this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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I have some questions about the royalties and the collective bargaining:
I don't use Spotify or any paid service, they rarely have the music I listen to anyway. I do give donations to SOMA FM for groove salad, but I imagine they too are paying the bare minimum - a radio type royalty. But I also tend to buy physical music from the musicians I like and I do go out to see performances. By the way, although I don't know Galaxie 500, I do recognize the Ornette Coleman reference; I do listen to Ornette live music from time to time.
There are a lot of issues here. I think you should have the right to own the company (streaming service) if you could be allowed to collectively get musicians to create a co-op or something like that. On the other hand I find it confusing when compared to my own work, where the company owns the code I write. I do not get paid every time it runs for the rest of my life, so why should you? But I get that the music industry corporations are ruthless, exploitive and chew up talent and spit them out, and are using the streaming services for their own benefit.
Some people might say what are you complaining about? You have a platform that is freely advertising your music, it is up to you to convert that to money. Other people might say that without your music, there would not be a platform. So once again, it seems the only way out is to have your own musician ran platform. So I support that, thanks for the shout out to the issues you face in collective bargaining, and the current legislation in the US.
Sorry if I misunderstood you, but this feels rather easy to answer: because you are being paid to write the code. Spotify doesn't pay anyone to write music (well maybe they technically do for some ads or something, but it's definitely not how they acquire more music to add to the library), they just pay for streaming rights on music that was somehow already independently produced. And tiny unknown musicians have no leverage to negotiate better terms than what Spotify offers.