COVID Misery Index Rent is Too Damn High Edition
Streaming royalties based on revenue are doomed to fall short until they include the value transfer in the share price.
Category: Streaming Meltdown
Streaming and the Embarrassment of COVID Riches
We’re starting to see a narrative emerging from the digital music services in reaction to artists chafing under the misery of streaming royalties. Streamers want lawmakers to focus attention on the allocation of current period revenue that they pay to creators and deflect attention from the company’s stock market valuation (or private company valuation). That’s […]
UK Parliament’s Inquiry into the Economics of Streaming
Thanks to the #BrokenRecord campaign and especially Tom Gray of Gomez, the UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee is conducing an inquiry into the economics of streaming. (Attention Lindsay Graham and Jerry Nadler). You can read about it here and consider giving evidence. Watch on Parliament TV: Economics of music streaming or […]
Here Comes the New Dark Age: Blanket Licenses for Everything Based on MMA
Cory Doctorow has a post on the EFF’s Deep Thoughts…sorry…Deep Links blog that proposes “A Plan to Pay Artists.” MTP readers probably need no further information to know what’s coming next without even reading Mr. Doctorow’s post. It’s the old ISP licensing hash rehashed and served up as if nothing happened–but using The MLC as […]
Arithmetic On the Internet Revisited: The Sustainable Ethical Pool Solution to User Centric Royalties
“User-centric” is rapidly becoming all the rage in the streaming royalty debate. To its credit, Deezer is the only streaming service that has announced it is working on trying to implement a user-centric model. The Ethical Pool model avoids the complexities with an opt-in approach for fans and artists.
Pandemic: Digital music services should accelerate payments and liquidate any royalty minimums they are holding
You may not have noticed, but many music services have a clause in their direct licenses that allows them to delay royalty payments if your accrued royalties are less than a certain amount, often $50. This is on top of paying quarterly in many cases (as opposed to the monthly payments required by the statutory […]
@realrobcopeland: WSJ Reports Google Reveals YouTube Revenues of $15 billion of Value Gap, CEO Wants More–Where’s Ours?
Very insightful reporting from Rob Copeland at WSJ on Google’s revenue that culls out YouTube’s share of Google’s revenue–and boy are we getting hosed.
As if it weren’t hard enough: @TheFOWShow Covers the Direct Shot Supply Chain Debacle
If you are lucky enough to have an independent record store in your community today (mine is the fabulous Waterloo Records), you may not realize just how lucky you really are. For an independent record store to have survived the last 20 years is something of a modern miracle. (I think the Waterloo story should […]
Guest Post: We are Not Blind to the Harsh Economic Realities of Streaming: An Interview with an Indie Publisher
This post is an interview with a reader who is an independent publisher about how they view the future for songwriters and independent publishers in the streaming upside down world to the right of the decimal place.
A Look at Christopher Sprigman’s Recent Record
The Spitting Image of the Modern Major General MTP readers may remember the name Christopher Sprigman. Most recently, we have identified him as a counsel to Spotify in the “Nashville cases” brought against his firm’s client Spotify by four plaintiffs represented by well-known and successful artist rights attorney Richard Busch. These were cases brought […]
