Inside the bill that could (finally) regulate Big Streaming

26:06We have no chips. We have no copyright claim. We have no protection from the government. We have absolutely nothing. So that's why Yuma has decided to sort of try and make an end run around all of this existing kind of power balance and create a new way to claim power in the industry, which is, lo and behold, worker power.

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27:04You can go get it at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Could you talk a little bit about how the Living Wage for Musicians Act changes the process by which the royalties are calculated and paid out? I know that people have been talking about a penny per stream for a long time. And the word coming from the sort of like pro streaming side of things or the Spotify camp was like, oh, we could never do that because if we paid a penny per stream, the whole business would collapse. And I was reading the bill and it seems that you kind of came up with an interesting new way of thinking about it. Right.

27:44The bill really does represent a wholly new way of thinking in the industry. And I think that that's because nobody asked musicians before. You know, like, well, what do you guys think? So, you know, we have done a lot of research and a lot of work to come up with what a musician solution would look like, could look like, to present to our community of musicians and to see if we could get buy-in. And I think we are getting a lot of buy-in already. So this is what we came up with. To go back to this long conversation, which may be boring for people outside the industry, but about how royalties already worked historically.

28:22We have this one very powerful example of when digital came into the marketplace in the 90s for satellite radio, Congress said, okay, the platforms are going to owe new money from this new medium, and that money is going to be divided between musicians and labels. So what we're doing is we're saying, okay, streaming, if you take it as part of that whole same digital ecosystem, which it is, It's been paying all the money only to master rights holders, only to the record labels. They forgot about the other 50%. They should also be paying direct to musicians, just like satellite radio and internet broadcast.

28:58There's really no reason why I don't see how they can muster the argument that they own musicians nothing, which is really where they're at now. What little we get, we get through our labels. And that's a whole long, complicated story. But there's a case to be made just through sheer precedent that Congress already looked at this and already came up with what it felt was a fair solution and passed unanimously the same year that the Republicans were impeaching Clinton. It wasn't like Congress was lovey-dovey back then in the 90s. They were equally divided and it was equally difficult to get any kind of cooperation.

29:32But they unanimously passed in both the House and the Senate this idea that this would be fair. So if you hold on to that and you say, okay, the labels and the platforms made their deal to each other and did not include musicians. So we're asking the government to step in and say, you forgot something. So then once you establish that as a principle, then the question becomes, well, how much are we owed as musicians? And where does that money come from? So the bill that we've designed solves those questions this way. It takes sort of this 50 % as a kind of a concept. It's not quite the same. If you really went to Salarator, you'd say we should be owed 100 % the same as the master rights of course as the labels, right?

30:14You'd have to double the royalties and start sending half of them to us. We're kind of splitting the difference or saying, okay, look, the platforms do have to be in business as well. We feel there should be a 50 % increase in the paid subscription fees for streaming. And that 50 % increase goes 100 % to artists because we haven't been getting any of the thing from before. So that's what we're saying. And the solution is to put it onto the subscription fee we've chosen because it brings new money into the system, but it earmarks all of that money direct for musicians. And our reasoning for that is this.

30:55Paid subscription rates right now are artificially low. It's pretty generally accepted across the whole industry that they need to go up. They haven't gone up. Say, you know, video rates have gone up, but music streaming is still at the same place it was pretty much where it started. It's still basically$10 a month for most places in the US. And nobody wants to raise them. The streaming platforms don't want to raise them because they fear losing market share. Their whole game is to grab as much of the market as they can and then write the rules that they want to have written once they have all that power.

31:28And the labels don't want to raise them because they're afraid to lose subscribers and lose buy-in also to this system for listening to their music as they've sacrificed all the other ways that they used to get music to consumers. They sold the store, right? Recorded music revenue in the US is now 84 % streaming, 84%. Nothing is left outside the streaming system. So now they're like very anxious about kind of upsetting the balance that they've struck. So nobody wants to raise the rates and yet there isn't enough money in the system. So the whole industry is suffering from a lack of income from recorded music.

32:07So we're stepping in, we're saying, look, we are the artists. Number one, we're not being paid. Number two, we are the ones who can ask our fans to pay more because we are willing to say the thing neither the platforms nor the labels will say, which is music is worth more than it's being paid for right now. So we are proposing that we ask Congress to legislate that a surcharge needs to be stuck onto everybody's paid subscription bill 50 % again, but that 50 % never goes to the labels or the platforms. Why? Because they're making plenty as it is. So that new money has to go straight from the consumer, we're our fans after all, and go earmarked direct to recording musicians.

32:48And again, we don't have to invent the wheel here because there's already an administrative system in place to do that. SoundExchange already does that for digital satellite radio and internet broadcast, already gets all the data, in fact, from the streaming platforms because there's a small portion that they do owe to that system. And they already have all the musicians registered that they already cut checks to. So we have a system in place for collecting money from digital platforms and distributing to musicians. It's not being used for streaming. So that's what we're proposing. The other reason we're asking for new money to come in the system instead of saying we want half label share, right, is strategic.

33:23Because we know we are sitting here without power to begin with, and we are building power, new power base. But the labels hold a lot of the cards, and they could shut it down if they decide to throw all their weight in against it. We watched this happen in the UK, where a very similar effort happened already. It was a campaign called Broken Record Campaign. They got all the way to the House of Commons. They had hearings in the House of Commons. And after the hearings, which are very, very revelatory for how the system really works, because again, it's all closed door contracts, but hearings forced a lot of details into the open.

33:58Following that, it seems the majors just stepped in and through the power of lobbying, had the whole effort shut down within the House of Commons. We don't want to go down that route. So we are saying, look, we're not trying to take money away from the labels. We're not trying to take money away from the platforms. They can both cry poor as they sometimes do. None of us believe it, but they can go ahead and keep doing that. We're turning to our fans and saying, music needs to be valued more. We're asking you to pay more, but we don't want any more that you pay to the labels and platforms than you already do.

34:31The rest goes to the artist. And our feeling is that people want to pay for music if it's going to the artist. People understand that. There's one more piece to the puzzle, which is what do you do about free streaming? Now, this is very important. It wouldn't be if the platforms hadn't created these free tiers, but they did. And they did it again with the permissions of the major labels because there was so much interest in just grabbing market share as fast as they could for a new technology. And it's worked, right? Sorry not to cut you off, Damon. When you say free streaming, you're referring to everything from YouTube to TikTok to a free Spotify account.

35:05Exactly. Free Spotify is the primary example because it's for a dedicated music streaming platform that they offer a free so-called ad-supported tier. The other platforms don't do it, right? Apple and the other major platforms, Amazon, they don't have that. Although they do have bundles, which are kind of an equivalent effort where you buy one Amazon product, you get music streaming with it. So we have to deal with those bundled things that exist in the corporate world. We also have to deal with this free idea. YouTube is the other huge question here because so many people use YouTube as an audio platform.

35:41Of course, it's not strictly an audio platform, but it does operate in our world. So we've designed the bill to apply to all streaming that's happening. And our hope is that it would alter the entire ecosystem to make it more accountable to musicians and actually to master rights holders and songwriters as well along the way, because they would need to share a lot more information than they're sharing now about what's going on. Nobody really fully knows what's going on at YouTube free tier because they're not really reporting it fully and transparently. Even with Spotify, where we all have kind of wealthies flowing for better and worse, there's a huge lack of transparency in where this money is really going and how it's being accounted for.

36:21So that's the other thing we're trying to do is sort of make the whole system more transparent. But anyway, so the free thing is something we have to deal with because it already exists. So what we put in the bill is that there's a 50 % surcharge on paid subscriptions, plus 10 % from the platform's revenue for the free ad-supported tiers. So that would mean, okay, if you're going to continue offering these ad-supported free access to all our music, you're going to have to share the income that you make from that, however it is you make it. Whether it's through ads, selling data, we're not entirely sure all the ways that they make a money off it.

36:56But again, a bill from Congress would clear a lot of that up because they would have to declare it. And there'd be a lot more eyes on it than before. So that's how we sort of try to account for the possibility that raising subscription fees would create a push of migration toward the free tier. This way, we would still be making money both sides. Another thing about streaming that probably most of our listeners are familiar with is that it's kind of a winner-take-all system where you have certain artists who get the majority of streams or like most of the streams and then emerging and mid-tier artists who obviously get significantly less.

37:34And there might also, you know, we don't know exactly, there might also be some stuff at work where Spotify pushes people to certain artists over others, further affecting this. But how does this act address the winner-take-all system and sort of try to tip the balance a little bit back towards the smaller artists? Thank you. Such a great question. And we have an answer, I'm happy to say. So this is the other and actually secretly most radical part of the bill that we've designed, which is that we put a cap in it for how much of the money out of the pot that's created from this new pot of money that we're asking the legislator to create.

38:15From that pot, everybody who has streaming tracks would have a claim proportional to the amount of streams that they get. That's the same way we're paid now. But we would put a cap on how much any given track could pull out of that pot. We've proposed a million streams a month as a maximum cap. Above that, so you're talking about just a rarefied group of tracks. But because of the way, as you said, things get all sort of funneled toward the top in the streaming platforms, although it's a relatively small number of tracks that pulls that many streams, it accounts for a lot of the streaming money and a lot of the streams because everything is going toward the same handful of artists.

39:01So we're proposing a cap. Above that, the musician who recorded that particular track would not get any more than the million stream payout per month. Now, remember, this is on top of what you already get from your record label and from your song publishing. The royalties that flow from streaming now would not be interrupted. So we're talking about an additional payment to begin with. So if you're Miley Cyrus doing fine on stream, we're not going to touch any of the money you're already getting from streaming. For this new payment, however, we're going to say you're only going to get up to X amount max.

39:36Past that point, the money that flows from the platforms due to that track generated by that track in theory still goes into the pot, but it gets redivided among all the tracks below the minimum max. So, it's sort of like a progressive tax. So, the reason we designed it this way is to boost the payments per stream among all tracks, including the first million for those hit songs, right? They would also benefit from this in that that million would become, you know, changes according to how big that streaming payment gets. And that would create, we feel, a more equitable streaming platform because the problem with streaming is that it's all at scale, It's at this crazy internet scale that things happen at, and that's not how a lot of music happens.

40:26Music happens in communities, music happens in regions, music happens in specific genres that don't scale necessarily in this global pop way. So what is working best for streaming financially right now is the things that can scale. Tracks that can put you to sleep or tracks that the whole world is dancing to. But everything else is kind of suffering because if you're working in a genre that cannot scale, you don't have the hope of really pulling anything meaningful out of the system. So that's the idea is to make the payments from streaming more meaningful at lower levels, at smaller scales. And the benefit we feel to that would be, you know, jazz could maybe pull something meaningful out of streaming as well as pop.

41:10Maybe we could get regional music, you know, Tejano music and polka music and worship music. I mean, churches have a lot of tracks out there on streaming too that don't have the hope of going viral, could also function in a sustainable way, scaled to the communities that these musics are made for, if you see what I mean. So that's really a radical piece of the puzzle, but it's very, very crucial to how Yuma designed the bill and is thinking about it. it's not the part that we push. It's not the first thing that anybody asks about, partly because the big effect on consumers is this question of, oh, my rates are going to go up.

41:49So that's one big question we have to face for consumers. The big question for the industry is, well, what's going to happen to our subscribers? Are they all going to flee because the rates are going up? Or is it all going to move to free instead of paid? And how's that or fall out. These are sort of the industry questions. The maximum is a question that only another artist would ask, really, because it's really about artist payouts. And here's the interesting thing. So far, we've had no pushback on it, which is really amazing. From Zodafat or? No, from other artists. Really? Yeah. I mean, they're the only ones who potentially would say, well, wait a minute, why shouldn't I get paid?

42:26I've got my viral hit. I want every penny possible out of it. And so far, nobody has piped up and said that. And I think that's a testament to artists, actually. I feel like there's actually a lot of goodwill and a lot of buy-in to the idea that we do need to support one another. And I mean, even if you're at the top of the heap, you are employing your side musicians, you're employing your session players, and then you've got all your friends who are not at the top of the heap in the way you've broken out. And you've also got your former herself, your own prior career prior to your breakout success, say, is a story of struggle.

43:05And I think all artists are familiar with it. Right. Everyone's been there. Everyone's been there. And everyone has friends who are there now. So, so far that has not been a big deal. So it's kind of interesting to me that what we kind of thought is the hardest sell and the most radical idea, like a progressive payment. This doesn't exist in music so far as we understand in any other situation. But that's sort of the newest idea, and it's getting the least pushback. Now, where we took it from, though, I mean, we took it from ideas of justice and of economic justice and progressive policy. But the other place we took it specifically in the arts is from film and TV.

43:42Residuals, it turns out, and we've had really helpful meetings with SAGRA after it and the recording, understand these things. Residuals do work that way. In film and TV, the stars of these contracts don't get residuals until all the other players on these programs are paid up to a certain amount and then they get theirs. It's a reverse from the way the music industry works. And, you know, it's very progressive. But if you look at the history of Hollywood, Hollywood is completely unionized. And we just witnessed the power of those unions last year, where they shut down the whole industry for contract term demands, which they won.

44:22So, you know, the music industry is not organized that way. And so we don't have a history of labor power asserting itself in the collective. So this little piece of our bill is a very much a kind of like a musicians unite, labor unite kind of concept. And I don't know, so far, my feeling is that's going to fly. Hey, pals, if you're enjoying today's episode, we want to remind you that the only reason why we're able to keep this podcast going is because of the generous support from listeners like you. If you can't chill out for a subscription, we understand. We know things are rough out there right now.

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45:14You touched on this a little bit a few minutes ago, but can you talk a little bit more about what, you know, beyond obviously the interests of the streaming platforms, what challenges the bill faces and also what have some criticisms been? I know you said haven't gotten many so far, but maybe beyond artists. Yeah, I think that, you know, The power players in the industry are the labels, the platforms, right? And then you have Congress, of course, because we're engaging with politics. So you have political issues as well. We've gone to the labels, not the majors, but we've gone to big indies to have conversations in preparation for this and polled them and got their feedback and sort of talked to them about what they would need to feel comfortable in this.

45:55And the conversations with them have been really illuminating. It's really interesting to talk to them. In general, they are not happy with the current system either. They have also been handed a kind of a raw deal by Universal and the other two major labels and the platforms. The Indies have just had to accept it. And they really don't have much of a purchase of negotiating power to better that deal. They just kind of can do what they can to try and influence the real powers in the system right now, which are, again, Spotify and Universal, essentially, to behave better. They don't behave better.

46:32They keep behaving worse is part of the problem that the labels are facing. So in that regard, they seem kind of like really intrigued at the idea that the artist could step in and just shake this whole thing up. On the other hand, especially if they're successful, which the big indies are, they've managed in this system to get where they're at now. So they can be a little nervous about having it shook up so much. I mean, what we're proposing is really so new. And so for the music industry radical, it would really change the power structure of the industry. What it would do is put more power in the artist's hands.

47:10Now, some labels are going to look at that and say, we want our artists to feel more independent, more secure, more in control of their careers. We want them to have more resources available to them. And others look at it and say, uh-oh, if the artists feel powerful, they're going to be more powerful than the labels. Where do we fit in? Where do the labels still have their negotiating power vis-a-vis the artists, right? So then you get into that. There's sort of a dividing line, really label by label in some ways, about the labels who feel secure and comfortable with artists taking more power and the labels who that concept makes them very anxious.

47:50So that's one issue that we're dealing with. With regard to the platforms, we don't know what they're going to say. Our hope is that because we're not saying we're going to take their existing income, that they may look at this even as a kind of an escape valve because they're running into a lot of trouble. They're running into a lot of trouble with artists who are furious at them. They're running into trouble with consumers who aren't loving a lot of what they're doing on the platforms and who generally seem like they don't want to pay more if the platforms just raise their rates without explanation.

48:23And they seem to be running into trouble with the big major labels as well. One clear example that we've all just witnessed was Universal and TikTok having such a falling out of negotiating that Universal pulled everything off of TikTok. Now, ultimately, what happened was Universal then cut their own deal with TikTok. Nobody knows what's in it. And now we're back to the same situation again, where two power players cut their deal and everybody else just has to kind of like pick up the crumbs that they can. But you get the image of, it's not like the majors and the platforms are so happy with each other.

48:54If you look at the statements made by the head of Universal, who's really kind of like not only the most powerful man in the music industry, he's pretty down on the direction of Spotify and of streaming in general, and seems to be making noise about wanting the system to change. Now, I doubt he's really waiting for the system to change by artists seizing power, but that's what we want to do. So, you know, So we don't know how this will fall out with the majors and with the platforms. We have yet to find out. But our hope is that they might look at it as sort of benign because we're not taking their money.

49:24They can continue making the money they're making now. We're just saying we need something else. And we're not touching your money. We're asking our fans for money. And we're not touching your contracts. We're not challenging them. We're not saying you owe us back royalties. We're not saying you've been cheating us for the last 15 years. we're just saying, look, going forward, we need more to survive in this industry and make the industry sustainable. So that's our hope. Because, you know, it's a good solution. I mean, that's the other side of it. No one else has come up with a workable solution, but everybody knows there's a problem.

49:58So that's our hope. A penny per stream is obviously a lot better than what artists are earning on Spotify now, especially in this context where they're keeping those pennies, however much it adds up to. I was doing some math yesterday preparing for this and like thinking like, oh, if an artist makes this many streams about how much might they make per month? And I was like, wow, this actually adds up. This could add up pretty fast, especially if the artists aren't splitting it with labels. I added up like, you know, if an artist made like 400 ,000 streams or 200 ,000 streams, like, oh, like, wow, that's actually a pretty good baseline to live on.

50:36But realistically, there are still many artists who don't get meaningful numbers of plays in that sense, like who still won't make a ton of money from streaming or maybe whose work is sort of incompatible with that model where, you know, they're an illustrious composer who maybe gets their money from things like grants usually, but only, you know, a small coterie of people listen to them. So there are artists whose work is incompatible with that. Are we stuck with streaming forever, do you think? Or are there signs that some independent musicians may be on the verge of maybe seeing as an option, but also deciding to opt out?

51:17There was recently a really big moment that, you know, we talk about a lot in the culture journalist discord, that artist Cindy Lee got a Best New Music and was not on streaming. And I think part of the celebration around that record was like, oh, wow, you could actually do it in another way. Yeah, I love this question. Exactly. Such good points. First of all, I love the Cindy Lee record. It's painful to find out that Cindy Lee has canceled her tour, walked off the tour. Oh, really? Kind of amazing. Yeah, because I guess it wasn't just a marketing ploy, as I'm sure some cynical people in the industry could look at that and say, well, look how clever someone went the other direction and succeeded.

51:57But no, I think just someone who genuinely has evidently complicated feelings about what it means to put your work out and how you put it out there. and then when all the shows sold out overnight after the Best New Music thing and all the press that came down out of there, out of nowhere, the whole image of the tour obviously changed and apparently Cindy Lee walked off and canceled all the shows. Pretty intense. What I love about your question is that it very rightly is thinking beyond streaming, which I think is so crucial. Streaming is just the way the industry is working right now. And I've been in this business long enough that I've seen a lot of moments come and go that seem like endpoints, and they weren't.

52:44And streaming is certainly not any more an endpoint than CDs were or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it's very important to think about the ecosystem as a whole in music. And that pretty much comes naturally, I think, to most working musicians because you're always cobbling together your income from so many various sources. Sources come and go in one's career, according to how your work is interacting with audience, with technology, with the industry, with expectations of a given moment. There's always fluctuations going on. And wherever you are at a given moment in time is, I feel sort of like this collision of all these sine waves of your income and your demand that are fluctuating in all these different ways, like your live career in different territories and recorded music, soundtrack work.

53:31So there's always going to be this constellation of ways that music functions in the society and that interacts with the money economy. And I think that that's a big kaleidoscopic picture. Streaming is dominating recorded music specifically right now, just recorded music income. And that's kind of the issue that we're trying to fix to improve. The thing that would happen if we were able to do it is I think it would have a knock-on effect throughout the industry. Because if we could revalue recorded music, you kind of restructure the relative value of all the different parts of a musical career.

54:08And I think you bring it better back into balance. I mean, one of the things that we're seeing so much of is the pressure to make your money in live music, which is really grueling for so many of us and can really have a whole series of effects that are kind of unforeseen in terms of just thinking about the music industry, where you start thinking about people's mental health and people's lifestyles, and even just the amount of production that you need to keep going, the need to have new things all the time to keep yourself in the public eye so that you can keep popping up with enough demand on social media and in the live sphere to keep that kind of career popping is very, very different rhythm than when we have valuing records, which have a long lifespan, right?

54:52I mean, a lot of the streaming platform is catalog records. Catalog, generally they define it as 18 months or older. That's the cutoff. That's some kind of weird decision that record labels probably made a long time ago, say, looking at how consumption patterns go. But if you think about what you have that's 18 months old, it might be your most recent record for one. So even your most recent record passes into catalog pretty fast. But if you can revalue catalog, you can help build a sustainable career over a longer period of time. And that's really important. I mean, now speaking as an older artist, obviously it's very useful to me because I have a catalog, but it's actually useful even to a young artist who's just putting out their first, second, third album because it's also about how long that album can sustain them as they work toward the next one or other phases of the career or new discoveries.

55:43If you don't have time, and that time is sort of purchased by the value of what you've done with the time before, then you're just like on this treadmill, you know? And I feel like a lot of what I'm seeing in musicians right now, especially younger ones, is this really kind of desperate situation of needing to constantly produce, needing to constantly post, needing to constantly be on the road. I mean, just physically draining and exhausting. And it's pretty nigh impossible for a lot of genres, as you were saying, who are not set up that way. And we shouldn't be only valuing, you know, one tiny little segment of, you know, the grand musical possibilities for our society and our culture at large.

56:23So, you know, recording, you know, obviously the history of records is not fantastic in terms of justice either, but it has this great benefit over the streaming thing, which is that it has lasting value. And so I think if we could do more to bring those two concepts back in line in the digital era, it would just bring a lot more help. to the industry as a whole. Now, the other half of the question that I want to just answer also is that at UMaha, we very consciously don't see this as like the beyond and all solution. There needs to be universal healthcare. There needs to be free education. There needs to be cancellation of debt.

56:57There needs to be police abolition. I mean, we have people working on all kinds of ways that our society as a whole needs to improve for the sustainability of of workers' life within it. And we are a labor organization. So the big picture is like, what can we do for workers altogether? And then the issue-based one is, well, what can we do for music workers? What can we do for music workers in recording? What can we do for music workers in recording in the digital sphere? And that's what this bill is about. What are some other issues that Yuma is focusing on right now? Yeah. We have different committees who are pursuing different things.

57:34We have two overlapping organizational strategies right now. One is committees that are devoted to topics like the streaming committee that I'm very active in is what came up with this bill, and also our Justice at Spotify campaign that preceded it. We have a venues committee that's looking at all kinds of issues with regard to health and safety in venues, both for workers and for bands, issues of fair pay. As I said, we've had a police abolition committee that was working on a program to get instruments into incarcerated populations, for example. And then we have campaign-based ones as well. So we have a campaign at South by Southwest that's been very successful, really, in pressuring South by Southwest to treat musicians better, that are coming in.

58:16We're also concerned about visa rules, about international issues for artists, dealing with that. And then about recording contracts. We did some early work we did when we first set up. We had a very active labels committee that did just a very simple but powerful thing to do in the music industry. They gathered a whole lot of contracts that people had with the record labels and compared them. You'd think that had been done before. But that kind of sharing of information is kind of at root of what UMass is all about. It has not been done in the music industry before. We have been generally atomized by the industry and kept apart as workers and not been given a union opportunities, for example, organizing opportunities.

58:58And so contracts have generally been held under wraps. So we've been doing a lot just to share information. And once you start comparing information, you build a power base through knowledge. So we have on our website information about standard terms and contracts, where you can actually go and see what is usual. And you don't have to take your A &R person or your lawyer's or your manager's word for it. So things like that are really crucial. And then just thinking about justice in general in the industry, about discrimination. Obviously, the music industry has a very ugly history of racial discrimination, which relates to the streaming bill, actually, and is part of the reason I think why our champion in Congress is Rashida Tlaib.

59:40And also, if you look at our co-sponsors right now, they're all people of color. We don't have a single white co-sponsor of our bill. Incredible. It's incredible. It's also not incredible because it is a bill about social justice. It's a social justice bill. And the first representatives who have seen it, how we intended it, and what we've structured it to do have been people of color. And it's incredible. It's rewarding, really, to me about the ideas in it, that that has resonated so well. Because who has historically been underpaid in the industry? Well, for example, session players. Who has not been able to unionize in the industry?

1:00:17Orchestras can unionize. Symphony orchestras are unionized. Broadway pit orchestras are unionized. but the rest of us generally are not. But of course, think about the racial divide that that goes back to. Like who's in the symphony orchestra? They all belong to the AFM, the American Federation of Musicians and have union representation, have pension plans and have healthcare for the employers. And the rest of us don't. And that goes all the way back to the 1920s where it was like jazz bands, no. Classical players, yes. All right, like who are you giving the rights to? Who are you giving the credit to?

1:00:49This whole question of like featured and non-featured players, you know, It's like who had the contract? Who was the face that was being sold? And who was only seen in the studio? And who played that break on that song that then was sampled thousands of times but was only paid by the hour when they record? It's very, very likely that there's a strong history of discrimination in just the structural terms of the industry. So you're most very alert to that. We're very alert to issues of fair treatment for gender and sexuality as well. If you look at our Instagram page today, there are posts about a really shocking survey that was done in the UK about sexual abuse in the music issue, how rife it is.

1:01:27So these are all issues that come to the table. But ultimately, we are a democratically arranged open organization. So the issues we pursue are the issues that our members bring to us. So everyone is open to become a member who's a music worker. And if you become a member and you come and become active and you can convince others that the issues that you're interested in need attention from all of us, then they will get that attention. Thank you for that. So let's imagine a world in which there is no regulation of the streaming music industry and Daniel Ek is allowed to continue steering Spotify in whatever direction he pleases.

1:02:04Where would we see Spotify's business model headed without something like this? And what are some recent developments on that front? And what sort of future do they point to? Right. Well, I mean, when you get to the future, it's always speculative, right? So that's where you get into kind of finance people love these things because they're actually making their money by betting on these outcomes. My own view, take it for what it is. This is my personal guess about where this kind of company would be heading. I assume they're prepping themselves to be sold to a bigger corporation because music streaming is not very profitable for Spotify.

1:02:46They keep saying it over and over again. It's kind of a lie because they have all become billionaires through streaming, but they're not getting there through the product. They're getting there through market share, through the value of their corporation. The product that they're pushing is not a great profit maker. The margins are not really big enough. They're not charging enough for music, first of all, which we want to take care of. But also they do owe payments off of that music because there are a lot of royalty claims that come after them. So they don't have a great product. So they keep tinkering, Spotify in particular, with their product.

1:03:22They seem more like a company in search of a product than anything else. They seem like one of those typical sort of like, well, now we've got the market, what are we going to do with it? So they've been going through almost yearly shifts in their emphasis. They bought up all the podcasters, as you're probably well aware, and they put a whole lot of them out of business. and you really want angry people at Spotify, could talk to a podcast company. They're furious. I've spoken to some podcast people because I made a podcast with Radiotopia, so I have access to a bunch of those people. And boy, do they hate Spotify even more than many musicians because they got nothing out of the deal.

1:03:58And they feel like they ruined what seemed like a sustainable growth industry. And they're dumping them again. They're just firing people on podcasting. They kind of like stepped in and screwed it up. Their new one is audiobooks. And book publishers are getting furious at Spotify. Again, you search audiobooks and Spotify in like the last month or so, there's been such fury at them from that world. So that's not going to fly either. I don't think, I mean, podcasts, you well know, you don't make money hand over fist, most podcasters. And that was not like a huge industry for them to take over. And that wasn't going to solve their problems.

1:04:35Audiobooks are the same thing. That's not going to solve their problems either. They're just going to keep looking for what they can do with the market that they have. What can we sell these people? And that's going to cost us less and that's going to make us more. That's what they want. Ultimately, I would assume that what they probably really have their eye on is capital, which is what they've always had their eye on. These are finance people. They're not music people. And they're not podcast people. They're not book people. They're finance people. And so probably what they want to do is sell their company.

1:05:03You know, that's what finance people do. Heck had a company before Spotify. She sold for a fortune and started this one. And he probably wants to sell this one and start another or retire or whatever. So I think they'll probably sell. They'll sell to the entertainment corporations that are bigger. You know, Apple needs help with their streaming. Amazon needs help with their streaming. Tencent would love to buy it, I'm sure. Or maybe the major labels will step in. Maybe Universal wants to buy Spotify and make it Universal streaming. Who knows? But, you know, when you look at that kind of thing, it's like you get drawn in the corporate world and the corporate logic.

1:05:35and I think it's been really helpful at Yuma actually that we dodge a lot of these kinds of questions. The question we get a lot is, well, how is Spotify supposed to make money? And we've gotten this question from the very first time we started criticizing them. And we figured out fast that really the right answer for us is to say, we don't care. That's their problem. What we care about is how musicians get paid for our work. That's what our responsibility is to our constituency. How Spotify pays for their company, that's their problem. And if they can't and they go bust, well, too bad. Somebody will step in on their place anyway, where they'll probably get out of music soon enough.

1:06:16Anyway, that's my prediction. Because I don't see why they'd stick with music because they don't have it in their heart. I mean, have you seen these people talk about music? They don't know how to relate to musicians. They don't know how to even describe music. I mean, it's just astounding the way that they offend musicians every time they open their mouths, Eck in particular, because they don't come from the music world. They're the opposite of smooth operators like A &R, people who used to be hired by the majors to come talk to musicians, or still are, I guess. They're really the opposite. They're tech people, they're finance people.

1:06:46So they'll go off to do tech and finance. I remember Daniel Eck saying something like, if you're not making enough money and you're a musician, you have to know that you can't just get away with only releasing one album every couple of years which is like what every artist does except taylor swift yeah taylor swift totally took that to heart look what she turned around and did which you can't help but wonder like would her almost frantic like pace of releasing records be what it is would she would she be doing that if we weren't in the streaming climate that we're in right now i really i i doubt it i mean i think she's such a driven business person as well as an artist whatever the dominant paradigm is of the moment that she's in.

1:07:27I think she wants to be at the top of it. And she's figured out how to be at the top of streaming, absolutely, which is release three albums a year. You know, staggering, staggering amount of work. Wild. Well, Damon, this has been illuminating and you're doing great work. And thank you so much for taking the time to come on and share with us. Well, thank you so much. I mean, your questions were so good. And I just hope I didn't talk too much. But I guess I was the guest on the podcast, so maybe that was my job. A little bit your job. Every word was potent, so. Thanks so much, and keep in touch.

1:08:06This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominick. Our theme music is by Mark Donica. To check out more about The Bill and Damon's own work, head to our sub stack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what we're doing, leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.