

A graphic illustration of music industry madness - arihelgason
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/08/13/a-graphic-illustration-of-music-industry-madness/

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sgift
And it is still a simplification: If I read this correctly it is only for the
UK. Try to do this for the whole EU (27 royalty collection societies) and
their partly overlapping, partly distinct right systems. Good luck.

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callmeed
A spiffy, modern infographic would actually be really useful here. This one is
a bit messy.

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samdk

        This one is a bit messy.
    

That's the entire point: the flow of rights and royalties in the music
industry is a mess.

Making it "spiffy" and "modern" may make it more aesthetically pleasing, but
it's not going to make it any less of a mess. That's a problem with the
underlying data, not the infographic.

It could certainly be cleaned up a bit because the text is rather hard to
read, but I don't think doing that's really going to change anything.

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whimsy
Is there a startup opportunity here?

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dazzawazza
To be truly disruptive here you need to remove the performing rights
organisations and (most of the) record labels.

The large record labels have an entrenched position and they use there cash to
stop the business being changed. It is happening slowly though. The performing
rights groups have an interest in gathering royalties and not promoting music.

Some record labels really do know their niche and are managing to stay afloat
(just) through diversification and begging people to support their artists
(and thus them). They are normally very small (<10 people) companies.

Spotify is a great product but it's moving too slow for me. They need to
invest in revenue streams for artists ASAP (as they have hinted they will so)
but I feel they are hampered by their investment partners (large labels) who
don't want to see revenue streams for artists that they can't plunder. Without
the labels you're not going to get the Lady Gagas that most people want to
listen to though so I understand why they went that way.

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nikhils
ah here we go again - society bashing!

if you actually spoke to the artists, you'd realise they're pretty happy with
the PRS. it does send them cheques after all, which can be a nice thing if
you're a struggling artist.

if you fundamentally believe in the role of copyright, then the collection
societies have an important role.

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dazzawazza
If a shop plays a radio the radio station pays to play the song so why should
the shop pay to hear the song? It's free advertising for the music after all.
The collections agencies do a poor job. They try to maximise revenue to
justify their existence but hamper exposure for artists.

If you want to move the industry on they are a keystone holding the old
business model together. Remove them and the large labels that monopolise
shell space, distribution and negotiations with new technology companies and
we might get somewhere where more artists and fans are happy.

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Confusion
I doubt whether a similar graph for any other equally sized piece of our
economy would look any different. Many people profit in many ways from many
things. Nothing in the article supports the assertion that the flow is
unusually complicated.

