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As the author of the Music Modernization Act (MMA), I am thrilled with the benefits it has provided music creators and music streaming services. Rarely does Congress come together in a bipartisan, bicameral way to respond to a market problem with a comprehensive, collaborative and business-driven solution.
The bill updated copyright law for the digital generation, and the cornerstone of the legislation — the creation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) — has been a shining example of an industry working together to solve major market challenges. However, recent attempts by streaming services to redefine the original intent of the statute, to benefit themselves, are concerning and must be corrected.
The MLC was created to solve a massive music industry problem. Streaming services often failed to find the correct copyright owners and therefore held on to large sums of money owed to songwriters and music publishers. This both kept earnings from rightful owners and also opened streaming services up to large amounts of liability — from which lawsuits were piling up, costing them hundreds of millions of dollars. Both sides had a major incentive to find a better way forward.
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Along with my colleague, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), I authored a bill to establish a company that would be funded by the digital streaming companies, and governed by copyright owners, which would receive all of the streaming mechanical money owed and then distribute that money based on copyright ownership. The company would also operate a first-of-its-kind public database so that song ownership information would be more transparent than ever.
To create the MLC, the U.S. Copyright Office held an impartial designation period where anyone could campaign to run the company. A coalition representing the vast majority of the music publishing and songwriting industry came together and was selected.
In five short years, the MLC was activated and is now a towering example of success. It has distributed over $2 billion in royalties to publishers and songwriters. It has a match rate of over 90%. It operates the most accurate, open database of music rights information in the world.
Crucially, as the MLC is responsible for ensuring accurate payments to its songwriter and publisher members, the MMA made clear that it not only has the authority but is mandated to enforce the rights of its members if it determines any streaming service is not reporting or paying properly. Most recently, the MLC was forced to litigate against Pandora for underpaying royalties.
Unfortunately, this has led DiMA, which represents the major streaming companies and has a seat on the MLC’s board, to attempt to reinterpret the original intent of the MMA. They are pushing the misguided idea that the MLC was meant to be “neutral” when it comes to enforcing the rights of copyright owners. Nothing could be further from our objective.
This definition of neutral is simply another way to take the voice away from those who have struggled to be heard when it comes to receiving what they are owed for their labors. This was never the intent.
Should the MLC not enforce and litigate when necessary to uphold the rights of its members, those members would have absolutely no recourse to defend their property rights. This notion of neutrality would make the MLC toothless and completely undermine the important role of the Collective. Allowing the MLC to dole out royalties is inextricable from its primary purpose of ensuring those royalties are correct.
It is a perversion of the legislation to attempt to convince current lawmakers that the MLC was meant to give equal weight to the opinions of the digital companies as the rights of songwriters. Of course, there is a massive incentive for DiMA and its membership to want the MLC to relinquish its role as enforcer of music creators’ copyrights. Billions of dollars in royalties are on the line.
The streaming services’ vision of a neutral MLC is not in line with the original intent of the MMA, and they know it because they were intimately involved in the lengthy negotiation of the language of the bill. The resulting legislation was fair and allowed for the collective and the courts to do their jobs when it comes to disputes.
The five-year milestone since the MMA was signed into law is an important time for reflection and refining. However, it is not a time to redefine the most important music legislation of our time.
Doug Collins is a lawyer and former Member of Congress representing Georgia’s Ninth Congressional District. He served as Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee as well as Vice Chairman of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet. He introduced the Music Modernization Act along with the bill’s lead cosponsor, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).
As the founder of LaPolt Law, a Los Angeles-based entertainment firm, I actively seek out talented students from underrepresented backgrounds to promote diversity within my firm and provide these students with an opportunity that their privileged counterparts may take for granted. I have been working with the Black Music Action Coalition (BMAC), co-founded by my esteemed colleague and co-writer of this piece, Willie “Prophet” Stiggers, since 2021, and I currently serve as their executive leadership council. Our collective aim remains steadfast: to champion diversity and promote developmental opportunities for minorities in the music industry.
Recently, my firm was set to hire a Black woman from Harvard Law School for an internship position. However, the candidate encountered a significant obstacle due to Harvard’s Summer Contribution Policy. I was dismayed when I learned she couldn’t accept the offer because the school’s policy would require that she apply 90% of her summer internship earnings to her tuition bill, which would have made it impossible for her to afford to live in Los Angeles for the summer and pay her bills, while also helping to support her family.
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Most aspiring law students seek admission to a top law school for the promise of excellent job prospects. This is particularly true for students from underserved communities and underrepresented students of color who face significant barriers at the outset of their careers. For these underrepresented students able to attend these high-ranked institutions and secure summer employment, it serves as an opportunity to not only change their own circumstances but those of their families. However, at Harvard, the No. 5 law school in the nation, the financial support for need-based students becomes challenging as the institution deducts up to 90% of students’ summer employment income and applies it to the next year’s tuition bill.
Pursuing a career in “Big Law” allows students to earn a salary upwards of $200,000 post-grad and a pro-rated version of this salary as a summer associate. For students from affluent backgrounds, this path often continues building generational wealth. For students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, it offers a chance to change the trajectory of their families’ lives by providing additional income to support household and medical bills.
Harvard Law’s Summer Contribution Policy stretches beyond those students working in Big Law summer associateships by imposing this policy on any student earning over $9,500. Those accepted to Harvard Law are typically aware the school doesn’t offer merit scholarships, but many students only grasp the significant impact of the policy when they embark on their 1L summer job search, often realizing its implications too late. The policy disproportionately impacts those who receive need-based aid, the majority of whom are students of color.
While some entertainment internships may escape the policy’s impact, others, such as at Disney and certain boutique/mid-sized firms, are impacted as their pay can place a student over the $9,500 threshold. Considering the difficulty of breaking into the entertainment industry, forgoing these summer opportunities can make a Harvard Law student’s dream of working in entertainment harder to realize.
With its $9,500 allowance, the Summer Contribution Policy fails to adequately support students, especially those pursuing summer employment in major entertainment cities such as Los Angeles and New York, where the average monthly rent is over $2,000. This perpetuates a cycle for low-income students of color: they receive need-based financial aid, obtain high-earning summer employment opportunities and lose most of their earnings (which are absorbed by Harvard), leaving these students economically disadvantaged or reliant on additional loans. Rinse and repeat. This cycle persists throughout their time at Harvard and contrasts starkly with the experience of wealthier students who do not rely on need-based aid.
Despite numerous attempts to eliminate or amend the policy through longstanding protests, the students’ informal movement has been unsuccessful. In a world where students of color from low socioeconomic backgrounds must work twice as hard to succeed and three times as hard to be heard, Harvard Law’s Summer Contribution Policy reflects the disadvantages these students face and thus, needs to be abolished or modified to accommodate these students instead of targeting them. My recent experience underscores the challenges faced by aspiring professionals from marginalized communities and emphasizes the importance of advocating for equitable policies within educational institutions to ensure equal access to opportunities for all students, regardless of their financial circumstances.
Dina LaPolt, owner and founder of LaPolt Law, P.C., is an entertainment attorney and activist. LaPolt Law is the only firm of its stature owned and operated by a sole female attorney. As a result of her activism in the Black community, Dina was a recipient of the Black Music Action Coalition’s Change Agent Award, and she also serves on the organization’s Executive Leadership Council.
Willie “Prophet” Stiggers is a lifelong activist, music executive and co-founder/CEO/president of the Black Music Action Coalition (BMAC). Prophet has built BMAC into a unified force of action for racial equity and justice within the music industry and a catalyst using the power of music to improve communities and drive systemic change.
As we come to the end of Mental Health Awareness Month, the music community would be remiss to not critically examine the mental health of the most vulnerable among us — specifically, the child and youth labor that represents a significant portion of our market share, revenues, and slots on the new artist charts. The state of our entertainment union, one that venerates youth above seemingly all else, ironically puts a low value on artist’s holistic wellbeing, putting them in myriad situations that are age-inappropriate, and that are dangerous mentally, emotionally and physically.
The discussion of youth safety in the workplace is hardly new and as the recent documentary about abuses at Nickelodeon, Quiet on the Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, showed, we’ve seen embarrassing and tragic cases of industry putting commerce before conscience. Having only minimal guard rails in place, such practices in the entertainment industry have resulted in mental health damages that oddly run counter to the fiscal goals of the industry itself, but more importantly, cause mental scars on young artists that are carried long into adult life.
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A study published by JAMA Psychiatry last month echoed what so many other studies have shown: over 40% of adult mental illness — anxiety, depression, substance use and suicidal ideation — is directly linked to traumatic events sustained in childhood and adolescence. The study strongly advocates for policy-driven prevention measures to reduce the rates of youth mistreatment, thereby reducing the rates of serious mental illness in adulthood.
The entertainment industry, and specifically the music industry, needs to enact deep systemic, policy-driven changes, ones that introduce the presence of mental health therapists in virtually all situations and venues encountered by new artists. Shadows, if you will, that protect the artist, thereby indirectly protecting the asset the label has so dearly invested in: the artist themselves.
What would this look like? Just as we require on-set academic tutoring and child labor OSHA protections, the music industry should lead the way and have 24/7 mental health support people shadowing each and every new label signing, helping the artists navigate their new reality of constant adoration, free-flowing money, highly-sexualized environments, the prevalence of drugs and alcohol, and long, unsupervised hours in studios and on the road where rampant sexual/gender-based harassment and assault can and does occur. Labels and publishers would present standardized curricula related to mental health on-boarding upon signing, mental health de-boarding upon termination (ie, when an artist is dropped), gender-based assault/harassment safety best practices, recording studio safety, balanced and healthy touring, and general psychotherapy, among other things.
Some forward-thinking industry players are already part of that change. Nettwerk Music Group builds “wellness budgets” into their artist deals. Limited Edition Music Publishing, a new independent publisher, is doing the same. There are also non-profits including MusiCares, Sweet Relief and Backline that offer valuable assistance. But the list of agencies, labels, and publishers giving only lip service during Mental Health Awareness Month is pathetically long.
For more than 15 years, I was a senior level A&R guy. Over those years, I signed a number of young songwriters and bands (Disturbed, Michelle Branch, Hoobastank, BRMC, Remy Zero, among others). The industry thrives on the young. Michelle Branch was 14 when I signed her. The stories many young women tell of being harassed, including Phoebe Bridgers and Billie Eilish, very likely could have been minimized or outright avoided with the presence of therapist shadows (and zero tolerance for the men doing the harassing). But as it stands now, mental health initiatives in the music industry are mostly just performative talking points.
Artists are our livelihood. Artists are our passion. We as an industry need to do better, proactively protectingthem at all costs from predatory, dehumanizing behavior that relegates them the status of a disposable widget (and not someone’s daughter or son). To be sure: artists will be dropped, singles won’t be worked, and albums will be shelved — that’s business — but how the artist is treated when these events occur can make all the difference in their lives going forward.
And what’s the payoff? How about fewer artists with devastating identity issues, severe depression, debilitating anxiety, substance use disorders, suicidal ideation and more? How about artists that don’t flame and burn out? How about artists whose creativity is boundless and ever evolving? And how about cultivating a whole generation of young artists who are emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically at the top of their game — thriving and creating — and not traumatized by the very industry meant to nurture them. Now there’s a legacy we could all be proud of.
David Andreone is the founder of ArtistServices Therapy, a psychotherapy and coaching practice tailored to artists, creatives and creative executives. Andreone has held senior level A&R positions at Warner/Chappell Music Publishing, and Columbia Records, and continues to manage artists and produce TV content.
You’ve most likely heard by now the news that Spotify, through a surprising bundling maneuver, has unilaterally decided to give songwriters a substantial pay cut. As part of our ongoing efforts to provide the songwriting community with data and details related to this incredibly important income stream — which at this point must feel like a continual moving target — we have reviewed and analyzed Spotify’s reporting for the first month where they instituted this change (March), and compared it with the month prior (February).
What Is Happening?: Spotify has decided to bundle audiobooks in its premium tier offerings (affecting 85% of total Spotify subscribers). By doing so, they are now claiming that nearly half of total subscriber revenue is attributed to audiobooks, reducing reported service revenue to music to 52%. This results in a substantial decrease in payments to songwriters, which we explain below.
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In March, total mechanical revenue paid by Spotify was reduced by 33.9% (from $36.7 million in February to $24.3 million). This is where the reported yearly $150 million reduction comes from — an estimate built on Spotify’s prior-year performance and payment reports to the Mechanical Licensing Collective. The twist here is that Spotify reported that performance royalties increased 18.75% from February to March (from $31.2 million to $37 million).
Spotify’s performance royalties always fluctuate from month to month (by as much as +/- 10%) but the magnitude of this change is unusual (and unexplained). Was March’s unexpected growth in Spotify’s performance royalties an anomaly, or a precursor to a new level of payments for that royalty? Due to the structure of the mechanical royalty payment formula, an increase in performance payments results in a decrease in mechanical payments.
For many songwriters who have agreements with music publishers, performance royalties are beneficial because half are paid directly to the songwriter and not through their publishing agreement, whereas mechanical royalties run through the publisher.
So, while mechanical payments in March were reduced by 33.9%, the total reduction in payments to songwriters was 9.75% ($67.9 million to $61.3 million), which on an annual basis comes out to $80 million.
Historical Performance vs. Mechanical Payments for CRB III: This harkens back to prior reporting (and confusion) a couple of months ago when the streaming services reported an increase in performance revenue over the prior five-year period (2018-2022). While we cannot explain exactly why performance revenue changed in this historic accounting period, we can presume that it had something to do with deals that were being negotiated during that time and were finalized and took retroactive effect by the time the final remanded reporting was provided and required by the final determination of the appeal.
If Spotify Cut Revenue in Half, Why Aren’t We Seeing a 50% Reduction? The payment structure has various protections so that Spotify and other similar digital service providers cannot unilaterally adjust their prices to the detriment of songwriters, as Spotify has done here. One of those protections is an obligation to pay songwriters a portion of what they pay record labels, to the extent that that amount is greater than the service revenue percentage. This is called the “TCC Prong,” or “Total Content Cost Prong.” Because Spotify’s deals with the record labels apparently do not give them the flexibility to choose what they can bundle into offerings and make price reductions, what they pay the labels has not changed. In fact, in March, that percentage increased by 5.86%, or $13.1 million.
So is the Total Yearly Reduction 150M or 80M? This will most likely land somewhere in the middle, as it depends on what Spotify reports paying on performance (i.e., if March’s performance royalty growth was an anomaly) and what it pays to the labels. Over the course of the next several months, if Spotify does not change its position, we will be monitoring and reporting trends in percentage and actual results as part of our ongoing effort to provide the songwriting community with actual and up-to-date information related to their royalties. You can also check the current going rate of publishing revenue yourself at any time with our royalty calculator, updated monthly.
Spotify spent five years litigating against publishers and songwriters to establish rates for 2018-2022. The result was a positive increase but a major delay in payment. In total, the mechanical increase from all digital service providers came out to about $250 million over that period. Of that, Spotify contributed $98.6 million more, and that’s just from its restated 2021-2022 period. Songwriters did not receive the eventual rate increase until earlier this year.
When Spotify, the NMPA and NSAI reached an agreement for 2023-2027, we thought the fight was over. We were wrong.
At the end of March, Spotify reported yearly revenue of $15 billion. This audiobook bundling maneuver, which affects 100% of all musical content on its service, reflects less than a 1% cost savings for the tech behemoth. And for a limited time, at that, since the settlement referenced above ends in 2027. This begs the question to Spotify analysts and shareholders alike as to whether it is worth it — and leads to the obvious answer: “It is not.” Spotify should reverse course immediately and find 1% savings somewhere else that doesn’t work to decimate the revenue of millions of American songwriters, the lifeblood of our treasured American music industry.
Jordan Bromley leads Manatt Entertainment, a legal and consulting firm providing services to the entertainment industry for over 45 years. He sits on the Board of Directors for the Music Artists Coalition, an artist first advocacy coalition established in 2019.
Trent Smith is a financial analyst at Manatt Entertainment with extensive experience in the streaming economy.
Recently, Spotify has reclassified its premium individual, duo and family subscription services as “bundled subscription services” in an ill-informed attempt to deprive songwriters and music publishers of their rightfully earned U.S. mechanical royalties. As a result, the agreed-upon revenue share rate for Spotify premium, currently 15.2%, may effectively be reduced to less than 12%, depending upon a number of factors. Losses to songwriters and publishers, estimated by Billboard to be $150 million on an annualized basis, will undoubtedly increase over time as subscription revenue and users grow.
Let me say straight away that this column is not intended to embarrass or disparage Spotify in any way. Quite the opposite: This is a respectful appeal to the company, specifically its senior leadership team, to do the right thing by songwriters, regardless of what strategies they appear to believe are legally permissible.
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Spotify has an unfortunate and documented history of punching down at songwriters and music publishers. In just the last few years, this includes appealing the Phonorecords III decision, which reasonably raised the mechanical royalty rate from 10.5% to 15.1% of revenue over a five-year period (while also providing discounted terms for family and student accounts that are beneficial to Spotify and other music services). Almost immediately after serving notice of its intention to appeal Phonorecords III, Spotify moved to retroactively implement the Copyright Royalty Board’s final pre-appeal decision and clawed back a multi-million-dollar credit from songwriters and music publishers throughout 2019. The appeal and remand process lasted for many years, ultimately delaying the payment of a large amount of mechanical royalties, including those earned during the hardship of the COVID-19 pandemic, until February 2024. And finally, in late 2021, Spotify proposed statutory rates for 2023-2027 that the NMPA referred to as the “lowest royalty rates in history.”
While the settlement of Phonorecords IV in 2022 was celebrated by both streaming services and music publishers, Spotify and other DSPs had especially good reason to rejoice. The settlement provides that revenue share rates minimally increase from the prior rate of 15.1% to 15.35% over a five-year period while also providing for discounts related to not only family and student accounts but also Spotify duo —subscription tiers that are meaningful to Spotify given the strong growth of family and duo plans, as the company has noted in earnings reports. The settlement also provides specific terms for DSPs that choose to bundle a qualifying music subscription service with other products and services.
It’s difficult to imagine why Spotify could have any degree of buyer’s remorse concerning the Phonorecords IV settlement or deliberately attempt to manipulate its terms given how clearly reasonable and fair it is. Spotify presumably entered into the settlement with the full knowledge and acceptance that it was agreeing to pay the revenue share rates of 15.1% to 15.35% upon a properly undiluted revenue base, as it had been doing until March 2024.
But Spotify has again devalued the contributions of songwriters to its platform, a move that has been described by rights and advocacy organizations as “cynical,” “potentially unlawful,” “greedy” and “offensive.”
I’ve been asked a lot in recent weeks why Spotify is doing this. The answer, other than perhaps “because they believe they can,” is simple. I believe that Spotify is unjustly attempting to reduce the amounts it pays to songwriters and music publishers in order to (1) effectively use the displaced royalties to offset the costs of running its audiobook business and (2) improve its margins.
Spotify’s reframing of the vast majority of its subscription services as bundled subscription services is a work of fiction. It has done so, in part, by launching a standalone audiobooks access tier that does not appear commercially attractive to users and was launched, at least to an extent, to support its “bundling” strategy. As noted in the Mechanical Licensing Collective’s (the MLC) legal complaint against Spotify, the audiobooks access tier is largely hidden from view on Spotify’s website on a page where the primary purpose is to steer subscribers to premium, not audiobooks access.
The audiobooks access tier is also only available in the United States, the only country to which the Phonorecords IV settlement and accompanying statutory framework applies, and is notably not available in any other country where audiobooks are available in premium. Spotify’s intent is rather obvious on its face, but to think that the availability of the audiobooks access tier as implemented is something of a silver bullet that qualifies it to reclassify its premium individual, family, and duo tiers as a bundled subscription service is a true mark of acting in bad faith. To do so when Spotify is reportedly on the cusp of rightfully raising prices in the United States is all the more insulting.
In the wake of the ire directed at Spotify from songwriters and the music publishing community in recent weeks, the company has issued statements to Billboard and other media.
First, Spotify has stated that it is simply doing what other services have done with bundled products. In my opinion, this is misleading. The Spotify competitors that have availed themselves of bundle reporting methods have done so for products that are bona fide bundles consisting of individually available services and products that hold a clear commercial value, and to which users actively elect to subscribe. Spotify has even done this itself for bundled products on a more limited basis, in the manner actually intended by the Phonorecords IV settlement and its predecessors. But as the MLC’s legal filing against Spotify notes, anyone who subscribed to Spotify premium prior to November 8, 2023, did not elect to receive audiobooks content or functionality. Many premium users have not utilized audiobooks even once; and, as of this writing, a non-student Spotify subscription without audiobooks does not even exist.
Spotify has also been quick to point out that music publishers “agreed to and celebrated” the Phonorecords IV settlement. I can assure readers there is no world in which the music publishing community truly believed that it was agreeing to bundling provisions in the manner in which they are being abused by Spotify to drastically reduce its payments to songwriters and music publishers. At minimum, Spotify’s actions clearly violate the spirit of the agreement, and to say otherwise is blatantly dishonest. To the extent Spotify may believe it has outsmarted songwriters and music publishers, there should be no pride in ownership.
Finally, Spotify has stated that it “paid a record amount to publishers and societies in 2023 and is on track to pay out an even larger amount in 2024,” which presumably refers to Spotify’s global rather than U.S. domestic spend on music publishing royalties. This may be true given Spotify’s growth trajectory, which as of its most recent reporting was up 20% year-over-year in revenue and up 14% in premium subscribers. However, it is wholly irrelevant and a deflection from the issue. Simply paying more from one year to the next does not atone for the grave offense at hand. The amount of royalties paid is not the only pertinent metric.
Spotify has repeatedly stated its desire to become a more efficient and profitable company. I applaud that. Spotify operating profitably is good for the music business — including songwriters and music publishers. And Spotify is welcome to spread its wings and invest in new areas of business such as podcasts and audiobooks. But let’s be clear: The royalties that Spotify pays to songwriters and music publishers (and other music rightsholders including record labels) are not preventing it from becoming or remaining profitable.
Spotify has said on multiple occasions, including during its 2022 investor day presentation, that it has chosen to prioritize growth over profitability and has done so deliberately and willingly. Its music gross margin has operated at strong numbers and improved over time, in part thanks to its marketplace initiatives, but overall gross margin has been dragged down by investments the company has made in the podcast space. Not all of those investments, including content deals and acquisitions of other companies, have produced positive results, as is well documented in various media, and Spotify has since pivoted to operate more efficiently and better ensure that its costs do not grow quicker than its revenue.
The royalties Spotify pays to songwriters and music publishers are not the problem, nor are the royalties it pays to others. Spotify receives tremendous value in exchange for the mechanical and other royalties that it pays for musical works, and songwriters should not be treated by Spotify as a drag on its margins. To pay slightly north of 15% of revenue for songwriters’ creative output is a gift, and there is absolutely no reason for Spotify to sneak around corners to dilute songwriters’ income. It is beyond the pale, even relative to actions that Spotify has taken against songwriters and publishers in recent years.
I love Spotify and have been a user since the very beginning. But I value the songs upon which it has built its entire business even more. Spotify is a house built by songwriters. In the modern listening environment, which heavily depends upon personalization, recommendations and playlists, songs and songwriters are an even more crucial part of the infrastructure and the value conveyed to consumers who pay Spotify subscription fees.
I’ve often said that compensating songwriters in accordance with the value that they bring to music streaming platforms is not only good business but also good for business. Spotify’s relationship with songwriters and publishers, whether it realizes it or not, is mission-critical and not just about maintaining positive sentiment. Given the global stature of Spotify and the company’s interest in various content types including podcasts, music videos and lyrics, returning its relationship with songwriters and publishers to a respectful position is important to its future. Unfortunately, Spotify’s relationship with the songwriter and music publishing communities that it has built its business upon is now more fraught and damaged than ever. Trust has been almost entirely eroded. That cannot merely be chalked up to, as Spotify stated during its most recent earnings call, “natural tensions between suppliers and distributors.” But it may not be too late to fix things.
Here is my genuine and respectful appeal to Spotify, and it’s not a big ask: Please voluntarily honor the Phonorecords IV settlement on the intended terms that you know fully well were agreed to and promptly reverse course on your misguided attempts to reduce U.S. mechanical royalties in this manner. Songwriters and the broader music publishing community will thank you. If this is too much to ask, I believe the songwriting community will never want to hear another word from Spotify about, to use the company’s own words, “giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art.”
Adam Parness was the global head of music publishing at Spotify from 2017 to 2019. He currently operates Adam Parness Music Consulting and serves as a highly trusted and sought after strategic advisor to numerous music rightsholders, notably in the music publishing space, as well as popular global brands, technology-based creative services companies and firms investing in music and technology.
Spotify has once again shocked the songwriting community by attempting to use a legal loophole to find a new way to pay them less.
Music creators had enjoyed a relative period of peace with Spotify since songwriters and music publishers struck a deal with digital services in 2022 to raise royalty rates over the next five years. Unfortunately, the streaming giant is now perverting that agreement by using audiobooks to redefine and reduce how much they pay songwriters – the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. By unilaterally adding audiobooks to their premium music standalone service, they are now classifying that music service as a ‘bundle’ which means they can attempt to pay royalties under a different definition. In a single year this could cost songwriters an estimated $150 million.
Whether or not they can get away with this is still in question.
Record labels, who are in a free market, have immediate recourse against such underhanded tactics. They are not under a compulsory license like songwriters, and they have the freedom to negotiate directly with streaming services like Spotify. Crucially, this means if they don’t like the way their royalties are affected by Spotify’s bundling strategy, they can say no.
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Unfortunately, songwriters and music publishers cannot. They must go to court every five years and are at the mercy of three judges to interpret Spotify’s routing of the rules.
Spotify first aggressively came for songwriters in 2018. We had achieved a 44% raise in the headline rate for mechanical streaming royalties at the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) – raising rates from 10.5% to 15.1% of revenue. In an unprecedented move, Spotify launched an appeal of that decision, sending us into a half-decade legal odyssey which ultimately resulted in the upholding of our headline rate increase as well as a few new changes.
Fast forward to 2022. Having lost their appeal in regard to the headline rate, the streaming services came to the table to negotiate the next five-year period.
To avoid repeating another era of uncertainty, and to ensure rates and terms improved, we agreed to a deal with Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Pandora to cover 2023-2027 which included a phased-in headline rate increase. Critically, it also included strengthening bundle definitions by ensuring that services were no longer able to attribute all parts of revenue to other non-music offerings in the bundle. However, the court prevented us from doing away with bundle definitions altogether because when a service pays under the bundle definition, they pay at a discount since music is only part of the offering.
Only recently, when reporting of royalties by Spotify sharply decreased in the middle of a CRB rate period, were we alerted to the fact that Spotify was reinterpreting the new bundle rules to manipulate their payments. However, calling Spotify’s premium service a bundle is dishonest.
After raising prices last year, there was great hope that Spotify would better align pricing with market value and songwriters would see the benefits resulting from the deal we agreed to in 2022 which ensures that when prices go up, so do their royalties.
Only in Spotify’s world would a price hike for users mean a lower royalty rate for songwriters.
As we look to the next CRB trial, where we will again face the largest tech companies in the world, we had hoped to approach it as business partners, bolstered by several years of collaboration. This development has shattered that potential as Spotify has returned to attacking the very songwriters who make its business possible – and worse, they’re doing it through a dishonest work-around.
Bundles were conceived to apply when two standalone products were combined to incentivize new users and grow the paying consumer base. What Spotify has done is act as if audiobooks are a new, separate service, when they are in fact the exact same premium streaming option to which millions of users are already subscribed.
In fact, in a bombshell last week, it was found that if you can even find where to sign up for the audiobook-only option, the first question Spotify asks you is who your favorite performing artists are – exactly like onboarding a music-only subscriber. It then offers you all of the music on its platform on-demand.
We will not stand for their misinterpretation of bundles as precisely defined in our settlement. If allowed to abuse the statutory formula in this way, it will pave the way for other services to do the same.
That’s why several serious actions are in process. Last week, the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) sued Spotify for improperly reporting its usage – a.k.a. underpaying songwriters by labeling their services as a bundle.
As the MLC states in its complaint, “Spotify informs potential Audiobook Access subscribers that, unlike Premium subscribers, they will not have access to unlimited, ad-free, on-demand music. But in rolling out its Audiobooks Access plan, Spotify neglected to create a different product.”
Separately, NMPA also sent a demand letter to the streaming giant for its unlicensed use of musical works in its lyrics, videos, and podcasts. We also specifically warned Spotify about its rumored “remix” feature which would allow subscribers to “speed up, mash up, and otherwise edit” songs to create derivative works.
In addition to these legal challenges, soon we will unveil a legislative proposal to permanently fix the power imbalance songwriters face by being subject to a compulsory license for their songs.
Spotify’s cynical, and potentially unlawful, move should make all songwriters and artists question their relationship with the service. The strategy to rebrand music as a “bundle” further devalues their art and amounts to a complete betrayal.
David Israelite is the president and CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA). Founded in 1917, NMPA is the trade association representing all American music publishers and their songwriting partners.
For the last two years, I’ve poured my angst, joy, wonder and grief into a musical project called Current Dissonance.
I read the news voraciously, and every few days, a story resonates with particular thunder. I sit with that story in mind, as inspiration and intention, and then record a piece of solo piano music, composed on the spot, in reaction. Most often, Current Dissonance subscribers receive the new track within minutes of its completion.
I love engaging with this project. It’s become a cathartic practice and wordless diary, connective tissue when so much around us seems to be fracturing, something full of guts and blood and soul that feels deeply personal and unapologetically human.
Given all that, I find it both thrilling and jarring that AI music creation has advanced to a point where well-crafted algorithms could largely take my place as the brain, heart and fingers behind this project.
At its core, the fusion of AI and music creation isn’t new, and its evolution from tweaky curiosity to full-on cultural juggernaut has been fascinating to watch. My first exposure came via Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) — the complex software suites used to produce nearly all new music. Years ago, I experimented with an early AI feature that allowed virtual drummers to bang out rudimentary grooves tailored to my songs-in-progress; another utility let me stretch and distort audio samples in subtle or grotesque ways. Later, I wrote coverage of a startup that used machine learning to auto-generate soundtracks for video.
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Some of those legacy AI utilities felt promising but imperfect, others inelegant to the point of unusability. But they all showed the potential of what was to come. And it’s not hard to see that what was coming has now arrived — with the force of a freight train.
Welcome To The New A(I)ge
Examples of AI’s growth spurt permeate the music world. For cringe-worthy fun, check out There I Ruined It, where AI Simon & Garfunkel sing lyrics from “Baby Got Back” and “My Humps” to the melody of “Sound of Silence.” Then visit Suno, where single-sentence prompts yield remarkably realistic songs — fully-produced, with customized lyrics — in electronica, folk, metal and beyond. Open up Logic Pro and hear just how big and vivid its AI mastering utility can make a track sound in seconds. These developments are just the overture, and there’s no technical reason why a vast array of musical projects — including my own — couldn’t be AI-ified in the movements to come.
For example, I’ve created 154 short piano pieces for Current Dissonance, as of the writing of this article. Hours more of my piano work are publicly accessible. An AI model could be trained on those recordings to look for patterns in the notes I play, the chord voicings I choose, the ways I modulate volume and manipulate rhythms — all the subtle choices that make me sound like me, as opposed to anyone else sitting at a piano.
The algorithm would also need to learn the relationship between each Current Dissonance movement and the news article it reinterprets, building a map of correlations between facets of the written story and recorded music. Do Locrian-mode motifs in 7/8 permeate my playing when I’m reflecting on South Asian politics — and are C#s twice as likely to appear when I reimagine headlines that are less than four words long? I have no idea, but a well-trained AI model would parse those potential patterns and more.
In the end, my hypothetical AI Current Dissonance would function like Suno does for popular music formats. To hear a Michael Gallant-style piano reaction to anything, type in your prompt and see what erupts.
While this may sound like a daydream, the key technical bedrock exists right now, or will exist soon. Following a similar development pathway, I doubt it’ll be long before we can also hear how Tchaikovsky might have reacted symphonically to war in Ukraine, or how McCoy Tyner could have soloed over “Vampire,” “Believer,” or any other tune written after his death. Elvis Presley reimagining Elvis Costello, Billie Holiday reinterpreting Billie Eilish, John Philip Sousa composing marches to honor nations that didn’t exist when he did — the possibilities are stunning.
But where does all of this innovation leave today’s music professionals?
Old Theme, New Variations
Recent conversations with fellow music-makers have yielded gallows humor, dark jokes about obsolescence at the hands of the robots — but also a sense of resilience, the feeling that we’ve heard this tune before.
Take for example the advancement of synthesizer technology, which has certainly constricted market demand for musicians who make their living playing in recording sessions. And the ubiquitousness of affordable, powerful DAWs like Pro Tools, Ableton Live and GarageBand has snuffed out a generation of commercial studios and their engineers’ careers. Those losses are real and devastating, but they’re only part of the story.
Inventing, programming and performing with synthesizers has become a thriving musical specialty of its own, creating new professional opportunities amidst ashes of the old. The same can be said for the brilliant minds who make every new bit of music software even more amazing. And democratized music production due to GarageBand and its ilk has made possible the global ascent of DIY artists who could never have afforded to work in traditional studios.
As the duality of loss and regrowth takes hold in the AI era, everyone involved in music must amplify the latter, while keeping the former as muted as possible. There are key steps that communities and countries alike can take to ensure that AI music technology boosts existing creators and inspires new ones — that it enhances human creativity more than it cuts us down.
Shedding for the Future
The biggest error music-makers can commit is pretending that nothing will change. When it comes to AI, willful ignorance will lead to forced irrelevance. Let’s avoid that future.
Instead, I encourage all music-makers to learn as much about AI music technology as possible. These tools are not secret weapons, siloed away for the rich and privileged; with an internet connection and a few hours, any music-maker can gain at least a high-level look at what’s going on. It’s incumbent on all of us to learn the landscape, learn the tools and see how they can make our human music-making better.
Music-makers must also double down on human connections. For artists with followings large or small, this means rededicating ourselves to building meaningful relationships with audiences, strengthening the human connection that AI can only approximate. Taking time to greet listeners at each performance, making space to bond with superfans — just as in-person concerts will grow in meaning as fiction and reality become increasingly indistinguishable in the digital world, so will the importance of face-to-face conversations, handshakes and high-fives, hugs between artists and those who see beauty in their music.
For music-makers who spend their time in studio settings, reinforcing connections with clients and collaborators will also be key. While I currently rely on AI-fueled music tools in some contexts, I cherish every opportunity to team up with fellow humans, because I’m blessed to work with great people who elevate and inspire me. That’s another vital connection that AI cannot now — or hopefully ever — replace.
It Takes a Movement
Music-makers, those who support them in commerce and industry, and those who weave music into their lives as listeners — all of us must help build a movement that cherishes human creativity lifted through technology.
There’s already hard evidence that protecting artists’ digital integrity is an all-too-rare consensus issue within American politics; check out Tennessee’s bipartisan ELVIS Act for more. Music-makers in any community can push their local and national leaders to ride Tennessee’s momentum and reproduce its successes against AI abuse. As a voting member of the Recording Academy, I’m proud of the organization’s pro-human activism efforts when it comes to federal copyright law and other vital issues. Every music-related entity should make noise in favor of similar protections.
Granted, even the smartest laws will only go so far. AI music technology is so accessible that trolls and bad actors will likely be able to manipulate musicians’ voices, privately and anonymously, without suffering real consequences — a dynamic unlikely to change anytime soon. But the more our culture brands such exploitative recordings as tasteless and taboo, the better. We cultivate respect for human creators when we marginalize the consumption of non-consensual, AI-smelted musical plastic.
Consent is one key; control is another. While industry executives, music-makers of all shapes and flavors, influencers and lawmakers must collectively insist that musicians remain masters of their own voices, I recommend we go further by empowering artists themselves to take the lead.
It would be brilliant, and fair, for Madonna or Janelle Monáe, Juanes or Kendrick Lamar, to release interactive AI albums that they, the artists, control. Such properties could allow fans to create custom AI tracks from raw material exclusively recorded for that purpose. Under no circumstances should AI assets be leveraged for any use without the explicit permission — and compensation — of the humans responsible for the music on which those algorithms were trained.
…And I Feel Fine
In the face of AI’s explosion, we must remember to stay curious, hungry and optimistic. Investors, inventors and tech companies must look beyond novelty song creation as the technology’s highest musical goal; I can’t imagine how far AI will go when applied to creating new instruments, for example. Much of the music I make is improvisational, formed in my brain milliseconds before it’s realized by my fingers. How amazing would it be to jam with live band members — as well as an AI algorithm trained to create instant orchestrations, in real time as I play, using a never-before-heard chimera of Les Paul overdrive, volcanic glass vibraphone and a grizzly bear roaring?
AI presents massive challenges to human creators of any sort, but if we proceed with thoughtfulness and respect, new innovations will lift music-making communities everywhere. I for one will be thrilled to learn who the first Beethoven, Beyoncé and Robert Johnson of the AI era will be, and to hear the masterpieces they create.
Michael Gallant is a musician, composer, producer, and writer living in New York City.
In such a stressful world where mental health challenges are on the rise, it’s comforting to know that there’s a timeless, low-to-no-cost medicine that can help soothe the soul, mend a broken heart, and increase both physical and emotional well-being. That medicine is music. As a psychologist, I’ve seen firsthand the life-changing effects music can have on the lives of my patients. In times of deep despair or moments of anxiety or depression, music and its resonance in the body has had the power to heal in ways that words alone cannot.
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So what is it about music that makes it such a powerful tool for healing? From a psychological perspective, music has the ability to go beyond the rational mind and access deeper layers of consciousness. According to a study in Finland, when we listen or make music, we’re not just taking in the sound through our ears; our entire brain gets involved. The study showed that music recruits the motor areas of the brain, which gets our toes tapping and our bodies swaying; lights up the emotional center of the brain, which lifts our spirits and reduces our stress levels; and activates the part of the brain which allows the mind to wander, daydream, and be creative.
When we’re depressed, grieving, or traumatized, it can be challenging to get enthusiastic about anything. And yet, when we play some music, the sound lights up our “pleasure center,” that deep part of the brain that secretes dopamine, the “feel-good” hormone. A particularly fascinating study noted that simply anticipating or remembering a certain song can boost dopamine levels. And even after listening to the song, those levels can stay elevated as long as fifteen minutes after the music ends. That means, we get to keep feeling happy longer.
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When we suffer from anxiety, fear, or panic attacks, listening to music can help calm our nervous system and decrease levels of stress hormones, like cortisol. It’s also been found to reduce blood pressure, improve sleep, and lessen physical as well as emotional pain by triggering the release of endorphins, the body’s natural feel-good chemicals. In addition, research suggests that having music play in the background while we’re doing another activity can improve our ability to focus and problem-solve, especially those with ADHD. Think of music as a tool for ultimate self-care — moments of compassion that allow for self-reflection and reconnection.
Music improves our memory
Music has the unique ability to evoke specific thoughts, emotions and memories, serving as a bridge between past and present. Anyone who has ever suffered from a break-up or lost someone they loved will recognize its power to access these moments long forgotten. Listening to a certain song can transport us back to that time and place and allow us to feel it all over again. For individuals struggling with trauma or PTSD, certain songs can activate powerful thoughts and feelings, which can provide an opportunity for catharsis and healing.
Music connects us
What I love most about music is its profound impact and ability to foster connection and community. Playing music together, dancing, sharing a playlist with friends, or even attending a concert surrounded by complete strangers makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves. In a world with so much isolation and loneliness, music serves as a unifying force that brings us together across generations, cultures, ideologies, and backgrounds, promoting trust and a sense of belonging.
Curating Your Playlist
Below, you’ll find a 20-track Latin music playlist that I felt called to share. Now it’s your turn — I encourage you to take your own musical journey. Maybe there are songs that speak to something you’re going through or thinking about right now. Or songs that spark a certain memory that makes you smile. Have fun with it and share with your friends if you like.
Edith Shiro, PsyD, is a Venezuelan clinical psychologist in private practice in Miami and the author of The Unexpected Gift of Trauma, available now. She is a board member of the World Happiness Foundation and was awarded the Health Innovation Award 2023 for outstanding service in healthcare and Hispanic Women of Distinction 2018. Also, the Latino Book Award 2022. Learn more at dredithshiro.com
Ticketing for live events is not only under the Justice Department’s microscope but front and center for music fans across the country. This focus places our industry at a crossroads. We can either stay with the status quo, in which events are egregiously expensive and funds go to resellers rather than artists and venues, or we can use this moment to support reform that benefits the broader live event ecosystem.
For too long, fans, artists, and venues have been caught in an unchecked marketplace riddled with speculative ticketing, deceptive practices and exorbitant price gouging.
But all is not lost. We have an opportunity to establish guardrails that protect fans, create trust and promote a healthy live event industry.
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The Fans First Act is the right bill, at the right time. If passed, this important bipartisan legislation will bring much-needed enforcement and transparency, prohibit deceptive websites, disclose resellers, and ban speculative ticketing. That is why we call on Congress to pass this important legislation and move it to the White House for signature.
The Problem
To understand why we need the Fans First Act requires a full understanding of the problem and how we got here.
Fans find themselves in a perfect storm. Amid inflation and an unpredictable economy, they face bots, brokers and skyrocketing prices for live experiences (concert ticket prices have increased by 35% since 2019), according to Pollstar. While fans are eager to see their favorite acts and artists live, too many cannot.
Music festivals are a prime example of live events looking to adapt to the current economic environment of increased costs for fans (tickets, travel/lodging and food) and rising production fees. Unfortunately for fans, this means canceled events. This year, manyfestivals have been canceled as organizers look to consolidate and adjust to rising fees and economic constraints.
Dig deeper into the fan experience and we find that many fans’ first engagement with live entertainment is through a reseller on a secondary ticketing site, sometimes posing as the actual venue.
Fans are often asked to cough up well over $500 for a decent ticket on the secondary market, and that’s for real tickets. A buyer has no sense of clarity about the primary ticket seller. For example, Seattle fan Kerry Dellisanti had her own dream crushed when her $895 nosebleed ticket for a Taylor Swift concert turned out to be speculative (fake). Her friends ended up enjoying the show without her.
Fans across genres and localities are frequently deceived by fake tickets. Many book non-refundable travel and hotels for concerts they think they have a real ticket for, but they’ve been scammed.
Everyone is losing in this environment.
Unscrupulous brokers and illegal bots have been increasingly detrimental to consumers. As they resell tickets at the highest possible price, it’s having a direct impact on the full ecosystem of live events, harming fans, artists and venues alike.
Sky-high profit margins for the secondary ticket seller means fans are seeing fewer shows and spending less on venue concessions and merchandise that sustain organizers and artists. When fans show up at a venue with a fake or overpriced ticket, the predatory seller who defrauded them is nowhere to be found. It is the venue owners, artists and small businesses who are left to pick up the pieces of this unchecked ticketing ecosystem.
The Solution
Our industry is at a crossroads. Cater to the resellers and brokers who have no investment in the concerts? Or swing the power of the live performance industry back into the hands of fans, artists and venues?
We call on Congress to pass the Fans First Act. Fans, artists and venues are the lifeblood of the live entertainment industry and their experience should always be at the forefront. The time is now to give the industry back to the people who make it tick and get back to what makes live events and music so important — and what fuels local economies across the country.
The connection. The experience.
Julia Hartz is co-founder, CEO and executive board chair of Eventbrite.
Stephen Parker is executive director of the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA).
A time-tested revenue model in the theater and concert world is to price the front seats highest, and sell them early to the act’s dedicated followers, then fill out the house with cheap seats to optimize cash flow and lower risk. Recorded music does the opposite: when an album drops, an artist’s music is immediately available on all streaming services to every subscriber, leaving no room for passionate fans to self-select into pricier options.
In gaming, at least since the days of Minecraft, superfans have been given early access to titles prior to their publication, generating revenue, feedback and word of mouth.
Movie studios use a similar model, charging for early access to cinema screenings of major films roughly 45 days before they are widely available to stream (typically first as a purchase, then as a rental). Apple used this windowed approach seeking to maximize revenue with Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon, as did Amazon Prime with Air.
The record industry seems to have missed the memo. Other than an early misfire trying out streaming exclusives on the artist-owned Tidal service, it doesn’t use a windowed approach. This is a huge missed opportunity.
One way for recorded music to open a more lucrative, superfan-based future is to turn to one of the icons of its past: vinyl records. Rapper Travis Scott figured this out, pressing 500,000 double-vinyl records of his Utopia album and making it available the same day he dropped it on streaming services. Scott has now sold the majority of them at $50 a pop, taking the risk, and reaping the reward. What if he had released those analog vinyl records before the album was launched digitally on streaming? If he had sold half the stock before the digital release, he would have grossed $12.5 million, perhaps banking $10 million of that as profit, all while supercharging his marketing machine as all those superfans paraded their prized product to their friends.
A limited-edition package of Scott’s Utopia on red vinyl.
Courtesy of Cactus Jack Records
Like the boy who cried wolf, we’ve been told again and again that the resurgence in vinyl is a blip, not a trend. Yet for 18 straight years it has continued to surpass expectations. For the past three years, it’s made up over a tenth of all label revenues from the consumer and this year will see labels reap over a billion vinyl dollars, with no slowdown in sight.
Analog is surging in book publishing, too, as printed books are now outselling their digital counterparts 4-to-1 and bookstores are ascending. Not long ago that would have seemed inconceivable.
Now let’s look at where the vinyl meets the road: the math. While streaming is a music industry success story, it’s also a commoditization story – selling more and more for less and less. Back in 2001, Rhapsody charged $9.99 to access 15,000 catalog songs; today Spotify et al charge roughly the same for 120 million songs. Add the impact of family plan, where typically three people share a $15 per month account and the value of an account user has fallen by 10% and that’s before you adjust for inflation. Vinyl is bucking this trend. Since 2016, retail prices for the platters that matter have risen 30%.
Will Page
Anjelica Bette Fellini
For a streamer to provide a record label the same amount of value from an album as a vinyl buyer, a customer would need to press play over 5,000 times — or stream for almost two weeks straight without sleep. Let’s be crystal clear on what this comparison really means: consumers are paying more for the same with vinyl but paying less to access more with streaming. So if you want to hedge your intellectual property bets, you’d better put some chips on black and spin the wheel at 33 1⁄3.
Management guru Peter Drucker once quipped that “the customer rarely buys what the company thinks it’s selling him.” In the case of vinyl, over half of buyers don’t even own a record player. So they’re not buying the music — they’re buying merchandise that gives them a sense of identity and connection to the artist. With streaming, you merely press your thumb on a piece of glass; owning, holding and displaying a curated vinyl record with unique artwork has much deeper meaning to a fan.
There are similar conundrums concerning vinyl’s relationship with the creator. Remember that streaming unbundled the album – so you could have nine filler songs on a killer Number One record yet not get paid for those songs. The book Pivot showed that Gotye’s 2011 debut Making Mirrors was the most streamed album of the year, but it was all down to one hit: Somebody I Used to Know. Strip that hit out and this record falls out of the Top 100.
Vinyl captures more in the unit value — no fan can realistically give your album $30 via streaming — and all songs receive the same payout. Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is arguably the greatest vinyl success story in history; yet the obscure Ralph MacDonald track “Calypso Breakdown” from that album earned the same as the Bee Gees signature track “Staying Alive” for every album sold. Investors in music catalogs should take note: supporting more vinyl releases stands to monetize the vast majority of songs currently owned that make almost no money from streaming.
Vinyl is not without its challenges. Measuring the size of its remarkable continued success story is just one. Recent changes by Luminate, the go-to source for industry data, wiped off 40% of the measured volume overnight, by flipping from extrapolating the size of the market to counting only those who opt in. That’s getting fixed, and will assuage the people it’s upset, but the point remains, there’s way more vinyl being purchased than Luminate measures.
Fred Goldring
Natasha Fradkin
There are other challenges, too. If counting bricks & mortar retail is hard, what about tracking online physical retail that’s based anywhere yet serves everywhere? London-based Juno is a corner kick from Camden’s famous market and serves not just the UK and US, but Brazil and China in equal measure. Add the burgeoning second-hand platforms like Discogs and you get a sense that the true size of the market is a lot bigger than we give it credit for.
This brings us back to the potential of vinyl’s first mover advantage. Until the latter part of 2023, vinyl faced an enormous manufacturing backlog and demand far exceeded supply for even the biggest artists. Many vinyl albums were released many months after their initial streaming release.
A rise of small vinyl manufacturing plants have significantly decreased lag time and backlog. Travis Scott used the Poland-based team at Pressing Business to manufacture 500,000 double-disc, multi-cover, multi-colored Utopia albums in just five weeks, allowing for the highest vinyl debut for a hip-hop artist since records began in 1991. Combined with streaming, the album stayed at #1 for five weeks.
The record industry should start selling and delivering vinyl as an early access opportunity, not an afterthought. Pre-stream vinyl releases can create scarcity, exclusivity and therefore additional revenue from superfans who will jump at the chance to be the first to hear the music or own a limited edition version. Artists will benefit creatively as well, as superfans are the ones most likely to truly appreciate the album as a body of work, curated as the artist intended (and, many would argue, with better sound). Once music is thrown into the ocean of streaming, it often gets lost at sea, and all stakeholders lose something valuable. It’s time for the record industry to embrace the vinyl first mover advantage that is hiding in plain sight.
Will Page is the author of Pivot and former chief economist of Spotify, and Fred Goldring is an Entrepreneur, Entertainment Lawyer and co-founder of Pressing Business.