Four Tet wins royalty battle over streaming music
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I'm glad they're doing something with fighting to get proper compensation, the industry really needs to check themselves in terms of respect for who's out there doing the hard creative work. Way to be a repellent to talent, Domino Records!
I realized that I like a song from four tet (lush) already.
I think you would like Bonobo and Tycho for coding too
Tracks are automatically selected by their value combined with how little they have been played. The faster a track is skipped, the more it will be devalued. Tracks that are under the value threshold get automatically skipped. A track that doesn't get skipped will keep its value, but if it gets played too much, other less-played tracks will have priority.
I have a button to show me a track name if I really want to know (or I can look at the logs), otherwise all words (lyrics, track names, file names etc.) are ignored. If I find a track does have lyrics/speaking in it, I will tag it as such and move on.
Then again, I think people who skip EDM tracks are bound to do it anyway. A lot of people seem to listen to music just for the lyrics/celebrities.
I spent my early twenties going to DVS1 and Ben Klock sets. Past the drugs the music was (and remains) foundational to me.
To avoid making a valueless comment I can also suggest resonate.is! It's a music co-op that pays 45% to the artists, by far the most. I listen to the #ambient tag at work.
I wasn't aware of Courtesy until your mention, but very good indeed in that direction.
You got any more?
[1] https://soundcloud.com/djheartstring
[1] and a mix https://youtube.com/watch?v=DvyyGCg-P8A
Hard to comprehend how a label can seriously claim they deserve 86.5% of streaming revenue. Not like they sunk any considerable money into Four Tet, just sat back and watched the money roll in. What a ripoff, that's 2.2 million streams to make $1000 on spotify.
No wonder so many 'signed' artists have a problem with streaming. And no wonder so many young artists are choosing to self release. We really are getting to a point where labels need to properly prove their worth.
But, having been born at the tail end of the 80s, I personally have never found labels to be anything more than an annoyance. Like: "Oh, you can't buy this band's first two albums anywhere because the label is pissed at the band for leaving and won't re-release them."
I can think of maybe one or two smallish labels that I actually follow on Bandcamp because they specialize in niches I like, and there's a good chance that whatever they release will at least warrant a trial listen from me. But those are few and far between.
If a label owns subsidiary labels it is probably too big for this to work any more. If any of those subsidiary labels have multiple imprints of their own then it's definitely too big for this to mean anything, "Warner Brothers released this" tells you next to nothing about what to expect.
I'm guessing this is still the case for many artists. How can they argue this at all? Who is the sale to? I doubt the record labels would say that I purchased a song after listening to it on a streaming service.
At various points in the past, record labels were the ones taking the big risks and getting the big paybacks, just like any business, fronting the funds for expensive studio time and the people to run them.
And many bands took personal offence at this, and continue to do, despite being the beneficiaries of the whole sordid industry at the time. Now that the costs of production and distribution have dropped in certain areas - there’s still things that you need Abbey Road Studio One and 96 expert musicians for - artists expect a fairer deal.
But who decides what the value was of the label’s work in the first place? If they did all the promotion and legwork to get the artist into the limelight and keep them there, does or doesn’t that work deserve perpetual royalties?
I don’t know why streaming rights and licensing weren’t newly negotiated deals but I guess for artists like FourTet who arrived when they did, downloads and streaming were covered by a ‘digital’ clause.
Labels are full of people who love music and work their nuts off promoting musicians, building their web and social presences, getting them booked onto support slots, playlists, radio shows, festivals, cleaning up after them, and championing them, but labels are also cynical and heartless and will drop an act without compunction if sales don’t happen. I’ve hundreds of brilliant promo albums on my shelves from my days on student radio and nearly all those acts released nothing more.
Given the scale of competition and number of acts, I have no idea how anyone could be a sales success without a central organization coordinating things. I don’t know much about Taylor Swift but is she a huge success without the involvement of a label?
There are a significant number of very successful artists who do not have a label. We had lots.
Even artists signed to major label deals are often doing a JV with a major after achieving traction themselves - or are doing an “artist services” deal where the label does some things but not others.
Labels are great - but there are lots of artist making a success of things outside the traditional label model.
There are, of course, also lots of artists with amazing music who go nowhere because they can’t market themselves enough to get up the next rung of the ladder.