Music streaming service Spotify plans to make changes to its royalties model, which could impact the earnings of artists whose songs do not meet a minimum stream requirement, according to reporting by Music Business Worldwide and Billboard. The reported changes are intended to increase the amount of money paid out to the labels and artists with the most streams and …
What To Know About a Congressional Resolution on Streaming Royalties
Congress may soon weigh in on behalf of artists in the fight for more equitable royalties from streaming services like Spotify. According to Rolling Stone, Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, sent a letter to her congressional colleagues proposing a resolution to establish a new streaming royalty. The proposal would, the letter argues, seek to increase the amount of money …
Warner Music Adopts SoundCloud’s Artist-Friendly Royalty System
Go Fund Them
When the streaming- and social-networking service SoundCloud decided to instate their royalty payment system in March 2021, longtime users of the site and the new wave of the music industry leaned in to listen. Prior to this pay upgrade for music artists, SoundCloud paid contributors through pooling revenues from the platform’s collected streams, or overall and accumulated plays by listeners …
David Bowie’s Catalog Sold for a Reported $250 Million
"The Man Who Sold The World" has been sold
Another day. Another blockbuster deal reached for the music of a legacy artist. Warner Chapell music has purchased the publishing rights to David Bowie’s entire catalog of songs, which includes ubiquitous hits like “Space Oddity,” “Heroes,” “Let’s Dance,” “Rebel Rebel,” and many more. The deal, reportedly worth more than $250 million, was struck almost exactly five years after the enigmatic …
Buckets of (Making it) Rain
What Bob Dylan's $300 million catalog sale means for the recording industry.
A three month span in late-2020-early-2021 saw two monumental art sales. While the $69 million earned by digital-artist Beeple’s Non-Fungible Token (NFT) mosaic (in JPG format no less) at a Christie’s auction in March threatened to turn the visual arts world on its head, the music world was seemingly turned on its ear by another sale in December. No stranger …