Likely because it's less risky for the publisher, as opposed to a big up-front payment for something that might not sell as well as expected. As an author, which approach would you prefer?
1. Getting all of my compensation in cash (least downside/least upside)
2. Working for a publicly traded company where part of my compensation comes from RSUs vested over a schedule
3. Working for a startup where I get “equity” instead of my market value in cash.
The writers are negotiating based on 3. I would be negotiating based on 1.
Are you, anonymous internet rando "scarface_74", claiming to know the interests of the Hollywood writers better than the writers themselves?
I have had the same choices:
1. Being risk averse by taking cash up front and choosing to negotiate based on a maximum up front payment
2. Taking less up front and dealing with a higher risk/reward return like accepting lower payer for equity by working for a startup
It's truly a wonder that you haven't been made the President of the Writer's Guild of America.
> Taking less up front and dealing with a higher risk/reward return like accepting lower payer for equity by working for a startup
Hollywood studios are not startups, and residuals are not like startup equity. Writers and actors are not hoping for some BigCo to come along and buy the Hollywood studios, or for the studios to go public, leading to a massive single payday. The studios are the BigCos, and they're already public. Residuals are more analogous to BigCo stock than to startup equity.
Whether the studios are public is irrelevant. What is relevant is the success of the movies/tv shows being successful.
From https://www.sagaftra.org/were-fighting-survival-our-professi...
Us: We need an 11% general wage increase in year 1 so our members can recover from record inflation during the previous contract term.
Them: The most we will give you is 5%, even though that means your 2023 earnings will effectively be a significant pay cut due to inflation and it is likely you will still be working for less than your 2020 wages in 2026.
They could just as easily negotiate for no increase in pay for larger residuals that most people here are focused on.
The status quo favors the studios, because they're finding new ways to avoid paying the residuals, while not offering anything else to take their place.
Musicians need to unionize and strike again, like the did to establish the royalty system originally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2%80%9344_musicians%27_s...
That's the difference here. Striking gets the goods. Musicians have been complacent. They face an existential risk to their recording income, and what have they done?
Streaming services are too cheap. The price of buying one album is approximately $10, but for the same price a consumer can get practically every album in the world for a month on Spotify. That's not sustainable for musicians. Their music is being given away for peanuts. It's a race to the bottom, and it has to stop. It's not a matter of how to divide up Spotify's pie, because Spotify is only a mini-pie, and that's not enough to feed everyone. They need to bake a bigger pie.
It was never clear that Spotify and Apple Music were in the interest of the music industry. And you can see in the film and TV industry that the studios are pulling their content from Netflix and moving it in-house, which forces Netflix to produce their own content. Spotify and Netflix were clever in taking advantage of cheap content, and the industry was slow to react, but now there needs to be a counter-reaction to the fleecing of artists.