Future of Music Coalition
@future_of_music
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Education, Research, and Advocacy for Musicians
Washington DC
Joined August 2008
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The politics of the music industry are complicated, but many music industry issues make more sense when you look at them through the lenses of labor justice and media justice. What's good for working musicians is also good for communities. We're in this together.
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This is an encouraging precedent, even if it's no substitute for needed regulation. Artists take heed: when you speak up (with both conviction and nuance), you can make new things possible.
1 OF 2: AFTER FURTHER CONVERSATION, TICKETMASTER HAVE AGREED WITH US THAT MANY OF THE FEES BEING CHARGED ARE UNDULY HIGH, AND AS A GESTURE OF GOODWILL HAVE OFFERED A $10 PER TICKET REFUND TO ALL VERIFIED FAN ACCOUNTS FOR LOWEST TICKET PRICE ('LTP’) TRANSACTIONS...
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Just as it's fun to see Swifties learning about the problems of private equity, it's fun to see BTS fans learning about the ways consolidation on commercial radio have narrowed the scope of what gets airplay.
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The position that
@zachlanebryan
is staking out is straightforward and shared by many musicians: artists should be able to run their shows the way that makes sense for them. Ticketmaster shouldn't make the rules. Neither should bots, resale sites, or brokers.
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Payola is already happening on Spotify. This makes it worse. What was pitched to artists as "leveling the playing field" may instead amplify power disparities.
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Tonight is the
#iHeartAwards2022
, an event where a massive radio monopolist corporation pretends to value musicians while fighting to preserve unjust laws that allow them not to pay musicians a cent.
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You can bet we have a lot of complicated thoughts about this! 🧵
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LiveNation/Ticketmaster reporting record revenues while beloved artists are canceling tours because they can’t make the math work to avoid losing money on the road…monopoly power at work.
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Here's the federal government's arts budget plotted alongside the budgets for Mission: Impossible films.
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Albini will be remembered for his reliably questioning arbitrary industry "standards", his generosity in freely sharing his techniques and insights, his modeling of expansive empathy & critical self-relection, and innumerable beautiful records. Sending love to all who knew him.
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How does Spotify get away with practices like this? The key word is “monopsony.” They control enough of the market that they can use their market power to implement “multi sided marketplace” dynamics, which amount to extracting more $ from artists and rightsholders.
so, big surprise, Spotify has been doing some shady shit. spoilers: things are going in an *even more* artist-unfriendly direction.
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To state the obvious: most artists and small indies can’t afford this. Spotify was pitched as democratization of the music business, but this appears to replicate old, bad payola dynamics.
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You don’t have to be
@taylorswift13
to make a real difference by contacting your Senators & Representatives about whatever issue you care about. Here’s what she did right: (thread)
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Tonight is the
#iHeartAwards2021
. If you ever wondered “What if we had a music awards show run by a corporation that spends millions of dollars on lobbying to avoid having to pay artists?” then this event is for you!
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We're among the groups who are asking DOJ to
#BreakUpTicketmaster
. Here's a quick thread about why. 🧵🎟️🎶
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Are you freaked out about Bandcamp being sold by Epic to Songtradr? Sharing what we know and what we don't know in this THREAD 🧵
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@AOC
A small thing: lots of folks (especially those with demanding jobs) stop exploring new music in their thirties, which is unfortunate! Setting aside some time to exploring new music—whether recorded or live—is an awesome gift you can give yourself.
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Spotify’s demonetization of tracks with less than 1000 plays is problematic on multiple levels. It’s important to understand what it actually means, and to do that, you have to consider how various kinds of artists might be impacted.
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This has the potential to be an issue that unites artists, fans, major and indie labels, antimonopoly advocates, civil rights groups, media reformers, and more. Payola sucks for everyone except gatekeeper platforms.
The House Judiciary Committee has a lot of questions about Spotify’s “Discovery Mode”
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@Eve6
@theloyaltyfirm
It’s a structural barrier—in the US we bizarrely tie access to health care to employment status, so people like musicians who work with lots of different business partners but may not have one “employer” get left behind.
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This is payola. Artists and listeners alike are rightly outraged. Lawmakers have called for answers. Time for
@FTC
to investigate!
Spotify officially announces ‘Discovery Mode.’
In exchange for lower royalty rates, artists can use the program to gain more algorithmic exposure through Spotify Radio and autoplay.
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It's awesome that
@bandcamp
is forgoing its share of the revenue today. It's also worth thinking about the reasons why the company is willing and able to do this.
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@Eve6
@theloyaltyfirm
Yeah, we are working on it but basically our research found musicians lack health care at 3x the rate of the general population
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Laying off half the staff including the core editorial team isn’t business as usual.
@songtradr
had a chance to do the right thing, but many artists will look at today’s news and conclude that they’ve bungled it.
- It’s business as usual.
- There will be no changes to existing services or the artist-first revenue share.
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This is still payola. It’s evidence of the dysfunction typical of multisided markets with an abundance of gatekeeper dynamics. It’s why antitrust folks need to be looking more closely at Spotify.
Big claim about Discovery Mode, where labels pay to have music surfaced in radio and autoplay modes, in return for a lower royalty rate. "On average Discovery Mode has helped these labels grow streams by 30%, resulting in higher royalty payments for artists opted into the test"
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🧵Billie Eilish is using fan to fan face value resale on her new tour, following after Pearl Jam and The Cure, among others. Anyone can resell their ticket if they can't go, but only at face value. Brokers and resale sites hate this idea. Here's a thread to clear up some myths:
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Seeing some confusion about
@bandcamp
implementing some new tax policies. Will try to clear that up here. 🧵
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Free idea: publicly funded all-ages venues that offer touring musicians healthy food, lodging and fair pay.
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Publicly traded company seeks users’ uncompensated labor to improve its product.
If you’ve ever thought, “This is dream pop, not shoegaze,” Spotify wants to hear from you
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Good reminder for musicians: family wealth can be a factor in whether people take on the risk of pursuing a career in the arts. Acknowledging that reality helps us imagine systemic reforms that could broaden opportunities and make it possible for more diverse voices to be heard.
A lot of people who struggle with imposter syndrome haven’t realized yet that what they’re actually competing with is intergenerational wealth.
Be patient and kind to yourself.
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This marks a serious shift away from how the service was pitched to the musician community at launch, as a level playing field that treated all tracks the same. Over time, Spotify has shifted further and further away from that pledge.
Spotify is apparently planning to pay even less in royalties to less-popular artists
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THREAD: one factor leading to low payouts on streaming services is that the market is distorted by competitive services that pay artists nothing at all. At the top of that list is FM radio. This impacts every artist, even those that would never get radio airplay.
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Honestly, the USA needs a cabinet level Secretary of Arts and Culture to direct and coordinate arts policy across federal agencies, and Dolly Parton would be a consensus pick.
working on a new form of government called “everyone pays taxes to dolly parton and she just kind of takes it from there”
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About a decade ago, we undertook a massive research project examining musicians' various revenue streams. Here's a few reflections on what we learned about live music, in light of conversations around canceled tours. 🧵
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On this panel, a representative of I Heart Radio describes the company’s job as “servicing the needs of advertisers.” No mention of serving communities or the public interest.
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@RElOFHOPE
Fair point! It's "fun" in the sense that knowledge is power and encouraging to see that the industry issues we think about all day are being seen and understood by more people--that more and more people care about this stuff (and everyone should!)
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Hearing that Spotify is starting to send around submission information for Discovery Mode, its new wage suppression scheme. It’s perhaps the most brazenly anticompetitive form of payola we’ve seen in digital music.
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We don’t have to accept the status quo. Part of what artists are supposed to do is to imagine better futures and bring them into the realm of the possible.
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Labor Day is a good time to remember that musicians are laborers, often working in difficult conditions, and their labor must be valued.
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iTunes isn’t going away—it’s being split into 3 apps for music TV and podcasts. Looks like store remains up and playlists etc remain intact.
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Covid isn’t over. Help keep musicians healthy: wear masks at shows.
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Yes, there’s lots of big stars on the red carpet, because if they don’t show up, I Heart’s program directors and robot DJs might not play them in the future!
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Two things can be true at the same time:
1) Venues taking cuts of artist merch sales is a major frustration for musicians.
2) The ability to unilaterally walk away from a revenue stream isn't evidence of Live Nation's goodwill; it's evidence of Live Nation's market power.
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Here's a quick thread addressing aspects of the crisis in music journalism. There's not just one problem. There's multiple, and it's important to try and disaggregate them to be able to understand what's going on.🧵🧵🧵
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Business journalists: please don’t just write about what a Pandora/Sirius merger would mean for investors. Ask critical questions about what it means for artists, competition, cultural diversity, and the public interest.
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On its face, digital payola is an unfair method of competition. Payola deceives consumers, amplifies power disparities, threatens diversity, and drives down wages. Eliminating payola from *all* digital platforms will be an important step towards a healthier music ecosystem.
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December was the last
@Bandcamp
Friday, a day where the company waived its usual cut of the revenue to pass on more money to artists and rightsholders. Here's a thread with some lessons we can learn. 1/🧵
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ICYMI: Bandcamp is unionizing!
We are Bandcamp United - a union of workers across all departments at Bandcamp committed to advocating for a better Bandcamp for all, including our international colleagues and the artists, labels, and fans who use the platform as well as ourselves. 🧵
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Bandcamp in some ways embodies an earlier, more idealistic conception of what the internet could be for culture--rejecting one-size fits all economic approaches, facilitating diverse expression. So why is it such an outlier?
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A true story: Mary Wilson of the supremes called our office line out of the blue one day. She didn’t have an agenda, she just wanted to know what we thought might be coming up in music policy and artist advocacy. She was SO cool and smart and funny.
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Musicians need the post office. Mailorder records and merch are crucial revenue streams for many artists, especially right now as touring has completely halted.
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@rgay
One policy proposal that's been floated is a cap on how much tickets can be resold for (eg, max of 150% of face value). Of course, Stubhub etc forcefully oppose any such restriction at both federal and state levels.
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Confusing fact: Spotify and similar services pay out 3 types of royalties. And because not artist knows this, many are missing out on the royalties they've earned.
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And if musicians don’t show up to kiss the proverbial ring and grovel at I Heart’s feet, they might stop getting played at all. Same dynamic that radio festivals have exploited for years.
#iHeartAwards2022
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This is why fixing ticketing can't stop with just one company. We need to
#breakupticketmaster
but we also need to address the predatory brokers and the massive resale companies like Stubhub, Seatgeek, and Vivid Seats that empower them.
This shouldn’t be celebrated. It should be illegal.
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Cassette sales up 35% last year! This doesn't mean cassettes will "save the music business" But it does confirm what we've been saying: the future of music listening won't just be one thing, but different formats for different audiences & artists & communities & contexts.
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For context: right now when music is played on the radio in the US, artists typically don’t get paid a cent. That’s not the case in nearly all of the rest of the world.
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Too few companies have too much power in every part of the music business. It's easy to understand why mergers and acquistions are viewed with serious skepticism. And some in the music community have real frustrations with how Epic has dealt with music licensing in the past.
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Let’s talk about this.
Spotify Touts Benefits of its Discovery Mode as House Judiciary Probe Continues
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Reminder: independent music cultures were doing a lot of innovative things before the rest of the world caught on, even pre-internet. All the interest in "direct to fan"? Artists and indie labels just used to call that "mailorder."
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The court ruling about mask mandates on air and rail transport will create new challenges for the return of live music.
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Infuriating to see this.
@songtradr
is squandering years of goodwill built among the artist community.
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Seeing people circulate the stat that 50% of vinyl buyers don't own a turntable. Let's talk about this in a quick thread!
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Live music—in person— is a cultural practice that drives technological developments but also predates human language. It isn’t capable of being replaced by digital or virtual experiences. It won’t go away. And yet, the sense of crisis is real. 🧵
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Those principles include:
(1) clear, fair, and transparent terms
(2) neutral and nondiscriminatory treatment of all the artists and labels they work with (no sweetheart deals or equity stakes for big rightsholders)
(3) absolutely no payola of any kind in any part of the platform
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While others prioritize algorithmic discovery, Bandcamp invested in humans doing actual music journalism, including writing about work that isn't intended to scale, music that most people probably aren't going to like, but that resonates with a specific community.
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If additional artists start pulling their catalog from Spotify, there's likely to be questions about "Why haven't more done this?" It's important to understand that even successful and popular artists may not have the contractual ability to make such a move.
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Musicians and indie labels will be watching close. We hope to see
@Bandcamp
keep its transparent terms, open platform, and ongoing investment in niche-oriented music journalism intact.
We look forward to welcoming
@Bandcamp
to Songtradr. Our shared music and artist-centric missions will enable us to provide artists and labels with even more opportunities
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Songwriters are classified as independent contractors and can’t go on strike or be represented by a union because of a 1984 NLRB ruling.
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The longer this crisis lasts, the longer your favorite musicians are likely to be unable to tour. Please wear masks and practice social distancing.
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It doesn’t just hurt artists who get lots of big time commercial airplay. It puts an artificial downward pressure on the market for music licensing, and it’s a huge part of the reason streaming services don’t pay more. That impacts everyone.
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🎶Great news! Remember how in January we heard that Homeland Security was proposing to triple the visa fees for international artists, making it impossible for many artists to tour the US? Artists, venues, arts presenters, and fans all filed comments opposing the fee hike. Well…
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It would be really easy for Bandcamp's new owner to squander the goodwill that the service has banked over the years with artists, indie labels, and music listeners. But the service is profitable NOW--it doesn't need to change course from the principles that made it successful.
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It actually can still be expensive to make records, especially if you care about paying your collaborators fairly.
Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content. This has sparked my curiosity about the concept of long shelf life versus short shelf life. While much of what we see and hear quickly becomes obsolete, there are
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Not to pick on this artist, but © is the reason digital royalties exist. Revenue sharing in this manner is a licensing deal invoking certain exclusive rights—both right of publicity & right to control the making of derivative works. Killing © would mean no royalties for anyone.
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Yep, this is the same I Heart Radio that used to be called Clear Channel—the company that fired countless local DJs and replaced them with robots. It was such a great business strategy that The company went bankrupt in 2018.
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Crucially, Bandcamp did just one round of VC funding in 2010 and have stayed relatively small. Rather than providing massive returns to investors or attracting the attention of private equity, they've stayed focused on serving artists and indie labels and listeners.
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Ek’s response to Spotify criticism is to pass the buck to fans. This is a sideways way of saying “if you’re not making enough money from Spotify, it’s because you’re not famous enough.”
Fans will ultimately decide who thrives but our focus remains clear: Continue to create more opportunities for more artists to reach more fans. We know we have more work to do, but we’re confident in what we’ve built and the innovations we continue to deliver for artists & fans.
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Here's the most important thing happening for music today that you haven't heard about: the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in Prometheus Radio vs FCC. What's that about? We'll tell you in this THREAD.
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The Department of Justice and 27 states have jointly filed a courageous, hard-hitting antitrust lawsuit, alleging unlawful conduct by Live Nation - Ticketmaster. This is a great day for musicians and for music fans.
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Happy Labor Day! Musicians and songwriters and composers and producers are workers! Because so much of the labor behind music is invisible to listeners, it’s always worth reflecting on the work that we’re not seeing.
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(4) centering the needs of artists, especially those whose work is not aiming for mass scale in platform design and new feature development
(5) investment in original high quality journalism that centers diverse communities and musical traditions not covered elsewhere
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When artists point out that Ticketmaster is not the only problem, this is an example of what they mean.
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Happy 50th birthday to
@kexp
! Here's a quick thread celebrating some of the things KEXP has done to support the music community in Seattle and beyond.
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There's no surveillance or advertising component to Bandcamp that drives the company to prioritize growing the user base over sustainable revenue generation. Bandcamp's hybrid streaming/download model was profitable while many of the big streaming services were not.
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It's worth thinking about how this mirrors trends in film, TV, etc. Shifts in the economics of cultural production driven by platform companies mean that work that doesn't appeal to a big audience is harder to make profitable.
Spotify Cancels 11 Original Podcasts, Trimming Slate as Part of Focusing on Bigger Shows
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A music industry that only caters to the 1% (of fans, artists etc) is not the future we are working for.
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In evaluating this merger, that's perhaps the key question: does Epic fundamentally understand what those principles are? And is Epic comfortable with committing to them moving forward?
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This article doesn’t make it clear that the switch in royalty calculations only applies to artists who pay SoundCloud for distribution. Kind of a crucial detail.
SoundCloud announces overhaul of royalties model to 'fan-powered' system
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To clear this up: major label recording artists are eligible for membership in SAG-AFTRA (vocalists) or AFM (instrumentalists). They can't strike against Spotify though, because they don't have a CBA with Spotify. They could theoretically strike against labels, however.
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Okay, so Ticketmaster's website is down right now, presumably due to demand for Taylor Swift tix. Here's a quick thread about some reasons this is such a nightmare.
#breakupticketmaster
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Without even getting into the fair use analysis, this is just so deeply uncool of
@AjitPaiFCC
. Especially considering the video’s inclusion of a Pizzagate conspiracist, responsible for harassment of some of our close friends in the DC music community.
"Harlem Shake" creators threaten to sue over use in FCC chairman's anti-net neutrality video:
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While they're not able to offer details (NDAs, probably), Universal argues that TikTok has offered really bad contract terms and have used bullying tactics. This is especially disturbing because if UMG can't get a fair deal, what hope do indie artists have?
Our core mission is simple: to help our artists & songwriters attain their greatest creative and commercial potential, which is why we must call time out on TikTok.
Learn More:
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What's the deal with police unsuccessfully trying to use the DMCA to avoid public scrutiny? It appears these cops don't understand how the DMCA or content identification technology works, and citizens haven't let them get away with it. Here's a quick THREAD (1/?)
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Much of the chatter about Twitch and Metallica and copyright is getting the facts and the history wrong. Quick thread.
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If true, this is a serious blow for a huge swath of artists who are making the kind of work that doesn’t aim for lots of repeat listens—arguably the very population that Spotify has already hurt the most.
it’s worse than the headline; the threshold is 1000 streams annually
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(6) treating music listeners respectfully, rejecting the kinds of surveillance technologies and user monetization schemes running rampant on some of the major music platforms
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