@Webtypography@j98 Another fantastic mono font family is Github’s Monaspace. They feature a rather unique "texture healing" feature that makes narrow and wide characters easier to read while still respecting the monospace grid. https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace
Spotify pays ~70% of its revenue to music rights holders.
If a music artist doesn’t have at least 1,000 plays a month from 713,000,000+ active Spotify users, it’s not Spotify’s fault they are not popular enough to earn a living from their artistry—nor would that artist be able to live off of CDs, merch, and live show performances.
I know capitalism sucks, but people have to actually want someone’s art for it to be a profession. However, the barrier to building a fanbase has never been lower.
Streaming services saved the music industry from piracy. It took 20 years to recover from Napster according to the RIAA’s own data.
Streaming services got more people paying for music than ever before. The result is more artists in more countries are earning a living wage from their art than ever before.
An artist with less than 1,000 plays a month just isn’t there yet. The good news is that streaming services give them more of a chance than ever before to find and grow that fanbase.
Could the streaming music royalty model improve? Absolutely!
The current model works like this: There is a pool of royalty money (70% of Spotify subscription). It gets apportioned to each artist by the number of streams the artist had divided by the total number of streams all artists had.
The user-centric payment model would have a royalty pool for each streaming service subscriber apportioned by what they alone listened to. This would benefit more niche artists.
Music streaming companies would pay the same total amount of royalties with a user-centric payment model. It wouldn’t affect their margin.
But it would negatively affect the revenue of the Big 3 Music Label Oligopoly because they don’t represent niche artists.
Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group own the copyright for the vast majority of music. They dictate licensing terms. Spotify has no negotiating power because it has no business without their content.
The Big 3 Music Label Oligopoly is protective of its revenue. It is more fearful than innovative. If you want to get mad at someone, don’t get mad at Spotify. Get mad at the intellectual property kings who decree the royalty model Spotify must use.
The only progress on a user-centric payment model has been an experiment by Universal Music Group with Deezer—the least popular service—with an tiny portion of its royalty pool.
Even better than getting mad is getting politically active.
Copyright was invented by governments to reward innovation by giving a time-limited monopoly on an idea or expression. It can be modified at any time with political will.
Innovation in media distribution is stifled by Big Music controlling the royalty terms for streaming music. Terrestrial, satellite, and Internet radio royalties are set by governments. Anyone can start a radio station without having to ask permission from Big Music.
Big Music is never going to allow music streaming companies to use a royalty model where its oligopoly gets a smaller percentage.
Governments created copyright to reward innovation, not oligopolies. Governments should set royalty apportionment rules for music streaming services based on per-customer revenue.
This would more fairly reward niche music artists, limit the Big Music oligopoly’s power, and increase streaming service competition by removing the need to negotiate with rights holders.
Music streaming services found product–market fit. Now, it’s time for governments to ensure a fair market by balancing the power so streaming services can innovate without fear of losing catalog access and so small artists can earn without having to join the music label oligopoly.
@thisismissem 1,000 streams a month is less than $0.25 of royalties in most markets. It costs more in payment transaction fees than the value to send. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable threshold.
Small artists have more opportunity because of streaming.
The number of artists earning meaningful money from Spotify has nearly tripled. Independent labels accounted for about half of Spotify’s royalty payments for the first time in 2023.
@thisismissem Yes, Tidal managed to kinda do it with UMG. On its high end plan that is nearly twice the price of Spotify and Apple Music, Tidal was able to negotiate a 10% pool bonus to the subscriber’s most-streamed artist.
@thisismissem Single music labels are willing to experiment with low revenue services, not the big players. We saw this before. When there was growing pressure for music labels to drop DRM, the music labels allowed Amazon Music Store and a few other tiny stores to sell music DRM. The labels would not permit Apple iTunes Store to sell DRM-free music until Steve Jobs made a public plea that caused regulators to start searching for potential monopoly and collusion abuses by the labels.
@76c71aae3a491f1d9eec47cba17e22@mostr.pub Copyright law requires Spotify to license the content from the rights holders. If music artists have a bad deal with their label, that is not a problem Spotify or any other streaming service provider can solve for them.
Welcome to music streaming. You can use the one with the crap app from the biggest tech company in the world who pay artists basically nothing or the one where they pay artists even less that that.
@vincentritter@robb Digital music sales like iTunes never came close to the revenue lost from piracy. Music streaming services saved the music industry from piracy by being a better value proposition to consumers.
@ravi@robb@gdp Ravi is correct. Music streaming royalties are not a fixed rate per stream.
There is a pool of money that is apportioned to an artist by the number of streams the artist had divided by the total number of streams all artists had.
Apple Music customers seem to not listen nearly as much as Spotify customers. The demographics for each service could also skew why one artist makes more per stream on one service vs another. Most artists earn far more from Spotify than Apple Music.