Royalty Payments
A royalty payment is an amount of money that is given to an
artist, composer etc. each time their music is aired. Companies that air the
music like Spotify give these artists a small fee every time. It is up to the
artist whether they want their music to be aired or not. If they don’t want it
to be aired this means no company is allowed to use it as the music will be
copywrited. A lot of royalty payments
that are given to artists are normally a small amount of money, which is why
some artists make their music unavailable to these companies.
In one article
that I read by Thom Yorke who is from the band Radiohead he stated this “I feel
like as musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing” Thom Yorkes band’s music
was previously available on Spotify. They had not been based on Spotify for
long and had asked to be taken of. Radiohead’s reason for this was that they
felt as though they were not being paid enough for their content to be
available to customers or such a small amount. It was said that Spotify has
become a lightning rod for criticism of streaming music by artists in recent
months, partly because it's the biggest service of its kind, with more than 24m
active users and 6m paying subscribers. A large amount of artists are against
the idea of Spotify. However, only a few artists have actually made the
decision to remove their music from the site. In Spotify’s defense they mention
that $500m has been paid out to artists within the year.
I looked at
another article which now shows one musician who disagrees with what Thom Yorke
states and he is actually defending Spotify. Dave Stewart who previously had a problem
with Spotify and the amount of royalties it pays its artists has now changed
his opinion. Dave Stewart disagrees with what Thom Yorke, he now believes if Spotify
had more subscribers then it would pay artists a fair amount. “Songwriters should worship Spotify” that is
the headline of the article and shows that Spotify is a blessing to all
artists. It is said that in the near future it is possible for Spotify to reach
up to 100m paid members. This would mean fair royalty’s being paid out to
artists and also more music available to consumers.
Overall there is still
a large group of artists who feel that they deserve more royalty’s paid out to
them.
Below are the two links directing to the two different articles.
One article being for Spotify and one article being against Spotify
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