OHHH Man..... Get ready for a rant.......

BTW.... listen to the whole thing.... it'll deceive you in the front.... but you should immediately start vomiting around the 1:45 mark I think.

******I'm talking about Country Genre here. I have no issues with dance music... rock music...rap... I love all music. But I was raised on Country, and it's what I primarily work on and I hold that pretty damn close to my soul. Right now I'm not a happy camper about what's going on in it.

You know Spotify is putting songwriters out of business, right?

Could you elaborate on that? I've never even looked into Spotify

evolver.fm/2013/12/03/what-spotify-just-did-there-transparency-audaciousness-and-the-collective/


December 3, 2013 at 9:51 amby Eliot Van Buskirk
What Spotify Just Did There: Transparency, Audaciousness, and The Collective





spotify_artistsFollowing thousands of articles about how Spotify pays — or doesn’t pay — enough money to artists, the company, again worth $4 billion after another round of investment, issued a mini-website on Tuesday to explain how it is not ripping off artists by streaming their music for free or for a monthly subscription to music fans in 39 countries.

It’s not just a public relations move. Spotify is also giving artists direct access to their data (soon), assembled with the help of Next Big Sound.

In a music industry where artists typically have to sue their labels for a chance to look at the books, this amounts to some fairly radical…


Transparency

By laying bare how it pays copyright holders — a group that includes not only recording artists, but songwriters, record labels, and publishers, too – Spotify can no longer hide behind its formerly-opaque royalty calculations. This is a major step forward for transparency in the music business, at least if Spotify and things like it constitute a significant portion of its future.

Spotify wouldn’t do this to make itself look bad, especially when the company is already so polarizing in the artistic community, with some artists (Billy Bragg) coming to its defense and others (Thom Yorke) thinking of ever more clever ways to state their disdain for the service as they withhold their music from its catalog.

This move could pit Spotify and artists, whom some see as enemies, against labels and publishers. After all, once recording artists and songwriters see how much Spotify is paying labels (and then publishers) on their behalf, they might notice how little of that money they’re actually seeing, even after waiting up to 18 months for their slice of the money to work its way through their label(s) and/or publisher(s).

Their very next phone call could be to their label or publisher, wondering where all that Spotify money is going — or to their manager, to see about switching labels or distributing music without a label. That way, they’d get 100 percent of that Spotify loot.

Audaciousness

Spotify hinted that it could pay out a billion dollars to copyright holders in 2013. So far, Spotify says it has paid out half that so far ($500 million). Given that there are only four more weeks in the year, we don’t expect Spotify to hit that billion-dollar mark, although it has paid out over a billion dollars to copyright holders since 2009.

According to Spotify, a niche indie album, presumably with a bit of traction, will earn $17K per month from the service. That would be an amazing world, but it assumes Spotify will hit 40 million paying subscribers.

So far, it has announced six million paying subscribers, and The Guardian’s sources say that figure is approaching 10 million. Finding 30 million more people to pay $10/month for Spotify who don’t already have it will be no easy task, especially when there’s so much free music out there. But if that happens — if — Spotify promises that more artists will earn a decent living from the service.

The Collective

Finally, Spotify clarified a big source of frustration for anyone trying to write about or understand how much it pays per stream.

The answer: Although Spotify pays copyright holder every time a song is streamed, it has no set figure for how much it pays out per stream, which is why previous estimated figures vary so much. The whole thing is a big collective. Some users pay, while others listen for free and put up with advertising that generates another little stream of cash. All of that money goes into a big pot, then gets split up among artists depending on who streams the most, with additional tweaks made for the country in which the listening took place.

After all of these calculations, Spotify says it ends up paying out between $0.006 and $0.0084 per streamed song.

Of course, the initial Spotify checks containing that money go to labels, then the money filters through to publishers, recording artists, and songwriters, according to how their contracts are set up. The biggest result of Spotify’s new transparency could be to affect artist contracts that have yet to be signed, with implications for how artists negotiate streaming rights (some of them are already suing labels about Spotify). Now that they will soon know how much money their music is generating from Spotify, they’ll have a better understanding of their fair share.

This is relatively a new technology. I still don't think the labels and artist fully understand it. I know that it's starting to become an issue and labels and artist are going to have to decide whether they want their content streamed or not. This is the way I see it, with streaming obviously the rate in which a song is spun is drastically higher. I think they need to figure out a formula that would equal the average payout that say iTunes or physical brings in and start paying the correct royalties. The streaming companies argument is that they are providing an exponentially larger rate of spins, and that because of that, the figure they have in place eventually levels out with what iTunes or physical would be, because the right to spin it is recurring. Obviously this isn't true, and they are only getting away with it because of lobbying to our elected officials to not have the rates hiked up.

I just want to know why this is available if no one is making anything? Why is it that I am able to go on this and listen to any song I want if no one is making any money, or if the record labels revenue is being so badly impacted by it. Why are labels allowing their content to be streamed? Is it because labels feel this would draw people away from illegally downloading the content? Is it because the a la carte of iTunes is decreasing revenue? Today's technology is all digital, that's the world we live in. Where do you even buy a CD anymore? At the artist shows? People will simply not buy CD's anymore because they want to eventually put that content on their media devices, and iTunes is the major player here. Allowing people to buy a single song off an album started this mess, but, this is how people want their media, they want it in their pockets. Radio stations are not getting the ratings anymore because auto manufactures have implemented bluetooth in cars, so when a person hops in their car, they don't flip on the radio anymore, they just load up their playlist from their smartphones and away they go.

I think everyone could be happy eventually in the new world of content delivery. But, it all starts with the labels, and them saying no money=no content. Some are doing this, but not the big ones, not the ones that could make a difference and get this changed. The end user isn't going to be responsible for making the change. Our society will always be selfish, and they want their content to be in the from they want it to be in. If the streaming companies cannot find a way to generate enough revenue to responsibly payout royalties they need to shut it down and let it go back to companies selling one license per song. But once that license is paid for it's theirs forever, if streaming companies could find a way to be competitive in royalty payouts then it would actually mean more money for labels,songwriters, artists. That's because the license to play the song is recurring, and because it's digital, the record for how many times those spins are happening can be tracked down. There's no one buying a CD listening to it for a while then giving it to their poor buddy who doesn't buy anything, or downloads it illegally, or rips it off and burns him a copy.

It's a new technology, changes have to be made, but it ultimately starts with the labels in making that change, and spending more money to lobby the public officials than the streaming companies are.

Just my opinion on this.

How about this...1 cent for the first 99 streams. Then it's free thereafter...

I personally use these streaming services to see if I like an album before purchasing. I want to see if the album is worth my cash. I was recently trying to find a steam of the new Beyoncé album, but couldn't find it anywhere. I guess she's just not going to get my money.

I really, really agree with your sentiment and it's an uncomfortable truth to the engineering community. The budgets are going to have to shrink, and we're going to have to do more with less in order to be able to exist. The "Which Neve console do I need" guys are dinosaurs. When someone can invest 1000 dollars and have a 16 input setup, some monitors and a couple of mics - why would he pay anyone that for an album?

It has to be economic and the difference in results have to be clear enough that he looks like the guy buying a trowel and deciding he's going to plaster his own house.


But the real cost is space. The real cost is lights and heating, security and rent. But in a world where no one maximizes the use of their spaces - why the fuck pay for one you're not going to be making money out of round the clock, either? Especially when any of the studios I've been to have fake/ineffective treatment and no isolation and have been far from "vibey". This is where the multimedia guys have us beat - they're happy to take a DLSR to just about anywhere that suits. It's why they're feeling the pinch and we're imploding.

Small, versatile setups that are portable is currently what I'm looking at. No one at my level has millions to pay me, so a million dollar set up won't get me any more income than a cheap one. Good laptop, portable recording device, maybe a mixer, big of jack-of-all-trade microphones, portable acoustics. Move them into the venues the artist and yourself can find and realistically use. Churches, schools, disused commercial spaces, houses. Whatever. The cost is now just your labour, maybe some minor transaction for the space and transport.

Nice!

I felt the dig at Cubase was a little petty of them. Came off a bit like some pro-tools fanatic in the back room kicking chairs in the office cause not everyone thinks you need a U47 to make a record.

That's definitely who it is.