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Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

And that has nothing to do with residuals.

They could just as easily negotiate for no increase in pay for larger residuals that most people here are focused on.

My point is that there's no magical massive upfront pay increase forthcoming that would make up for lost residuals. That was never on the table at any time. There's no way for actors and writers to avoid getting screwed if they don't get residuals. And it's pretty clear why that's not on the table: big upfront payments are a big risk to the studios, even more so than the risks they already take, so it's not good for them either. There's a good reason this system has existed for a long time.

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.

How are residuals from streaming working out for musicians on Spotify getting $.0006 per stream? Why would it magically work out better for most writers instead of suffering the same power law where the Taylor Swifts gets most of the money?

> How are residuals from streaming working out for musicians on Spotify getting $.0006 per stream?

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?

And how would unionization help? Spotify already gives 70% of its revenue to artists and those revenues are split based on the number of streams played. You’re still going to have the Taylor Swifts of the world getting the bulk of the money.

Musicians need to force Spotify to raise its price to consumers substantially, or if that can't happen, then frankly, they need to drive Spotify out of business. As I said, this is an existential risk for recording artists, so it may be a choice between Spotify going out of business or recording artists going out of business.

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.

It sucks for them too! Most artists aren't Taylor Swift or Eminem and have enough clout to own their own label AND be an extremely successful artist.

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