Artists can finally get what they deserve. Anyone who follows the music industry knows of the tussles between artists and those who rely on their creative output. The traditional food chain is a long one: between those who create the music and those who pay for it—music lovers, concert goers, advertisers, rights licensees, and corporate sponsors—there are publishers, producers, and talent agencies, and countless others with a stake in the industry. Each of these intermediaries takes a cut of the revenues and passes along the rest, the remainder of which eventually reaches the artists and musicians somewhere between 6 and 18 months. Many thought the Internet might help democratize the industry, but the opposite has occurred. “In the latter part of the 20thcentury, if a song of mine sold a million copies, I would receive about $45,000 in mechanical royalties, and I was awarded a platinum record,” Eddie Schwartz, head of the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC), told members of the International Literary and Artistic Association in 2015. “Today, a major music service pays me an average of $.000035 per stream, or about $35 for a million streams, thus reducing a reasonable middle class living to the value of a pizza.” We have swung from one extreme to the other. Now it’s time for the whole industry to collaborate on a healthy, sustainable, and frictionless ecosystem that benefits everyone in the value chain, not just the relative few. Big technology companies and streaming audio services have taken an additional piece of the pie, leaving most artists with even fewer crumbs, not to mention less control over their work and little knowledge of those who interact with it. The business has become so complex and powerful, so concentrated, that musicians like Taylor Swift and Jay-Z have taken themselves off of […]
