14 Issues in Music That Don't Get Enough Attention

A handful of problems get most music press. There's a lot more that needs to be addressed.

It feels like 99% of music industry press is focused on one of two issues: streaming royalties and the Ticketmaster antitrust case. Of course, these are major issues affecting an untold number of artists. But given that I spend an ungodly amount of time working in, thinking about, and making music, I often come across other pesky problems that get little to no press. This week, I want to give 14 of these issues their due. As always, this newsletter is also available as a podcast. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or click play at the top of this page.

Mo Money Mo Problems

#1 Songwriters Aren’t Paid for Their Labor

Let’s say you’re an artist working on a new song. You bring in a songwriter to help you finish it. Then you hire a producer to bring it to life. How are these people getting paid? For the producer, you will pay them upfront, along with giving them a small share of your royalties to share in the spoils if the recording becomes a hit. Songwriters aren’t so lucky.

The current standard is that songwriters don’t get paid upfront. Their only payment would be from the various royalties generated from their share in the songwriting. If the song flops, they don’t make anything. That isn’t fair. Songwriters deserve to be paid upfront for their labor and not just based on the success of their compositions, especially since those compositions can get shelved for years or never get released.

Furthermore, even if you’ve written a smash hit, the money isn’t going to get to you quickly. While most streaming services report recorded music royalties to labels every month, songwriting royalties are usually reported to performance rights organizations each quarter. This less frequent reporting leads to fewer and slower payments.

#2 It Takes Too Long to Enter a Concert

I’ve spent more time waiting to get into concerts in the last year than I think I spent waiting to get into every concert I’ve attended in the last decade. And this has nothing to do with the number of shows that I’m attending. It has to do with the infrastructure we’ve built around digital tickets.

Digital tickets are often very convenient, but I think they’ve slowed concert entry. Sometimes people don’t have the ticketing app opened. Sometimes they can’t get the tickets to scan. Sometimes all the tickets are on a single phone and the person has to have a venue employee flick through them one-by-one. It’s madness. Since I’ve never worked in live entertainment, I have no sense of how hard these issues are to fix. Nevertheless, it strikes me that two things might speed things up.

1. Rather than scanning a barcode, you should be able to enter by tapping in the same way that you can tap a digital credit card to pay for something

2. If you have multiple tickets on your phone, one tap should get everybody in at once

#3 Many Streaming Services Pay Artists Nothing

It’s easy to find press about how Spotify doesn’t pay enough in royalties. It’s harder to find press about how there are popular streaming services generating hundreds of millions in yearly revenue and paying nothing to artists, songwriters, or labels.

Apple App Store music rankings as of June 11, 2024

Above you will see the most popular music apps on the Apple App Store in the United States as of Tuesday, June 11. Not all of these are streaming services, but the ones that are should mostly be familiar: Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. One probably isn’t, though: Musi.

Musi is a free streaming app that, according to a recent report from WIRED, has been “downloaded more than 66 million times since launching more than a decade ago.” As far as anyone can tell, it’s never paid anything out to anyone in the music industry despite generating more than $100 million in ad revenue in the last two years alone.

#4 It’s Very Confusing for an Independent Artist to Get Paid in Full

For every record, there are two underlying copyrights, namely the composition’s copyright and the recording’s copyright. When you play a song on a streaming service, both the owners of the composition and recording must be paid. That makes sense. But when you look at how those payments flow, you brain will quickly get tied in a knot.

Let’s start by focusing on the composition. When you stream a song, the songwriters must be paid out for the public performance of their work and the mechanical reproduction of their work. Again, this makes sense. But those two songwriting royalties are administered by two different groups. Performance rights organizations (e.g., BMI, ASCAP, SESAC) collect and distribute royalties for the public performance of songs. The Mechanical Licensing Collective, a recently established government body, collects and distributes royalties for the mechanical reproduction of songs.

Now, let’s turn to the recording. When you stream a song, the owners of the actual recording must be paid out too. If you are using an interactive streaming service, meaning a service like Spotify where you can directly choose what you are listening to, then those royalties are paid out directly to distributors or labels by the streaming service. If you are listening on a non-interactive streaming service, like Pandora or SiriusXM, then those royalties are collected and distributed by SoundExchange, a non-profit established by Congress in 2003.

The MLC’s diagram of music royalties

In short, if you want to collect all of the royalties you are owed when people listen to your music online, you likely need to be signed up with four organizations, a distributor, a PRO, the MLC, and SoundExchange. While you must have a distributor to get your music on a streaming service, the latter three aren’t necessary. If you never sign-up, you will not get those other royalties. In fact, those organizations will generally only hold your royalties for three years. After that, they distribute them to all of the other artists in their system.

In an ideal world, there would either be more education about getting independent artists signed up for these services or a more efficient way to administer these royalties. The only royalty we are really good at getting to artists currently is interactive recorded music royalties. Those are the ones people spend the most time yelling about online because they are the only ones most people ever see. In all likelihood, the others should be paid out in a similar way for independent artists rather than having them sign-up with multiple organizations.

#5 AM/FM Radio Doesn’t Pay to Use Recordings

If you turn on SiriusXM and hear “Downtown” by Petula Clark, Sirius has to pay royalties to the respective owners of the song and recorded music copyrights. If you turned to your local oldies station on AM/FM radio and heard the same song, they won’t be doing the same thing. Terrestrial radio only has to pay royalties on the song, not the recording. There is no good reason for this. SoundExchange has been lobbying for a long time for terrestrial and digital radio to be treated the same.

#6 Spotify “Podcasts” are Filled with Illegally Uploaded Music

Music streaming services go to extreme lengths to make sure people aren’t uploading music that they don’t own the copyrights to. Mostly. In 2020, Variety reported that people were uploading music illegally to Spotify by marking that music as a podcast. Podcasts, enterprising listeners have discovered, are monitored less actively. In fact, if you search for popular artists and click on the “Podcasts & Shows” tab within Spotify, you will often find unsanctioned live recordings and remixes. No royalties are being paid for the usage of that music.

Live Taylor Swift bootlegs uploaded to Spotify as “Podcasts”

#7 Apple and Google Use Their Monopoly Power to Deprive Artists of Millions in Royalties