of know-how. Personally, I've worked with a couple of labels and promotion groups, and the amount of effort label puts into promotion has tremendous impact on the outcome.
Basically, there's almost no listeners who actively look for new artists and music that is outside of view of some spot of spotlight — and to get into that spotlight, you have to work. I'm not even talking about publications of scale of Pitchfork or xlr8r now; much smaller blogs get flooded with review requests and demos.
But most importantly, the kind of activity you have to do to actively sell yourself on social media is completely psychologically repulsive to a lot of artists. I've talked to a lot of people about it, and most agree that while they could see themselves pushing someone else's creations, doing it for themselves too often pushes one into apathy, self-doubt and depression.
The awesome stories that you hear about self-made success suffer from survivorship bias. Labels are there for a reason, and they deserve every penny that they take.
Edit: sorry, I missed your link. I get ~80% of my releases; didn't realize you were talking about the big dinosaur labels here.
And fans, stupidly, sometimes aren't supportive either.
There was an article recently talking about some very popular YouTube celebrities who are still waiting tables. And, when they tried to monetize their channel, got sreamed at by lots of fans.
It's a no win situation for artists.
If their favorite performer can't make a living, then the fans will just move to one of dozens (or hundreds or even thousands) of choices.
That same ease of entry that helped the Youtube performer gain thousands of viewers after posting a funny cat video will also let some other Youtube performer do the same thing.
It's a different world out there for artists, some for the better (it's easy to record your work and get it out there), some for the worst (it's also easy for thousands of others to do the same so you have to find a way to differentiate yourself).
Completely forgetting that the time spent to make something interesting isn't free.
I don't know about youtube celebs, but the notion that musicians can live off their music is basically laughable right now. No one I know even tries to do that, unless they're ready to perform three times a week in cities all over the world — it's usually just DJ sets (as live sets make logistics much harder), which aren't as stressful, but still. And it includes musicians with 10s and 100s of thousands of subscribers on SoundCloud, with constant media presence in publications like xlr8r, RA, pitchfork and others.
A lot of them get income from music, but it's usually writing soundtracks, sound design, running a label/promotion agency/party line, being an art director of a club, stuff like that. And it involves a lot of hard work apart from actually writing music.
For all of their successes they have many, many failures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_McGuinn
"and that to date [July 11, 2000 ], The Byrds had not received any royalties for their greatest successes, "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Turn, Turn, Turn" – they only received advances, which were split five ways and were just "a few thousand dollars" per band member"
The underlying economics here have changed from the 90s. Partly because of all the price fixing back then,[0] but mostly things have changed along the lines any economist would have predicted, once you add instant free duplication and teleportation of bits to the world.[1]
A right is a right, and Lowery makes great stuff so I want him to get some return. But it seems like he keeps starting fights with all the places trying new business models, trying desperately to fight against the economics. He's picking fights with the few holdouts still trying to trade music for actual money.
He's capsizing all the lifeboats because he's angry at the sinking ship. It's like he doesn't understand he's at sea.
[0] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2002-09-30-cd...
[1] ie, Price tends towards marginal cost. Overly simplistic maybe, but this is an awfully provocative case study: negligible marginal cost and pricing at effectively nothing.
The Spotify model even encourages people to not listen to music. Putting your music library on shuffle and turning off the speakers is the best way for a paying subscriber to get money to the bands they like. Streaming an excessive amount on mute also takes money from other bands that you don't like and redirects it to your favorites. Even better, sign up for an ad-supported account, play your favorites on mute, and the artists will get even more money per play.
It's a terrible model that rewards people for abusing it. Splitting your $10 among your bands is a much better model, but they won't do it because ads don't pay enough so they mix together ads and paid accounts so they can get more listeners. Spotify model is good for Spotify, but not for anybody else.
> when I pay 10 dollar's per month and all I listen to is Carsick Cars (my favorite Chinese indie band), still the majority of 10 dollars will go to Justin Bieber and Adele
... then it's also true that millions of subscribers are paying a tiny fraction of their subscription fee to Carsick Cars, even though they never listen to their music.
Mathematically, it's equivalent (I think) to you paying your entire subscription fee to Carsick Cars, and nobody else paying them anything. But the wording of one sounds fairer for some reason.
(It gets more complicated once you consider that some users are putting less money because they're on the ad-supported subscription.)
His most recent post does a pretty good job of pointing out where he stands on this issue: http://thetrichordist.com/2015/12/24/the-mother-of-all-frida...
Personally, I want to see Lowery make a few more bucks off of "Eurotrash Girl" and "Take the Skinheads Bowling," but his approach to the issue seems to have a take-no-prisoners vibe to it, which is too bad because it sort of undercuts a lot of the fairly valid points he might have. He's not afraid of going after listeners, which is a bummer because the listeners are probably less at fault in this case than the labels are. (He also looks like an older Chuck Johnson these days, which doesn't help matters on that front.)
No matter the complaints about tone or anything like that, we definitely need guys like Lowery making the case for artists. But he might win more support if he were to take some style tips from Taylor Swift [1] on the issue. Swift has done more on this whole issue than Lowery has and she hasn't once had to resort to making fun of an intern who doesn't buy CDs.[2]
[1] http://www.techtimes.com/articles/75173/20150813/taylor-swif...
[2] http://www.stereogum.com/1069672/david-lowery-on-file-sharin...
Why can't we put a clamp on the problem of every random artist thinking they've created something that lasts a few minutes and has more value than most people make in a year?
The entire system of copyright and recorded art needs to be abolished, and any music that is recorded instantly becomes the public domain. This would do away with many industries that serve almost no purpose for society, other than to attempt to extract value where no value has been created.
The conventional way for artists to make money should come from performance.
Though I suppose that there's some slim chance that our radio emissions (many of which are music) might be noticed by other stars after some number of years.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, just thinking out loud.
When you "buy" a CD/MP3/what-have-you, you're buying a license to that song, not "the song", which would be much, much more expensive. In fact, it's difficult to figure out how much the song is worth up-front, which is why there are generally licensing deals. That way the artist gets compensated according to how well the song does: if a lot of people like it, they make a lot of money. If nobody likes it, they make no money. Seems fair to me.
I guess a more accurate analogy would be if you designed a specific type of product and paid a carpenter to make it. Then you see him open a store that sells that item to a million people for 10x what you paid him, even though he directly ripped off your designs. He's profiting off of your work & ideas, with no compensation to you. Obviously this assumes that it's a novel idea, etc, but I think it's a bit more accurate.
Made by <Creator> + Enjoyed By <Person> = Endless Money for <Creator>
I might enjoying staring at a city skyline too, but that doesn't mean that I need to pay royalties to each and every architect that designed those buildings.
> if a lot of people like it, they make a lot of money. If nobody likes it, they make no money. Seems fair to me.
But for how long? 100+ years after the author is dead and buried? Seems a bit extreme.
This is way off. Music changes peoples lives. It defines generations. To many, it is one of the most important things in the world.
> The entire system of copyright and recorded art needs to be abolished, and any music that is recorded instantly becomes the public domain.
No way, artists deserve to be paid for their works.
> No way, artists deserve to be paid for their works.
I agree, but the fair market value of a digitized recording is evidently close to zero and in general too low to sustain an artistic career save for exceptional cases. The era in which a musician could support himself or herself via selling recordings has basically been a blip in the history of music. We can try to sustain this blip, which appears to be a sinking ship, or we can reinforce traditional models like patronage (e.g. Patreon, NEA, private endowments, etc.) and live performance.
Sure, but you can't discount that for most people, the majority of time spent listening to music, it is being used as a backdrop. I listen to music while I'm driving, while I'm working, while I'm working out, etc.
I certainly also spend time sitting down and really taking time to appreciate the music as an artform, but the majority of time it's just in the background. I think that's what the parent is saying.
Unfortunately for the artists, what they value their work at (living income) and what the market does (close to zero) is drastically different.
You can't will music to be worth something because you're nostalgic over times gone by.
Or they'll just pirate it.
>So I definitely think maybe they need to hike the price to $25 or $30 per month.
Spotify will charge what the market will pay. They think that $10 a month is the sweet spot, any more and they will lose more revenue in lost subscribers than they gain.
>Cable TV doesn't give you unlimited everything but we pay like 10x that per month and we still have to listen to the ads in many cases.
And cable TV is currently losing subscribers. I'm not sure that's a business model you want to emulate.
I'm a Spotify subscriber, and they can't go much over $10 a month or I'll just stop subscribing. Spotify's real value is that it's cheap and it's easier than piracy. With younger generations becoming more technical, the percentage of people able to download uTorrent and get on TPB is getting larger. The value of music is declining as free (though illegal) methods of getting it are getting easier, and as music is starting to take less of a focal point in our lives.
Music just isn't worth what it used to be.
I agree that music is incredibly valuable to us as a society. Ever since we crowded around the tribal campfire, our species has been almost pre-wired to appreciate music in this way. So the question I'd put forward, is how much of that value is created by the artists and how much of that value is created by the listeners? In the absence of the songs that "define generations" would we not have seen other songs fill the gap to define those generations? Or are those generation-defining songs so unique that, without them, there would be an unfilled void?
This is where I believe the current copyright laws err. While I'm genuinely posing the above questions, I've also mainly formulated my opinions on the answers to those questions and I believe that most of the value that you're recognizing in music comes from the fact that so many of us have, collectively, listened to the music rather than some inherent virtue of the music or skill of the artist. Once you accept that premise, it argues for things like vastly expanded non-commercial fair use rights or a loosening of the control that artists have to maximize the value realized by communities experiencing music together.
> artists deserve to be paid for their works
Most reasonable people would agree. Just how much and how often they're paid is an entirely different question and one where I strongly believe the artists (and record labels) shouldn't be the only ones with a say in the matter.
1. The $150,000 per song is a punishment amount, directly attributable to "willful infringement" which is, from my understanding, a pretty obvious bar to clear. Sharing a file on a mix CD and giving it to somebody for their birthday? Willful, but not really the intent of the law. Setting up a CD duplication shop and bootletting new releases to sell on street corners? That's the point of the very high dollar amount punishment. Society has basically determined that punishing infringement is supposed to cost a lot of money, so that would be a deterrent.
2. This is a completely fabricated problem, as not "every random artist" thinks their art is worth $150,000 per song until it's willfully used in an infringement format. Artists are pretty well aware that society thinks songs should basically be $0.99 to keep or very cheap to listen to through a retail/customer facing streaming service. However, if we substitute "every jackass record label" then you've got a much more valid point about the copyright system, because of how the record industry works.
3. Let's make a deal - we can abolish copyright on recorded music if you agree to abolish copyright on written computer code. After all, if you believe that the only time a musician should make money should come from performance, then I submit the only time a programmer or company should be paid for their software is during the hours it was created.
I'm all for copyright reform - limiting the ability to sign away rights to "no value" middlemen / hucksters like record industry conglomorates & putting very short protections on the created works (lifetime of artist only, impossible to transfer to outside corporation for renewal beyond artist's lifetime), but going that extreme is not preferable. I think my phrasing about music vs. software is really rough, but it's a tempting argument to hash out - if you want to throw out my baby with the bathwater, then I'm going to make sure yours is going along for the ride as well.
Where can I sign?
Damages per copyright infraction are certainly excessive, but your proposal seems to swing too far in the opposite direction.
It's normally used as the backdrop to a party, or exercising,
or some other such thing
I have nothing against those who simply don't connect deeply with the arts, but I take umbrage with the suggestion that the arts lack societal value. Centuries of music history (and art history, and literary history) offer far more profound benefits than mere backdrops and distractions, and that history is still being written.
It's rather sad how little cultural value music gets these days while a handful of billionaires churn out #1 pop hits every other week.
~50 years ago, musicians sparked the hippie movement which was largely a protest against the Vietnam war. This would soon transform into the angry 80s where the advent of electrical music created more industrious, louder, and often-angrier music. Then came the apathetic 90s where bands like Nirvana dominated with their "don't care" attitude.
Today, we have nothing. The last great band was Radiohead and yes I listen to a TON of music and love many bands, but I'm sorry Pink Floyd, Beatles, Dylan, etc.. were not just a backdrop to a party or exercise. They actually had something to say besides bitches, money, and sex.
Rap conveys the desires of the American urban youth, a desire for power, to escape, to join the degenerate holders of power and wealth in their chase for ever more money, cars, houses, and women.
And all through history people have been espousing about "bitches, money, and sex", just because it's in ebonics doesn't make it any less valuable as a means of expression or artistically.
It's easy to dismiss what comes from the ghetto, and yet often they are rapping about their very existences. And we all need to come to grips with being a part of a society which has fostered such lives and attitudes.
Of course there are club bangers too, and not every song is ever going to be full of meaning and depth, but I think discrediting an entire movement of music for the nostalgia of the hippies prior is a bit disingenuous.
Which I'm not doing though your straw-man argument was nice to read. In fact, I've often spoken the very same things you are. This is 2015 though and I'm afraid to tell you that most rap is not what you're talking about. The last great album that does exactly that is Illmatic in my opinion though you hear Kendrick's latest stuff and that's on-point too.
You don't get a moral blank check for growing up the ghetto. It's fine to rap about what you know, but it gets to the point of absurdity for most rappers who only know how to talk about bitchs. Am I supposed to stand aside and rally behind the virtues of big butts shaking on the TV 24/7 -- because it's from the ghetto and I just don't understand?
You're not seeing the full picture and though I enjoyed your tangent, I do not enjoy being written off as a nostalgic hippie. The hippies I'm apparently nostalgizing about were singing about ending the war -- what popular songs do that? What popular songs stop and make you think the way "Time" did by Pink Floyd?
No, the time when rappers actually rapped were more back in the day. I'll close out with one of my favorite verses by Big Boi that is basically what you're trying to say:
But they be making it seem
That my music and crime are a team
But I'm speaking the truth not dreams
So what in the fuck they mean
My lyrics ain't clean
Citation needed.
Or how about you try to find me a band in the last 20 years that released three indisputable classics:
- Kid A
- OK Computer
- Hail to the Thief
Anyway, listening habbits differ from 20 years ago. I agree people don't appreciate and relisten to a complete album as a whole like they used to, but there's so much quality and innovating music going on.
http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/radiohead VS http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/the_white_stripes
Listening habits and distribution have changed dramatically. The time where one band would rule the world and put a ton of effort into saying something because it was going to be a huge album release is over; now-a-days an artist you like a lot will release something and you're just like "oh ya? that's cool I'll check it out later"
Looking at the top hits, I still say it's sad though. The Biebers and Gagas rule this generation despite there being a plethora of good (maybe even great) bands that go unnoticed because it doesn't have the sugary pop hook that everyone needs for their low attention span.
I don't get the time to update it like I used to, but you can check out my personal RYM here: http://rateyourmusic.com/~joslin01
I love music man, but I definitely got a little bit of a gripe with the culture today.
Edit: Oh, now I see, you're complaining about the useless Bieber and Gagas of the world, so you're probably a small handful of years younger than I am. There were plenty of fantastic bands that predate the Bieber/Gaga era. I think your frame of reference is a bit narrow.
Now here comes you to his rescue, you white-knight you. You also seem to have an opinion worthy of a music critic ("okay"). That's great. Good for you. Go read some critics' opinions and go tell them they're all wrong and you know good music when you hear it and that Radiohead is just "OK". I really couldn't care less if you think another band is #1 or if a critic does -- just GENERALLY SPEAKING, Radiohead is probably the #1 band of the last 20 years. If you can find critical reception to another artist that is just as great if not better, good then you beat me.
Then there's me, oh poor me who doesn't know anything about the music world and thank God you're here to correct me. Just by your opening sentence ("I grew up listening to alternative music"), I probably have listened to 5x as much music as you. I've been in love with music since I was 13 religiously downloading and listening to as much as I can. You have no idea who I am, but you feel compelled to defend a pointless comment so you can patronize me.
For what it's worth, most people who don't like Radiohead or call them overrated, in my PRETTY DECENT amount of experience of talking with music lovers is that they're usually into metal. That wasn't some attack you overly-sensitive man, you.
You can't make any money playing live though, unless you're in Pearl Jam you're basically scraping by as a glorified beer salesman and it's a pretty shitty existence.
I hate this argument so much. It assumes that the value of the work is simply in the physical reproduction and not in the artistic expression. If it is too expensive for you then sure, don't spend your money on it, but what right do you have to say what something like that is worth?
About as much right as every other person who participates in the market.
I think that is a little extreme but I agree the system is way out of hand, specially in duration of copyright terms.
Copyright was supposed to allow artists to earn a living off their craft instead of relaying on being sponsored by the local nobility. It is not supposed to make you rich.
If only people wouldn't spend money on cheesy, raunchy music and distribute their spending more evenly to smaller-time, more interesting artists... but I don't know how to raise the level of discourse around that. I would love to hear a wider variety of music on the radio!
If you only had to pay the 99 cents or whatever per infringement, then no one would care, because you wouldn't have to pay much if you got caught.
"The conventional way for artists to make money should come from performance."
Who are you to say how someone else should make money?
Why can't we put a clamp on the problem of every random developer thinking they've created something that lasts a few minutes and has more value than most small countries make in a year?
The entire system of copyright and software licensing needs to be abolished, and any software that is written instantly becomes the public domain. This would do away with many industries that serve almost no purpose for society, other than to attempt to extract value where no value has been created.
The conventional way for developers to make money should come from becoming thought leaders on Twitter or maybe playing a few shows down at the bar.
But I agree with this, for very different reasons than yours:
> The conventional way for artists to make money should come from performance.
I've played violin professionally from the time I was 8 to present (36). I've only once participated in a professional recording for a couple of reasons.
1. Putting out a recording is even more difficult in the classical world than in the pop/rock/hiphop/whatever-is-accessible-right-now world. The market for classical violin soloist recordings is big enough to support about 15 or so string players at any given moment. So you have to be that good, and have those connections, and everything that goes into that. It's a very tiny world, and if your parents didn't live in the right music-centers of the world when you were a chile and couldn't afford 100k+ for an instrument and $300-500/hr for the right teachers, you are never going to be in that group.
Lots of people fall into that category, and still don't even make it close to the top. Or not even as close to the top as I did coming from Podunk, TX.
You can fund a recording yourself now. Especially now that I make literally 5 times my best income from a year working as a violinist doing software development.
But how are you going to market it? Who is going to buy it? It's a vanity project, that I've never had any interest in.
I know this is stretching the limits of on-topic-ness, but bear with me because of point 2:
2. Making a recording can do some good things for you. It can make money, for one thing. But it can also do some bad things for you.
Namely, it really wrecks the economics of your competition. Since the advent of recording technology and the post-production work that goes into every recording, you end up sounding much more perfect and amazing on the recording than you do in real life.
Every recorded performer since the 70s has been using this technology, not just people who never got famous like me. Itzak Perlman is one of the greatest violinists to ever live. He's up there with Heifetz and Paganini. He made one of the definitive modern recordings of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas for solo Violin. But even he averaged 4 edits per measure in post prod for that iconic recording. In one of the hairiest parts of the d-minor partita, he had over 32 splices in one measure.
That recording isn't an accurate representation of what he does live, which is--or was (he's getting fairly old now and doesn't sound so great live, but whatever)--amazing.
Making recordings like that leave you competing on quality with yourself. A competition you will always lose in a live performance.
In addition, I think that making recordings the way that we do today is a terrible marketing move for most artists who are trying to make it that way. You are taking demand away from yourself by providing a cheaper alternative to hearing you that costs far less.
Why would you do that? To motivate people to come show up at one of your shows where you will, by definition, let them down because you are not quite as perfect and amazing in real life as you are after post-prod?
I can see why people do this in certain realms, but I think it is, in the long run, a disservice to yourself and to musical artists in general as a general way of doing things.
It would be really interesting (although, I admit this will never happen in our lifetimes) if some high-profile groups just stopped recording and were only willing to take money by performing. Tons of caveats about this idea. The most obvious of which is, "How do people get to be high profile without albums?" And I say fair enough to that. Don't really have an answer.
I think that recording technology has caught musicians just as flat-footed as the internet and eCommerce caught brick-and-mortar shops. The difference, though, I think is that musicians haven't really figured out how badly they are being marginalized and disrupted. Now we have a few winners every year who win really really big, and the distribution of profits is getting really skewed. I can only assume that creation of new hit pop songs that sell millions of albums will become algorithmic at some point.
That's to the detriment of all art.
If i am right about that, then the record label that provided the music would be at fault. As they sold material that they did not have the rights to sell.
I guess you could find them at fault as they are not verifying what they are getting. But that would not be a civil case.
This setup may seem odd, but but it has historically been used to provide some protection against labels "screwing" artists - b/c although a label takes the sound recording rights and therefore controls royalty payments back to artists for the recording [if any -- after recoupment, etc], the artist typically retains their own publishing rights and can license those separately for $$ not subject to their label deal (though subject to cuts from societies, and their individual deals with publishers etc). This opens up new revenue streams for artists to get paid outside the control of their label: by radio stations/bars/restaurants via PROs, or in sync-right deals for placement in movies or on TV.
I predict this will go nowhere.
They should've just done a platform where the label needs to pay and could upload the stuff. Something like "pay X per uploaded song and X per traffic done", but get the rest off the revenue of the song. However at the moment the royalties stuff is way more complicated than it should be.
To maximize the creation of intellectual goods, we should pay artists enough money to have them enthusiastically create them, but no more. Of course, this money should only get paid to people who are creating works that people want to consume.
Our music copyright system has many problems, but I think it's fairly remarkable that we've stumbled on what I believe is fair prices for it: $10/mo/user or $15/mo/family for access to a full catalog, or ad-supported free for access to radio-like streaming. Ad-supported free is pretty meagre, but it was the government that set those rates, so we'll assume that's fair for the sake of this argument.
While dividing that $10/mo up by play seems fair, it doesn't seem maximal. A few artists get millions, most are lucky to get enough to get enough to buy a cup of coffee. They might be making a meagre living touring, but once they decide to have a family they give it up and get a real job.
I'd love to see log scaled payouts to address the problem. So if you A had 10x as many plays as B and 100x as many plays as C, A would get paid 2x as much as B and 3x as much as C. (using log10 for illustration -- the natural logarithm or some other lower base would probably be better).
Such a change would be relatively easy to make for compulsory-licensed music such as Pandora and other "Internet Radio". It would be harder to make for the voluntarily-licensed music such as Spotify, though.