Finnish pop artiste Anssi Kela has gone public with his earnings from content streamed via the popular commercial music streaming service Spotify.Kela claims that on average he earns an underwhelming fraction of a cent for each song played via Spotify’s free service. The precise sum is 0.002 euros, or considerably less than one cent.
Read the full story at YLE:
http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_pop_musician_earns_mere_pennies_on_spotify/6921281
Musician turned digital music executive [Tim Quirk] hits the wrong note with artists and composers over rights and royalties.
It’s perhaps not surprising that someone working for a digital music service is telling artists not to worry their pretty little heads about getting paid properly, but what may surprise some people is that Quirk is – or at least used to be – an artist himself.
Sure, many online music service executives claim to be musicians in order to convince artists that they’re on their side, despite them driving down royalties. Tim Westergren, the head of Pandora, has used that argument, claiming he cares about musicians while going to Congress to try to reduce songwriters’ royalty rates from next-to-nothing, to even less than that.
Back in 2009, he [Quirk] was raging against the major label system, but now that he works for a corporation that reported more than $50bn in revenue last year – more than three times the $16.5bn revenue of the entire global recorded music industry in 2012 – he appears to think musicians should now simply accept whatever scraps his company chooses to throw their way.
Read The Full Story at The Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/nov/14/google-play-tim-quirk-music
Shannan Ferry interviews ECR Music Group owner Blake Morgan on his music career and Pandora royalties.
Watch the Full Interview at Fox News:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/2834264097001/a-chat-with-blake-morgan-/
The model doesn’t work, so we have to come up with ways in which people can help us to make music for free, or at least for much less. But the current way isn’t working, something’s gotta give.
If I tried to make my albums with that Spotify pays me, I wouldn’t make them. I couldn’t hire other musicians or someone to master it; I’d have to do everything myself.
Read The Full Story at Digital Music News:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/11/14/beckspotifywork
The new landscape is instead dominated by technology companies who see all creative content as mere fodder for fueling their own business models (selling ads or devices for example) and they offer no support, no insulation:
The new bosses further cement their position by “waging a cynical PR campaign that equates the unauthorized use of other people’s property (artist’s songs) with freedom.” Through an army of “quasi-religious” surrogates (“freehadists”), the industry pushes for a “Cyber-Bolshevik campaign of mass collectivization,” where creative output is devalued. He sees it as particularly cynical because there’s one exception to this devaluation, one type of IP that is seen as sacrosanct — and that exception is software patents.
Lowery states that suggestions that artists simply need to find a new business model are a clear indication of awareness that artists are getting a raw deal. The new business model is already here, it’s been in place for over 10 years, and it’s making an enormous amount of money. But very little of that money goes to the creator.
At some point, one has to question whether it is still possible to earn a living as a musician, or any type of creator.
READ THE FULL STORY AT THE SCHOLARLY KITCHEN:
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/06/05/lessons-from-the-music-industry-should-we-put-our-faith-in-technology-companies/
Eminem sent out a public service announcement to address online piracy in the wake of his latest album The Marshall Mathers LP 2.
The album leaked online earlier this week and the Shady Records machine quickly went to work to suppress the leak. Eminem and his management even went as far as making Rap Genius remove the lyrics to the songs.
READ THE FULL STORY AT ALL HIP HOP:
http://allhiphop.com/2013/11/01/eminem-makes-public-service-announcement-against-music-piracy/
We’ll be running more of the artist feedback and commentary from last week’s Virgin Disrupters roundtable. Here’s Amanda Palmer,
“Can I speak up here? I’d like to just add to what Zoe [Keating] was saying. There’s also – the other kind of general problem that I think we’re seeing that doesn’t really get addressed very much because it’s so big and possibly un-fixable is that as bad and clunky as the major label system was, you still had a constant influx of capital back from those giant, sometimes soul-sucking systems, back into content creation.
And one weird thing is that iTunes, Apple, Spotify, Google, whatever, all of the people who are profiting – [and] YouTube – who are profiting off the artists from the small level to the huge levels aren’t really feeding very much back into the creation of new content.
READ THE FULL STORY AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/10/29/palmeritunesspotify
The entire infrastructure that supported the world of music for a century has been dismantled, and in its place we’ve got these little things, these little handheld devices. The worldwide web was supposed to give everybody access and democratize everything. It was supposed to create a level field and increase the middle class and everybody had more access and more information. But now anybody can say anything and nobody cares. This is the problem of ubiquitous data.
And what’s happened in reality is that the power’s been consolidated in very, very few companies, and the middle class of musicians really has just been wiped out. I mean, the Internet has been an honest-to-God con.
READ THE FULL STORY AT THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER:
http://m.hollywoodreporter.com/earshot/t-bone-burnett-silicon-valley-652114
Bestselling author says web piracy is akin to ‘reaching into someone’s pocket and taking their wallet’
Illegal downloading is a kind of “moral squalor” and theft as much as reaching in to someone’s pocket and stealing their wallet is theft, the author Philip Pullman will say this week.
In an article for Index on Censorship, Pullman, who is president of the Society of Authors, makes a robust defence of copyright laws. He is withering about internet users who think it is OK to download music or books without paying for them.
“The technical brilliance is so dazzling that people can’t see the moral squalor of what they’re doing,” he writes. “It is outrageous that anyone can steal an artist’s work and get away with it. It is theft, as surely as reaching into someone’s pocket and taking their wallet is theft.”
His article comes after music industry leaders met David Cameron in Downing Street last Thursday where the issue of web piracy was discussed.
READ THE FULL STORY HERE:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/15/philip-pullman-illegal-downloading-theft
During the protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), critics of the legislation portrayed its process of identifying foreign black market domains and then blocking them from gaining easy profits from, and access to, the US online audience, as “censorship” — full stop.
…
It bothers me that representatives from Google or the EFF, Reddit, etc. are so quick to lump in the attempt to protect artists rights with the political censorship of China or Iran. It is entitlement of the privileged at its worst and demonstrates to me how desperate some people are to excuse freeloading by any means necessary. But, the wonders of technology simply do not excuse clear cases of exploitation.
READ THE FULL POST AT nycRUEN:
http://nycruen.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/real-censorship/
The Trichordist 
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