David Byrne explains the streaming music ripoff

[G_j]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/opinion/sunday/open-the-music-industrys-black-box.html?_r=0

Open the Music Industry’s Black Box
By DAVID BYRNE JULY 31, 2015

THIS should be the greatest time for music in history — more of it is being found, made, distributed and listened to than ever before. That people are willing to pay for digital streaming is good news. In Sweden, where it was founded, Spotify saved a record industry that piracy had gutted.

Everyone should be celebrating — but many of us who create, perform and record music are not. Tales of popular artists (as popular as Pharrell Williams) who received paltry royalty checks for songs that streamed thousands or even millions of times (like “Happy”) on Pandora or Spotify are common. Obviously, the situation for less-well-known artists is much more dire. For them, making a living in this new musical landscape seems impossible. I myself am doing O.K., but my concern is for the artists coming up: How will they make a life in music?

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I asked Apple Music to explain the calculation of royalties for the trial period. They said they disclosed that only to copyright owners (that is, the labels). I have my own label and own the copyright on some of my albums, but when I turned to my distributor, the response was, “You can’t see the deal, but you could have your lawyer call our lawyer and we might answer some questions.”

It gets worse. One industry source told me that the major labels assigned the income they got from streaming services on a seemingly arbitrary basis to the artists in their catalog. Here’s a hypothetical example: Let’s say in January Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” accounted for 5 percent of the total revenue that Spotify paid to Universal Music for its catalog. Universal is not obligated to take the gross revenue it received and assign that same 5 percent to Sam Smith’s account. They might give him 3 percent — or 10 percent. What’s to stop them?

The labels also get money from three other sources, all of which are hidden from artists: They get advances from the streaming services, catalog service payments for old songs and equity in the streaming services themselves.

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[Skittles]

1. back in the day I remember having to pay for a lot of music I did not like, just for one song

seems to have gone from one extreme to the other

[CBGLuthier]

2. The services need to be transparent but it sounds like, as it always has been, the true villains

are the major labels themselves. Those same labels have found one creative way after another to screw artists and composers for almost 100 years.

[Depaysement]

3. Something's missing

[Ghost Dog]

5. +100%

(except when working live off the books?)

[Unknown Beatle]

4. When a group or a single musician are on the brink of

making it in the music biz, they're not thinking and hurriedly sign on the dotted line. They just want to get it over with and start recording. But, what they don't realize, is that the contract they just signed favors the record company. Many a famous group or single musician have gone into debt owing the record company a lot of money. Such a group was Kansas, they owed the company millions and didn't start making money until their third or fourth record.

The record companies are like Wall St., a bunch of money hungry, greedy assholes.