Look! It says so in this blog post! Spotify says it is “supportive” of the 15% effective royalty rate to songwriters but it just wants you to throw in  a bunch of other rights for which you are already paid a separate fee.  See? That’s cool right?  That’s not a pay cut.  The appeal of the Copyright Royalty Board rate-setting is actually done to help songwriters!

I mean you can kind of sort of maybe say they are reducing your pay because yes that separate income you get from micro sync and lyric display will be deducted from the 15% effective rate.  But no they aren’t trying to lower your mechanical royalty rate, they are just trying to take away other streams of revenue that you already have.  I suppose you can say technically they are slashing your pay. While technically correct that would be silly!

I know it’s a little confusing cause by law the Copyright Royalty Board was charged with only setting the streaming mechanical  rate in this proceeding. But hey, these are extraordinary times, its okay if the CRB just goes ahead without any constitutional authority and effectively ex-post facto eliminates royalties paid under a different private contract. Sure that’s technically unconstitutional and administrative judges don’t enjoy the same immunity from liability that other judges enjoy, but yeah why not?   In times of extraordinary hardship, if streaming services have to wield the awesome power of the federal government to hurt the little guy, so be it. I mean you have to starve a few million peasants to make a crony capitalist omelette right?   What’s a 20-30% pay cut to help a billionaires get by?