Comment by 6stringmerc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 6stringmerc | Hacker News Reader

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I have mixed feelings about this particular case, because on the one hand, yes, I want artists compensated fairly, and on the other hand, I do hold the belief that Spotify is putting a good-faith effort towards paying musicians and "rights holders" day in and day out.

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.

Yeah, it makes me wonder whether his complaint is really with his label, but he can't sue his label without creating friction. So he sues Spotify, Spotify performs discovery which shows his own label is withholding these royalties, he turns around and sues his label (or more likely, settles with them).

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?

Agreed! I don't think there's any chance he could get a class action status against his own label, but he successfully got out in public quite a while ago bitching about how he made roughly $17 for a milllion streams of "Low" and that got his profile up. My gut instinct is that the "willful infringement" isn't going anywhere, and after a critical breakdown of accounting, Lowery is probably owed another check that could buy him lunch at Chili's. This doesn't seem anything close to the kind of heavyweight punch that Eminem threw at Universal over royalties.

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.

I suspect that the main point is to drag the accounting into the light.

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.

Then he must sue himself

Have the streaming services made it any easier of late for a indie musician to publish their works? I'm several years out of date, but I remember at one point I'd looked into it, and the closest you could get to self-publishing was to go through an indie distributor like CD Baby. But at no point could you actually upload MP3 files and album information directly to Spotify.

Still have to go through a distributor to get on Spotify, but Pandora has a different system requiring submission and review.

For context: http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/19/8621581/sony-music-spotify...

An excellent point of reference for sure. I've reviewed that in the past and I'm pretty comfortable thinking the consensus by musicians was "Wow, Sony really throws its weight around and gets everything it can for itself and only bothers with artists when it actually has to pay them legally" which, all kidding aside, is kind of what a lot of people do (or should) expect of recording industry practices. As in tenths of tenths of a cent:

>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.

The record companies collectively own a 20 percent stake in Spotify. Thus and per their record of swindling their artists I don't have much faith in Spotify not following similar tactics. This is a just case!

> I do hold the belief that Spotify is putting a good-faith effort towards paying musicians and "rights holders" day in and day out.

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.

Wouldn't good faith be to remove it from their catalog until they could properly purchase it?

Good faith is one thing, but at the end of the day, if they're not paying what they owe, then they shouldn't be able to continue using the stuff.

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