US House: Proposed Living Wage for Musicians Act

[KeepDeanWeird]

'The additional payments would be funded via a tax on the streaming platforms’ non-subscription revenue and a small increase to the cost of music streaming subscriptions.'

Living Wage for Musicians Act

[Au$tin]

It really should be more of a tiered system because I agree that less popular artists suffer financially from the streaming era, but this new proposed system would also mean "Cruel Summer" alone made $1.8 million from Spotify, which is a high number in and of itself, but multiply that across the hundreds of songs with similar stats plus the additional hundred thousands of the other tracks that would still be raking in hefty profits ($100k+) and that's a lot to ask Spotify to pay out. I just don't see how any streaming service would be pulling in revenue high enough to support that. For the likes of Apple Music, they've got the rest of Apple's products that more than make up for the loss from its streaming service platform. Amazon Music of course has all of the profits of Amazon to fall back on as well. YouTube has Google. But Spotify and Tidal are their own entities that I don't know if they can survive a mandatory payout like this.

A tiered system would help this a lot, much like how an electricity bill is tiered. The first X amount of streams be payed out at a higher rate, then additional streams lower, more streams over that even lower, etc. This would reduce costs for the streaming platforms, allowing them to keep their services at low cost (which would help increase revenue as well), and it would be more fair to the artists on the bottom so they can continue to work on their craft without worrying about potentially starving.

Or perhaps another option would be base rate that all artists on streaming platforms receive per song just for being hosted on the service, then any additional money per stream after X amount of streams has been reached for that pay period.

[KeepDeanWeird]

Mar 10, 2024 16:08:28 GMT -5 Au$tin said:

It really should be more of a tiered system because I agree that less popular artists suffer financially from the streaming era, but this new proposed system would also mean "Cruel Summer" alone made $1.8 million from Spotify, which is a high number in and of itself, but multiply that across the hundreds of songs with similar stats plus the additional hundred thousands of the other tracks that would still be raking in hefty profits ($100k+) and that's a lot to ask Spotify to pay out. I just don't see how any streaming service would be pulling in revenue high enough to support that. For the likes of Apple Music, they've got the rest of Apple's products that more than make up for the loss from its streaming service platform. Amazon Music of course has all of the profits of Amazon to fall back on as well. YouTube has Google. But Spotify and Tidal are their own entities that I don't know if they can survive a mandatory payout like this.

A tiered system would help this a lot, much like how an electricity bill is tiered. The first X amount of streams be payed out at a higher rate, then additional streams lower, more streams over that even lower, etc. This would reduce costs for the streaming platforms, allowing them to keep their services at low cost (which would help increase revenue as well), and it would be more fair to the artists on the bottom so they can continue to work on their craft without worrying about potentially starving.

Or perhaps another option would be base rate that all artists on streaming platforms receive per song just for being hosted on the service, then any additional money per stream after X amount of streams has been reached for that pay period.

Perfect analysis. Of course, politicians know nothing about business and money, so it's easy to say 'hey, let's tax these big companies.' Of course, those costs would be passed directly to consumers. Same as the rights fees, those would paid for by an increase in subscription prices. What will happen is that so-called 'free-tiered' would be severely cut back. And, just like the video streaming services, premium plans would no longer be advertiser free.

Ultimately, if the tax/rate is too high, people will cancel their subscriptions, streams will drop and revenue will go down, etc. Creators absolutely should be compensated fairly for their work. Unfortunately, people have been preconditioned to cheap music for a decade. The labels shouldn't have given away the music so cheaply back then. It's going to be difficult road.