No More Poormouthing: Daniel Ek’s $310,000,000 Edifice Complex is Real, and Spotify’s PR Effluvia is Overflowing — Artist Rights Watch

By Chris Castle

As we reported February 9, Spotify is using hundreds of millions of its supernormal stock market riches to acquire naming rights to the Barcelona soccer team. The latest manifestation of Daniel Ek’s monopolist edifice complex was confirmed by Music Business World Wide and Variety among others, as well as Spotify itself. Barcelona’s iconic Camp Nou stadium (largest football stadium in Europe) will now be known as Spotify Camp Nou.

I assume that when Netflix finds out about this, there will be an epilogue to their Edward Bernays-style epic corporate biopic that will ignore the Rogan catastrophe but will include the Barcelona deal with a tight shot on the Spotify Camp Nou and probably a t-shirt vendor.

Let us take one clear message from this navel-gazing naming-rights deal to assuage Daniel Ek’s psyche after a losing bid to acquire the Arsenal football club and join the International League of Oligarchs. That message is that we don’t ever want to hear again about how Spotify “can’t make a profit” or “pays out too much money for music.” Daniel Ek–who controls the company through his super voting stock–has been running that diversion play for way too long and it’s just as much BS spewing from his mouth as it is any of the Silicon Valley oligarchs who whinge about how poor they are when they appear in court. 

Let us also agree that anyone who takes a royalty deal from any DSP that does not include an allocation for stock valuation is quite simply a rube who must be laughed at and mocked in the Spotify board room. This stock value allocation doesn’t require a grant of shares, but can include a dollar contribution that tracks share value and should be paid directly to both featured artists, session musicians and vocalists through their collective rights organizations on a nonrecoupment basis.

But don’t let me describe the bullshit, read it yourself directly from Spotify’s “Chief Freemium Business Officer” whatever the hell that means:

Statement of Alex Norström, Chief Freemium Business Officer, Spotify

“We could not be more thrilled to be partnering with FC Barcelona to bring the worlds of Music and Football together. From July, our collaboration will offer a global stage to Artists, Players and Fans at the newly-branded Spotify Camp Nou. We have always used our marketing investment to amplify Artists and this partnership will take this approach to a new scale. We’re excited to create new opportunities to connect with FC Barcelona’s worldwide fanbase.

Spotify’s mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity, supporting artists to make a living off their art and connecting with fans. We believe this partnership creates many opportunities to deliver on this mission in unique, imaginative, and impactful ways.”

Yes, that’s right. Daniel Ek’s edifice complex is all about unlocking the potential of human creativity because it’s all for the artists, don’t you know.

These people continue to embarrass themselves with their insufferable 1999er BS without realizing that any artist whose name shows up on a single Barcelona jersey will extract a considerable additional payment that the artist will keep and the labels won’t save Spotify on that one. Even if they do, there are only certain artists who don’t mind their names appearing on Barcelona jerseys–for a price. The overwhelming majority will not only not want it but are insulted that the “Chief Freemium Business Officer” is so ignorant of their name and likeness rights that he would even remotely float the idea that Spotify had the right to do anything like that level of grift.

If Mr. Freemium is really serious about “supporting artists to make a living off their art”, forego the edifice stroke and just pay that money directly to featured artists, session folk, and songwriters that have made him rich. Until then, he should just say you’re damn right we used the stockholders money to soothe Daniel Ek’s wounded ego because he desperately wants to be accepted by the Party of Davos and the League of Extraordinary Dweebs. Because we’ve already established what kind of people they are, it’s just a question of negotiating the price.

But let’s face it–what the monopolist really wants is a branded Monopoly game.

by theinvisiblestagehand

Spotify’s ESG fail: Governance

This is the third of a three part post on Spotify’s failure to qualify as an “ESG” stock. 

[This is an extension of Spotify’s ESG Fail: Environment and Spotify’s ESG Fail: Social. “ESG” is a Wall Street acronym often attributed to Larry Finkat Blackrock that designates a company as suitable for socially conscious investing based on its “Environmental, Social and Governance” business practices. See the Upright Net Impact data model on Spotify’s sustainability score. As of this writing, the last update of Spotify’s Net Impact score was before the Neil Young scandal.]

Spotify has one big governance problem that permeates its governance like a putrid miasma in the abattoir: “Dual-class stock” sometimes referred to as “supervoting” stock. If you’ve never heard the term, buckle up. I wrote an extensive post on this subject for the New York Daily News that you may find interesting.

Dual class stock allows the holders of those shares–invariably the founders of the public company when it was a private company–to control all votes and control all board seats. Frequently this is accomplished by giving the founders a special class of stock that provides 10 votes for every share or something along those lines. The intention is to give the founders dead hand control over their startup in a kind of corporate reproductive right so that no one can interfere with their vision as envoys of innovation sent by the Gods of the Transhuman Singularity. You know, because technology.

Google was one of the first Silicon Valley startups to adopt this capitalization structure and it is consistent with the Silicon Valley venture capital investor belief in infitilism and the Peter Pan syndrome so that the little children may guide us. The problem is that supervoting stock is forever, well after the founders are bald and porky despite their at-home beach volleyball courts and warmed bidets.

Spotify, Facebook and Google each have a problem with “dual class” stock capitalizations.  Because regulators allow these companies to operate with this structure favoring insiders, the already concentrated streaming music industry is largely controlled by Daniel Ek, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg.  (While Amazon and Apple lack the dual class stock structure, Jeff Bezos has an outsized influence over both streaming and physical carriers.  Apple’s influence is far more muted given their refusal to implement payola-driven algorithmic enterprise playlist placement for selection and rotation of music and their concentration on music playback hardware.)

The voting power of Ek, Brin, Page and Zuckerberg in their respective companies makes shareholder votes candidates for the least suspenseful events in commercial history.  However, based on market share, Spotify essentially controls the music streaming business.  Let’s consider some of the  implications for competition of this disfavored capitalization technique.

Commissioner Robert Jackson, formerly of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, summed up the problem:

“[D]ual class” voting typically involves capitalization structures that contain two or more classes of shares—one of which has significantly more voting power than the other. That’s distinct from the more common single-class structure, which gives shareholders equal equity and voting power. In a dual-class structure, public shareholders receive shares with one vote per share, while insiders receive shares that empower them with multiple votes. And some firms [Snap, Inc. and Google Class B shares] have recently issued shares that give ordinary public investors no vote at all.

For most of the modern history of American equity markets, the New York Stock Exchange did not list companies with dual-class voting. That’s because the Exchange’s commitment to corporate democracy and accountability dates back to before the Great Depression. But in the midst of the takeover battles of the 1980s, corporate insiders “who saw their firms as being vulnerable to takeovers began lobbying [the exchanges] to liberalize their rules on shareholder voting rights.”  Facing pressure from corporate management and fellow exchanges, the NYSE reversed course, and today permits firms to go public with structures that were once prohibited.

Spotify is the dominant streaming firm and the voting power of Spotify stockholders is concentrated in two men:  Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon.  Transitively, those two men literally control the music streaming sector through their voting shares, are extending their horizontal reach into the rapidly consolidating podcasting business and aspire soon to enter the audiobooks vertical.  Where do they get the money is a question on every artists lips after hearing the Spotify poormouthing and seeing their royalty statements.

The effects of that control may be subtle; for example, Spotify engages in multi-billion dollar stock buybacks and debt offerings, but has yet makes ever more spectacular losses while refusing to exercise pricing power.  

So yes, Spotify is starting to look like the kind of Potemkin Village that investment bankers love because they see oodles of the one thing that matters: Fees.

On the political side, let’s see what the company’s campaign contributions tell us:

Spotify has also made a habit out of hiring away government regulators like Regan Smith, the former General Counsel and Associate Register of the US Copyright Office who joined Spotify as head of US public policy (a euphemism for bag person) after drafting all of the regulations for the Mechanical Licensing Collective;

Whether this is enough to trip Spotify up on the abuse of political contributions I don’t know, but the revolving door part certainly does call into question Spotify’s ethics.

It does seem that these are the kinds of facts that should be taken into account when determining Spotify’s ESG score. At this point, it looks like Spotify is an ESG fail–which may require divesting by some of the over 600 mutual funds that hold shares.

by thetrichordist

Spotify’s ESG Fail: Social

By Chris Castle

[This post first appeared on MusicTechSolutions.]

Investopedia ESG criteria

[This post is Part 2 of a three part post on Spotify’s ESG Fail, and is an extension of Spotify’s ESG Fail: Environment. “ESG” is a Wall Street acronym often attributed to Larry Fink at Blackrock that designates a company as suitable for socially conscious investing based on its “Environmental, Social and Governance” business practices. See the Upright Net Impact data model on Spotify’s sustainability score. As of this writing, the last update of Spotify’s Net Impact score was before the Neil Young scandal.]

I started to write this post in the pre-Neil Young era and I almost feel like I could stop with the title. But there’s a lot more to it, so let’s look at the many ways Spotify is a fail on the Social part of ESG.

Before Spotify’s Joe Rogan problem, Spotify had both an ethical supply chain problem and a “fair wage” problem on the music side of its business, which for this post we will limit to fair compensation to its ultimate vendors being artists and songwriters. In fact, Spotify is an example to music-tech entrepreneurs of how not to conduct their business.

Treatment of Songwriters

On the songwriter side of the house, let’s not fall into the mudslinging that is going on over the appeal by Spotify (among others) of the Copyright Royalty Board’s ruling in the mechanical royalty rate setting proceeding known as Phonorecords III. Yes, it’s true that streaming screws songwriters even worse that artists, but not only because Spotify exercised its right of appeal of the Phonorecords III case that was pending during the extensive negotiations of Title I of the Music Modernization Act. (Title I is the whole debacle of the Mechanical Licensing Collective scam and the retroactive copyright infringement safe harbor currently being litigated on Constitutional grounds.)

The main reason that Spotify had the right to appeal available to it after passing the MMA was because the negotiators of Title I didn’t get all of the services to give up their appeal right (called a “waiver”) as a condition of getting the substantial giveaways in the MMA. A waiver would have been entirely appropriate given all the goodies that songwriters gave away in the MMA. When did Noah build the Ark?  Before the rain. The negotiators might have gotten that message if they had opened the negotiations to a broader group, but they didn’t so now they’ve got the hot potato no matter how much whinging they do.

Having said that, you will notice that Apple took pity on this egregious oversight and did not appeal the Phonorecords III ruling. You don’t always have to take advantage of your vendor’s negotiating failures, particularly when you are printing money and when being generous would help your vendor keep providing songs. And Mom always told me not to mock the afflicted. Plus it’s good business–take Walmart as an example. Walmart drives a hard bargain, but they leave the vendor enough margin to keep making goods, otherwise the vendor will go under soon or run a business solely to service debt only to go under later. And realize that the decision to be generous is pretty much entirely up to Walmart. Spotify could do the same.

Is being cheap unethical? Is leveraging stupidity unethical? Is trying to recover the costs of the MLC by heavily litigating streaming mechanicals unethical (or unexpected)? Maybe. A great man once said failing to be generous is the most expensive mistake you’ll ever make. So yes, I do think it is unethical although that’s a debatable point. Spotify has not made themselves many friends by taking that course. But what is not debatable is Spotify’s unethical treatment of artists.

Treatment of Artists

The entire streaming royalty model confirms what I call “Ek’s Law” which is related to “Moore’s Law”. Instead of chip speed doubling every 18 months in Moore’s Law, royalties are cut in half every 18 months with Ek’s Law. This reduction over time is an inherent part of the algebra of the streaming business model as I’ve discussed in detail in Arithmetic on the Internet as well as the study I co-authored with Dr. Claudio Feijoo for the World Intellectual Property Organization. These writings have caused a good deal of discussion along with the work of Sharky Laguana about the “Big Pool” or what’s come to be called the “market centric” royalty model.

Dissatisfaction with the market centric model has led to a discussion of the “user-centric” model as an alternative so that fans don’t pay for music they don’t listen to. But it’s also possible that there is no solution to the streaming model because everybody whose getting rich (essentially all Spotify employees and owners of big catalogs) has no intention of changing anything voluntarily. 

It would be easy to say “fair is where we end up” and write off Ek’s Law as just a function of the free market. But the market centric model was designed to reward a small number of artists and big catalog owners without letting consumers know what was happening to the money they thought they spent to support the music they loved. As Glenn Peoples wrote last year (Fare Play: Could SoundCloud’s User-Centric Streaming Payouts Catch On?, 

When Spotify first negotiated its initial licensing deals with labels in the late 2000s, both sides focused more on how much money the service would take in than the best way to divide it. The idea they settled on, which divides artist payouts based on the overall popularity of recordings, regardless of how they map to individuals’ listening habits, was ‘the simplest system to put together at the time,’ recalls Thomas Hesse, a former Sony Music executive who was involved in those conversations.

In other words, the market centric model was designed behind closed doors and then presented to the world’s artists and musicians as a take it or leave it with an overhyped helping of FOMO.

As we wrote in the WIPO study, the market centric model excludes nonfeatured musicians altogether. These studio musicians and vocalists are cut out of the Spotify streaming riches made off their backs except in two countries and then only because their unions fought like dogs to enforce national laws that require streaming platforms to pay nonfeatured performers.

The other Spotify problem is its global dominance and imposition of largely Anglo-American repertoire in other countries. The company does this for one big reason–they tell a growth story to Wall Street to juice their stock price. In fact, Daniel Ek just did this last week on his Groundhog Day earnings call with stock analysts. For example he said:

The number one thing that we’re stretched for at the moment is more inventory. And that’s why you see us introducing things such as fan and other things. And then long-term with a little bit more horizon, it’s obviously international.

Both user-centric and market-centric are focused on allocating a theoretical revenue “pie” which is so tiny for any one artist (or songwriter) who is not in the top 1 or 5 percent this week that it’s obvious the entire model is bankrupt until it includes the value that makes Daniel Ek into a digital munitions investor–the stock.

Debt and Stock Buybacks

Spotify has taken on substantial levels of debt for a company that makes a profit so infrequently you can say Spotify is unprofitable–which it is on a fully diluted basis in any event. According to its most recent balance sheet, Spotify owes approximately $1.3 billion in long term–secured–debt. 

You might ask how a company that has never made a profit qualifies to borrow $1.3 billion and you’d have a point there. But understand this: If Spotify should ever go bankrupt, which in their case would probably be a reorganization bankruptcy, those lenders are going to stand in the secured creditors line and they will get paid in full or nearly in full well before Spotify meets any of its obligations to artists, songwriters, labels and music publishers, aka unsecured creditors.

Did Title I of the Music Modernization Act take care of this exposure for songwriters who are forced to license but have virtually no recourse if the licensee fails to pay and goes bankrupt? Apparently not–but then the lobbyists would say if they’d insisted on actual protection and reform there would have been no bill (pka no bonus). 

Right. Because “modernization” (whatever that means).

But to our question here–is it ethical for a company that is totally dependent on creator output to be able to take on debt that pushes the royalties owed to those creators to the back of the bankruptcy lines? I think the answer is no.

Spotify has also engaged in a practice that has become increasingly popular in the era of zero interest rates (or lower bound rates anyway) and quantitative easing: stock buy backs.

Stock buy backs were illegal until the Securities and Exchange Commission changed the law in 1982 with the safe harbor Rule 10b-18. (A prime example of unelected bureaucrats creating major changes in the economy, but that’s a story for another day.) 

Stock buy backs are when a company uses the shareholders money to buy outstanding shares of their company and reduce the number of shares trading (aka “the float”). Stock buy backs can be accomplished a few ways such as through a tender offer (a public announcement that the company will buy back x shares at $y for z period of time); open market purchases on the exchange; or buying the shares through direct negotiations, usually with holders of larger blocks of stock. 

Vox’s Matt Yglesias sums it up nicely:

A stock buyback is basically a secondary offering in reverse — instead of selling new shares of stock to the public to put more cash on the corporate balance sheet, a cash-rich company expends some of its own funds on buying shares of stock from the public.

Why do companies buy back their own stock? To juice their financials by artificially increasing earnings per share.

Spotify has announced two different repurchase programs since going public according to their annual report for 12/31/21:

Share Repurchase Program On August 20, 2021, [Spotify] announced that the board of directors [controlled by Daniel Ek] had approved a program to repurchase up to $1.0 billion of the Company’s ordinary shares. Repurchases of up to 10,000,000 of the Company’s ordinary shares were authorized at the Company’s general meeting of shareholders on April 21, 2021. The repurchase program will expire on April 21, 2026. The timing and actual number of shares repurchased depends on a variety of factors, including price, general business and market conditions, and alternative investment opportunities. The repurchase program is executed consistent with the Company’s capital allocation strategy of prioritizing investment to grow the business over the long term. The repurchase program does not obligate the Company to acquire any particular amount of ordinary shares, and the repurchase program may be suspended or discontinued at any time at the Company’s discretion. The Company uses current cash and cash equivalents and the cash flow it generates from operations to fund the share repurchase program.

The authorization of the previous share repurchase program, announced on November 5, 2018, expired on April 21, 2021. The total aggregate amount of repurchased shares under that program was 4,366,427 for a total of approximately $572 million.

Is it ethical to take a billion dollars and buy back shares to juice the stock price while fighting over royalties every chance they get and crying poor? I think not. 

I think there’s clearly a legitimate question of whether Spotify fails on the environmental and social prongs of ESG. In Part 3 we will consider “governance.”

by thetrichordist

Spotify’s ESG Fail: Environment

Bu Chris Castle

[This is the first in a series of three short posts examining how Spotify scores as an Environmental, Social and Governance (or “ESG”) investment. “ESG” is a Wall Street acronym often attributed to Larry Fink at Blackrock that designates a company as suitable for socially conscious investing based on its “Environmental, Social and Governance” business practices, that is “ESG”. See the Upright Net Impact data model on Spotify’s sustainability score. As of this writing, the last update of Spotify’s Net Impact score was before the Neil Young scandal and, of course, rocketing energy prices that compound the environmental impact of streaming. These posts first appeared on MusicTechSolutions]

Spotify has an ESG problem, and a closer look may offer insights into a wider problem in the tech industry as a whole. If a decade of destroying artist and songwriter revenues isn’t enough to get your attention, maybe the Neil Young and Joe Rogan imbroglio will. But a minute’s analysis shows you that Spotify was already an ESG fail well before Neil Young’s ultimatum.

Streaming is an Environmental Fail

I first began posting about streaming as an environmental fail years ago in the YouTube and Google world. Like so many other ways that the BIg Tech PR machine glosses over their dependence on cheap energy right through their supply chain from electric cars to cat videos, YouTube did not want to discuss the company as a climate disaster zone. To hear them tell it, YouTube, and indeed the entire Google megalopolis right down to the Google Street View surveillance team was powered by magic elves running on appropriate golden flywheels with suitable work rules. Or other culturally appropriate spin from Google’s ham handed PR teams.

Mission creepy meets the Sound of Music

Greenpeace first wrote about “dirty data” in 2011–the year Spotify launched in the US. Too bad Spotify ignored the warnings.  Harvard Business Review also tells us that 2011 was a demarcation point for environmental issues at Microsoft following that Greenpeace report:

In 2011, Microsoft’s top environmental and sustainability executive, Rob Bernard, asked the company’s risk-assessment team to evaluate the firm’s exposure. It soon concluded that evolving carbon regulations and fluctuating energy costs and availability were significant sources of risk. In response, Microsoft formed a centralized senior energy team to address this newly elevated strategic issue and develop a comprehensive plan to mitigate risk. The team, comprising 14 experts in electricity markets, renewable energy, battery storage, and local generation (or “distributed energy”), was charged by corporate senior leadership with developing and executing the firm’s energy strategy. “Energy has become a C-suite issue,” Bernard says. “The CFO and president are now actively involved in our energy road map.”

If environment is a C-suite issue at Spotify, there’s no real evidence of it in Spotify’s annual report (but then there isn’t at the Mechanical Licensing Collective, either). “Environment” word search reveals that at Spotify, the environment is “economic”, “credit”, and above all “rapidly changing.” Not “dirty”–or “clean” for that matter.

The fact appears to be that Spotify isn’t doing anything special and nobody seems to want to talk about it. But wait, you say–what about the sainted Music Climate Pact? (Increasingly looking like a PR effort worthy of Edward Bernays.) Guess who hasn’t signed up to the MCP? Any streaming service as far as I can tell. There is a “Standard Commitment Letter” that participants are supposed to sign up to but I wasn’t able to read it. Want to guess why?

That’s right. You know who wants to know what you’re up to.

If you haven’t heard much about streaming’s negative effects on the environment, don’t be surprised. It’s not a topic that’s a great conversation starter and very few journalists seem to have any interest in the subject at all. I wonder why.

But if you’re an artist who is concerned about the impact of streaming your music on the environment or an investor trying to see your way through the ESG investment, this should give you a few questions to ask about Spotify’s ESG score. And if that slipped by you, don’t feel bad–Blackrock reportedly holds 3.8 million shares of Spotify that are worth less all the time, so they didn’t catch it either. And Blackrock coined the phrase.

Next: Spotify’s “Social” Fail: Rogan, Royalties and The Uyghurs

by thetrichordist

@digitalmusicnws: Is TikTok Safe for Kids? Platform Faces At Least Eight State Investigations Over Its Impact On Children and Teens — Artist Rights Watch

Remember this meme from the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act hearings?

Is your children’s online privacy worth $92 million?

@digitalmusicnws: Is TikTok Safe for Kids? Platform Faces At Least Eight State Investigations Over Its Impact On Children and Teens — Artist Rights Watch–News for the Artist Rights Advocacy Community

This post first appeared on Artist Rights Watch

Eight states (Massachusetts, Florida, California, New Jersey, Vermont, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Tennessee) just recently announced their investigations into TikTok, which settled an Illinois privacy lawsuit for $92 million in 2021. The coordinated scrutiny arrives as TikTok – which has been described as “legitimate spyware” – remains extremely popular, reportedly boasting north of three billion downloads and more traffic than Google.

Furthermore, TikTok’s userbase reportedly skews young, and higher-ups have capitalized upon the platform’s prominence within demographics that are relatively difficult for companies to reach.

Read the post by Dylan Smith on Digital Music News

by Trichordist Editor

20 Questions: An artist’s checklist for an NFT pitch

By Chris Castle

[This post first appeared on MusicTechPolicy.]

If you’ve been pitched to lend your name to an NFT platform or promotion, or if you are an NFT promoter who wants to attract artists to your program, there are some issues that should get addressed. Obviously, discuss all this with your lawyers since this isn’t legal advice, but the following are some issues that you may want to consider before you commit to anything.

As NFTs are priced in cryptocurrencies, a word about that. You should understand that cryptocurrencies use a huge amount of energy due to “mining” (See the Cambridge University bitcoin energy consumption index) and the current spike in the cost of energy is going to have an effect. Also realize that when someone tells you that an crypto enterprise is “green” you have to ask them what they mean exactly–for example, Google tells you that their data centers are “green” because they buy carbon offsets or use hydroelectric power from Oregon or wind farms in Nebraska (just ask Senators Ron Wyden and Ben Sasse), but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still take enough electricity to power Cincinnati in order to operate YouTube. There are no magic elves on golden flywheels producing electricity as if by magic. They still plug into the wall like everyone else.

1.  What artist rights are being granted and to whom?

2.  Does grant of rights match the project summary and are license agreement, smart contract, marketplace/auction TOS and cryptocurrency rules all consistent?  Has a subject matter expert been engaged to produce a report stating and certifying that the smart contract code implements the actual deal or needs to be revised?

3.  What royalty is paid and to whom and when?  Does artist, previous owner or charity participate in resale revenue after initial sale? Are any state or federal relevant tax rules implicated? What have you done to keep NFT revenue as far away from MLC as possible? (Remember that Etherium vehicle Consensys is somehow involved with the MLC.)

4.  Are there exploitation or marketing restrictions on the NFT that would prevent the NFT and artist name being used in ways that are offensive to the artist, at least during the artist’s lifetime? Could heirs enforce these rights?

5. Are there any third party payments involved like producer payments, production company overrides, or any third party rights involved, re-recording restrictions. Will any letter of direction be required, e.g., for producers?

6. Are you being asked to clear publishing? If someone is telling you that they have cleared publishing, has the publisher confirmed the license and are individual songwriters actually receiving a share of revenue? The tendency is that the major publishers “settle” these kinds of cases for a lump sum and prospective royalty, which may or may not be received by individual songwriters after multiple commissions being siphoned off the top.

7.  When does NFT terminate?  (On resale, transfer by owner, term of years)

8.  What is the governing law and venue?  (And how to enforce)

9.  Who maintains the blockchain and who is responsible for policing it? What happens if they fail to do so? (See my post with Alan Graham on this subject.)

10.  Is artist asked to make representations, warranties and indemnity?  Can the artist make such reps and warranties?

11.  Is indemnity capped?  

12.  Are there any active disputes among anyone in the chain on the NFT promoters’ side? (“Disputes” is any disagreements, including, but not limited to, litigation or threatened litigation.) Who will cover artist’s costs of defense?

13.  Is there insurance on chain of title, failure to enforce the smart contract, nonpayment, business risk?

14.  Can license agreement or smart contract be revised unilaterally?

15.  Is the NFT or NFT collection comprised of “generative art” or artwork created by machines, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and related technologies (i.e., potentially not capable of copyright protection)? What are implications for name and likeness rights.

16.  What assurances have been given to identify purchasers of NFTs to enforce terms or prosecute breaches for first or subsequent sales?

17.  Are any union rules implicated (e.g., SAG-AFTRA Basic Agreement Par. 22A)?  See my post on NFT union payments.

18. Is NFT or any NFT cash flows implicated in any sanctions placed on persons related to the Russian Federation? Given the strong reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, consider any implications if China were to invade Taiwan and similar actions were taken against China or China-based companies.

19.  Has NFT seller or marketplace obtained legal opinion regarding whether the NFT constitutes a “security” that would require sale by a registered securities broker-dealer or other regulatory oversight?

20. Are any state securities laws, tax laws or regulations, or “doing business” laws implicated or reporting obligations triggered?

Each NFT raises its own questions, so this checklist is just a starting point.  

by thetrichordist

@MartinChilton: ‘He made sure that she got nothing’: The sad story of Astrud Gilberto, the face of bossa nova — Artist Rights Watch

[Editor Charlie sez: When you read this cautionary tale for artists, remember that like so many other artists we look up to, Astrud never got a penny from radio performances of her records in the US which would have given her a direct payment outside of her recording agreement through SoundExchange.]

“The Girl from Ipanema” was one of the seminal songs of the 1960s. It sold more than five million copies worldwide, popularised bossa nova music around the world and made a superstar of the Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto, who was only 22 when she recorded the track on 18 March 1963.

Yet what should be an uplifting story – celebrating a singer making an extraordinary mark in her first professional engagement – became a sorry tale of how a shy young woman was exploited, manipulated and left broken by a male-dominated music industry full, as she put it, of “wolves posing as sheep”.

Read the post on The Independent

by Trichordist Editor

Daniel Ek’s Edifice Complex: Millions for tribute, but not one red cent for royalties as Spotify buys naming rights to biggest football stadium in Europe — Artist Rights Watch

By Chris Castle

If screwups were Easter eggs, Daniel Ek would be the Easter bunny. Right in the middle of Spotify’s crashing stock price, billion-dollar stock buy backs, shenanigans at the Copyright Royalty Board (which grows more chaotic by the day), the Joe Rogan controversy, and an investigation by the UK competition authorities after an investigation by the Digital Culture Media and Sport Committee of the UK House of Commons, here’s another Easter egg that Little Danny missed.

According to Marca, the sport site based in Spain, Ek is soothing his (so far) failed bid to buy the UK football club Arsenal by acquiring the naming rights to Barcelona FC’s super-stadium, Camp Nou, the largest football stadium in Europe.  According to Marca:

Sponsorship seems to be the way in which Laporta hopes to get the Blaugrana out of the red and into the black.

An agreement with music streaming platform Spotify, which is expected to be confirmed imminently, will see the club receive 225 million euros.

In turn, Spotify will sponsor the men and women’s shirts as well as their training wear. Furthermore, Spotify will have the rights to the stadium for the next three seasons- which has received mixed reviews from fans of the club.

Barcelona expect annual income of 20 million euros from Spotify to sponsor the Camp Nou, which is estimated to be more than Manchester City‘s deal with Etihad – who sponsor their stadium for 15 million euros per season.

That’s right–not one red cent for artists (or songwriters) but millions for tribute. And how did this deal come about do you think? Well, realize that Barcelona is also shopping for a rather large loan to renovate the Camp Nou stadium and they turned to…Goldman Sachs, which happens to be one of Spotify’s investment bankers. So which came first? 

Does Goldman think there’s anything unethical about a company that screws creators all the livelong day but spends hundreds of millions on naming a soccer stadium after itself? (OK, I got that out with a straight face, but you can laugh now.) Evidently not, because in the catechism of Goldman, you stop at the fees novena.

And speaking of fees, what is the source of funds for Daniel Ek’s latest self-aggrandizement or whatever you call it? Perhaps a loan from Goldman before interest rates spike this year if the Federal Reserve really does say goodbye to the easy money era that has bubbled up assets around the world?

by trichordist

@sealeinthedeal: Why Did Spotify Reduce Its Black Box Royalty Transfer to the MLC by Nearly $2.3 million?

By Gwendolyn Seale

Remember the $424 million in historical unmatched royalties (also referred to as black box royalties) delivered to the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) by the streaming services last February that songwriters are waiting to receive?

As a refresher, the Music Modernization Act (MMA) required the streaming services to estimate these “historical” black box royalties going back years, and then pay whatever they came up with to the MLC by February 15, 2021.  Why did the services pay this “historical” black box?  Because songwriters gave them a safe harbor in the MMA to enjoy a limitation of liability from statutory damages for the services’ prior acts of copyright infringement—services like Spotify, which was being sued into oblivion.

Now here’s the jawdropper. What if I told you that Spotify inexplicably reduced its portion of these historical unmatched royalties by nearly $2.3 million?

According to the MLC, on December 20, 2021 Spotify decreased its transfer of historical unmatched royalties by $2,296,820.15. You can find this information by visiting the MLC’s website here: https://www.themlc.com/spotify-usa-inc-spotify. You may wonder why this occurred. Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with any concrete answers, but I do think it is a more than fair question to raise.

Following the February 2021 data dump and transfer of the historical unmatched royalties to the MLC, the streaming services were given until June (in accordance with the regs) to provide the MLC with their second sets of data. According to the MLC’s Interim Annual Report (https://themlc.com/sites/default/files/2021-12/The%20MLC%20Interim%20AR21%20Hi-res%20FINAL.pdf) “[t]his second set of data contained information regarding works for which DSPs had previously paid some, but not all, of the relevant rightsholders for a given work.” The streaming services then had the right over the summer to amend or adjust the royalties and data provided to the MLC.

It is interesting to compare the historical unmatched royalties transferred by each streaming service in February 2021 with the final transfer amounts reported in summer 2021 — and I invite all of you to do the same (https://www.themlc.com/historical-unmatched-royalties ). What you will quickly realize is that the final transfer amounts for every service—other than Spotify, the Harry Fox Agency’s client, either reflected the same totals from the February dump, or, resulted in a higher amount transferred (like in the cases of Amazon, Apple and Google). At least so far.

You may be thinking, how do we know if this nearly $2.3 million reduction is accurate? Frankly, we do not know, and we forced to trust that Spotify is telling the truth. Regrettably, the MMA negotiators did not get (and may not have asked for) an audit right for songwriters or for the MLC with respect to these historical unmatched royalties. (Although it must be said that publishers with direct deals very likely had the right to audit, and possibly those who licensed to Spotify through Spotify’s licensing agent, the Harry Fox Agency, which was simultaneously acting as a licensors’ publishing administrator may have had an audit right. Have a pretzel and the conflicts make more sense).

I recognize I have the benefit of hindsight here — notwithstanding, I find it unfathomable that the MMA dealmakers did not secure an audit right in connection with what was sure to be hundreds of millions of dollars in unmatched royalties.

It is theoretically possible that Spotify overpaid its amount in historical unmatched royalties back in February 2021. Notwithstanding, and feel free to call me a cynic —  how am I to believe that for once Spotify actually made an overpayment in royalties?

How can I trust a company which amassed its billions in wealth by stealing musicians’ works, and has continued to supplement its wealth by fighting for the lowest mechanical royalty rates for songwriters ever?

How can I trust a company that unveiled a payola-like feature offering further reduced nanopenny rates to artists in exchange for “promotion?” (see “Discovery Mode”: https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/music-biz-commentary/spotify-payola-artist-rights-alliance-1170544/ ).

How can I trust a company that when faced with reasonable requests about paying musicians fairly, responded with a straight up gaslighting campaign?  (see “Loud & Clear” campaign: https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/ )

Remember, this is the company whose executive literally told an independent artist the following in a public forum:

“The problem is this: Spotify was created to solve a problem. The problem was this: piracy and music distribution. The problem was to get artists’ music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.”  (See here: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executive-entitled-pay-penny-per-stream/)

In sum, how can I trust a company that has proven time and time again from its inception that it has never cared about songwriters and artists? Ultimately, I cannot — which makes it utterly difficult for me to trust that Spotify incorrectly overpaid nearly $2.3 million in historical unmatched royalties to the MLC. Granted, if Spotify made misrepresentations here, it could lose its limitation of liability for those past infringements–after years of litigation. But, without the MLC having the right to audit the historical unmatched amounts, determining whether Spotify’s total transfer is correct is essentially futile.

Awesome.

So, if you happen to contact Spotify this week about removing your catalog or canceling your subscription, consider also asking them to provide evidence that they overpaid the MLC $2,296,820.15 in historical unmatched royalties last February. Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll get another Loud & Clear gaslighting campaign to post about!

by thetrichordist

@agraham999 and @musictechpolicy: Forever is a Long Time–thoughts on the state of NFTs

By Alan Graham and Chris Castle

If you’ve followed any of the drama surrounding the NFT music infringement marketplace Hitpiece, you know it has deservedly received a lot of grief—and at least one pretty potent cease and desist letter–for its blatant attempt at profiting from allegedly scraped IP it didn’t own. But the interesting thing is that it actually gives us an opportunity to discuss some of the greater potential challenges surrounding NFTs, and how it may in fact be impossible to live up to their promise. Let’s start by picking apart Hitpiece, and see where we get with this teachable moment.

Blockchains or databases that represent ownership, must have one trait in common to provide value, and that is a consensus mechanic whereby each party that is allowed to write data is known to the system, therefore the data that is written is trusted, and then all copies (or nodes) can commit these changes. Ta-da.  There is an inherent logic to the consenus mechanic.  It’s what Shawn Fanning’s SNOCAP accomplished with its registry in sharp contrast to the Wild West of p2p and essentially lies at the heart of Hernando de Soto’s extensive work in macroeconomics.  Good things can happen when people trust the system.

It’s also the starting point of what went wrong at Hitpiece.  Instead of using a blockchain solution like Ethereum, we’re told Hitpiece operates some kind of a “private blockchain.”

So what does that actually mean? It should suggest a distributed ledger, hosted by multiple separate parties to keep everyone honest, with a method of cryptographic consensus (who can write data, how are they known to the system, how is it trusted).  Remember, the definition of “good faith” is “honesty in fact” and it is an essential condition of contracts, all contracts be they smart or just human. 

The novel bit Hitpiece was doing, from what we can read, is that they were using regular credit card payments, not crypto, to allow collectors to mint/purchase the NFTs, which is actually very clever. Seriously, there’s no reason you have to use a cryptocurrency to pay for something, if you are in fact also hosting the blockchain/database. A private blockchain doesn’t need a cryptocurrency, it just needs trusted parties, and there’s the rub. Cryptocurrency is a sufficient condition of a successful NFT platform, but a trusted consensus mechanic is a necessary condition.

Now while we could go on and on picking apart many of the flaws in the Hitpiece model, it opens up a broader discussion that we’d like to have as to how NFTs plan to offer their grand promised future of benefits and entitlements (buy my NFT and get xyz). Whenever you challenge someone in the crypto space about how they plan to handle this, they simply say “smart contracts”, when what they really mean is, “I have no idea how/if this is going to work”.

Terms of Service

First, in order to have a product or service that you sell or provide online, there has to be a series of terms as to what is being purchased, who is paid each successive purchase price, what is being provided to the purchaser, and for how long. That means, in the case of a platform that allows creators to mint/sell/auction NFTs, the party that is minting/selling the NFT has to provide a Terms of Service as to what can be expected, not the platform. The platform is simply a service provider. It’s buyer beware, because the seller doesn’t necessarily have any technical solutions for supporting future benefits.  It’s also seller beware because if the initial seller specifies terms for the sale (and subsequent sales), there ought to be a believable and efficient way to enforce those future rights and post-sale conditions.

So if you are a creator promising this, you need to spell out what those might be, the term of that relationship, and be damn sure you can deliver on it. Likewise, if you are a creator being promised something will happen after the initial sale, you have to believe that your rights can be enforced in an efficient way (like the future sale can’t close without X being the case or $Y being paid to you).  This is a concern for both featured and nonfeatured recording artists (as well as union signatory record companies with collective bargaining obligations), plus co-writers of songs and their publishers.

To pluck two examples from the headlines on The Trichordist, Neil Young might want to place conditions on future NFT sales that have nothing to do with money;  elderly songwriters might want to be assured of a stream of future income from NFT sales that they can ill-afford to sue over.  This is not hard—it happens with real estate every day of the week in practically every country of the world (and was at the heart of Hernando de Soto’s “Peruvian miracle” that started with land reform).  If you don’t meet the sale conditions, you don’t close on the property and the title company won’t take money from the buyer or pay it to the seller.

Perhaps this is especially true of collectibles where resales may be part of the buying motivation.  (See for example, the pending lawsuit over the Quantum NFT against Kevin McCoy and Sotheby’s regarding the Namecoin blockchain that is for “slander of title” among other things—a real estate concept.)  The expectation most buyers will have is that the thing in question will live in perpetuity. For example, If you purchase a physical painting, you have the expectation of enjoying that painting as long as you possess it.

But what are your expectations regarding the NFT? This entire subject seems to be heavy on promises of future benefits and entitlements, but lacks any hard explanations of how that’s possible and for how long. That puts creators and collectors at great risk, because there’s no guarantee of being able to deliver on that promise—until there is. Technology practically assures us that whatever you buy today, will not necessarily work 10 years from now.  How’s that WordPerfect program working out for you?

Technical Challenges

The second issue we never see talked about derives from the first. It seems common for promoters to promise benefits/entitlements in the future from owning NFTs, but how? Where’s the mechanic that makes this possible? Simply saying “smart contracts” is just procrastinating and hoping something will exist later. In order to provide a series of benefits, like exclusives, you have to also provide a structure to interpret these, and we’re dealing with potentially thousands of intermediaries, and millions/billions of NFTs. We don’t have any idea how anyone expects this to work with the existing NFT model.

Say you want to provide exclusive first access to concert tickets to anyone who has a particular NFT. The ticketing site or agency has to be able to recognize this NFT and be able to trust it. One way to do this is they can run native code that runs independently on the site that can say, “I know this collectible” by being able to recognize who cryptographically signed something with a known set of keys. Or they could run an embed from a third party that did the same thing. The most secure way to do any of this is likely having more than one party sign the NFT to prove it is real, but not really something trustless blockchain folks like.

The ability to trust the NFT sale and automatically enforce the terms of each sale is vital for creator-driven NFTs.  If a creator places marketing restrictions on how the NFT can be used downstream, there ought to be a way to enforce those restrictions.  Recording artists and songwriters commonly have such restrictions in their artist or songwriter agreements with record companies or music publishers.  They have approval rights over how their works are used and they have blanket prohibitions.  Approval rights means they are asked before a license is granted by their label or publisher and they can sue if that fails to happen.  A blanket prohibition could, for example, prohibit the use of the work in a commercial promoting a product, say firearms, that the artist or songwriter doesn’t agree with, or a country whose laws the creator rejects, say Beastie Boys with China over Tibet, or a platform that distributes a podcaster the creator doesn’t want to be associated with.

The punchline there is why would a creator take, or allow their label or publisher to grant, lesser rights in an NFT than the creator has for the same work outside the NFT?

You Can Check Out Any Time You Like

Then we get into talking about serious security implications, as NFTs might have both a monetary value, and a potential “smart contract” that remunerates/rewards the purchaser, and has an ancillary connection to the collector’s wallet. Any compromise in this chain and you could not only put one creator or collector at risk, they could all be at risk including the seller (All apes, everywhere, stolen). A single errant smart contract or malicious developer, could put creators or downstream sellers at serious legal risk because they exposed the collector’s wallet to compromise. That means you’ll want to see that every NFT marketplace has serious security experience and precautions, but also as a collector, you’ll want to know that everything you purchase has an audit trail whereby you can verify the NFT is authentic and each link in the chain can be trusted.

That’s a whole lot of magical hand waving.  And title insurance or the equivalent.

In any case, not only does someone need to build, service, and maintain this, but also has to maintain it forever, and it can never fail.

And forever is a long time.

by Trichordist Editor