
Copyright Royalty Board Boosts Songwriters’ Streaming Pay Nearly 50% - lnguyen
http://variety.com/2018/biz/news/copyright-royalty-board-boosts-songwriters-streaming-pay-nearly-50-1202679118/
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WisNorCan
This perfectly captures the problem with Spotify’s business. Netflix has the
same issue on the video side and is working around it by producing original
content.

However, music is different than video. With music, Spotify needs a full
catalog for a great streaming service. With video, Netflix just needs
sufficient compelling content to keep the subscriber from churning.

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CharlesW
> _However, music is different than video and Spotify does not have the same
> choice._

Not only _have_ they been creating more and more original audio content, but
they're about to try video content again (their first effort failed) as well.
In their mind, music was just their beachhead offering.

[http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/spotify-lures-
courtney-...](http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/spotify-lures-courtney-
holt-from-disney-for-top-content-job-exclusive-1202546835/)

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walterbell
_> Jerkins’ stake in the song generated $146,000 in performance royalties,
while streaming revenue from the same period garnered $278 for 38 million
Pandora plays and $218 for 34 million YouTube streams. _

In those two scenarios, how much does the band/performer get?

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phjesusthatguy3
If they didn't participate in writing the song, 0%.

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skinnymuch
Is that really true? That seems pretty insane.

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jws
This carried over from radio. It was decided that recording artists benefited
sufficiently from the publicity of being played on the radio leading to record
purchases and concert ticket sales. Song writers managed to get a compulsory
royalty instead. Their compensation is written in law, they can not negotiate
for more, but at least they get paid.

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Eridrus
I wonder what this will do to negotiated rates, will the Spotify's of the
world succeed in arguing that they're paying ~20% more for the music, so the
base negotiated rate should go down to compensate for this, or will labels
manage to hold the current prices?

I.e. whose pocket will this actually come out of in the long run.

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jdlyga
Content is incredibly cheap nowadays. I used to spend most of my paycheck in
high school on CD's.

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beastcoast
Idea:

Rather than all-you-can-stream, charge a low rate per song play to users.
Assume that existing services charges $15/mo, and heavy users might play 16
hours a day, and act song length is 3 minutes, that comes out to about $0.0015
per play to be the same value proposition. But guessing average is much lower
so we could up the rate 2x or 4x and customers come out the same. Everyone
gets the same cut of revenue per song play, so popular artists get the same
cut of streams as indie artists.

Am I missing something?

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jstanley
The high-volume users are probably the biggest proponents of the service, so
putting prices up for them might have negative effects.

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danjoc
How is it songwriters aren't negotiating these individually? Copyright Royalty
Board sounds like a union.

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jws
They are a panel of three judges which sets the statutory compensation rate
for music played on streaming services. Their goal is to set it at a market
rate of what a willing seller and a willing buyer would agree to.

It is what keeps streaming stations from having to have lawyers negotiate
hundreds of deals for the content they play and then still get sued when they
screw up and play an unlicensed song.

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revelation
Imagine programmers asking for a per-execution rate.

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shakna
We have in the past, and we are again, which is just a little ridiculous, and
I think everyone can see that.

Back in the day, IBM trialled it with some version of their mainframe and a
particular database program, or tried to.

From what I recall, IBM said it would save us in the long run, and claimed
they were able to because we hadn't bought the mainframes, they were under a
contract. It didn't fly. (Business hint - don't try and fudge numbers when
dealing with an insurance company.)

Today? AWS Lambda, and other "function" cloud services, charging for execution
time, which isn't quite the same, but I have to feel we aren't far away from
someone building their product around Lambda... And then directly passing
costs to customers with the same pricing model.

