| Spotify actually has (at least) a few hundred pools of money; one of the pools might be "Free listeners in the US", one might be "Moldovan listeners who have Spotify as a bundle with this particular cell phone provider". A fixed percentage of that money is set aside for the rights holders for the performance (master rights) and the rights holders for the music (publishing rights). The allocated money is then passed to the rights holders, based on the percentage of listens they received within users in that pool. Individual rights holders can negotiate additional bumps, and Spotify has some exceptions for what needs to be counted. I know that the idea that money should go from a listener directly to the bands that user listens to, instead of splitting up the pool, feels like a pretty interesting one. Unfortunately, folks who listen to a lot of music tend to listen to smaller and more interesting bands as well. This change wouldn't necessarily result in more money in the pockets of smaller artists; it's not inconceivable at all that the rich would get richer. It's also worth mentioning that the average person who spent money on music at all, prior to the invention of streaming, spent far less annually than they spend on streaming now. I think artists are reacting to a lot of issues. The entire music industry is built around signing absolutely disgusting contracts with deeply talented and fundamentally naive 18 year olds who are effectively replaceable by the next new thing. This is compounded by the fact that most artists don't have a relationship with Spotify; they have a relationship with their record label who has a relationship with Spotify, and the label isn't really interested in giving an artist a full accounting of what they've brought in from Spotify. Finally, and most importantly, there is a real disconnect between the social impact of music and the actual size of the industry. There's a lot of money there, sure, but the music industry is like a professional sports league in terms of total revenue. A few superstars are going to suck up a lot of the money and not leave much for the bench players, let alone the folks three leagues down from the "show". |