Apple’s Proposal Could Transform How Streaming Services Pay Songwriters and Music Publishers … But Beware the Fine Print
There
is plenty of evidence that on-demand streaming music services like Spotify and Apple Music are disrupting the way people listen to music. Between them, the two companies have almost 50 million paying subscribers, and are generating annual revenue in the billions.
As streaming grows, much attention is being paid to the problems between Spotify and recording artists.
Whether it’s the arguments about “windowing” made by Adele and Taylor Swift, or complaints by artists like Radiohead about record labels not compensating artists for streaming, they get a lot of press.While these are important issues, there is one troubling fact that gets lost in the shuffle: Songwriters have yet to benefit in any significant way from streaming. If we don’t change the current system for paying them, there’s a chance they never will.
Source: Recode