Does this have something to do with streaming not even worth anything to artists? Snoop was talking about how they don't get paid much for those streams.
It's means the major labels are getting a bigger piece of the pie.
-Bots creating instrumentals to soak up background streams
-People filling playlists like Jazz and Ambient with stock or sample music
-People creating artist names as deliberately close to the real ones as possible and filling their disco with hundreds of songs of nothing so they just stream when you're not looking
-Spotify gaming certain peoples numbers (Drake) by burying them deep in several playlists so they get streams even where they shouldn't
Basically, people are realzing how much of the internet is actually dead and is just being taken advantage of.
Spotify has been exposed multiple times for adding "fake" jazz and ambient music to playlists. Essentially they will hire anonymous musicians (or AI) to create derivative songs that can be slipped into traditional genre playlists. For example getting some off brand Kind Of Blue style fake jazz artist added to a Miles Davis inspired playlist, or fake ambient music added to a Brian Eno inspired playlist. The more bullshyt they can sneak onto playlists, the less royalties they pay out.
People forget but the first news we got about AI music wasn't about rap. It was about jazz. Specifically, that AI had allegedly created a John Coltrane inspired album. Young Guru also said that some of his students informed him about an AI attempt to mimic Giant Steps, one of the most complex pieces of modern music ever created.
Live performances will be the only music of value soon enough
Sounds like they’re fukking over the independent artists basically
Universal’s new deal on streaming royalties underscores how the major labels have remade themselves throughout the digital era
www.ft.com
The incredible resilience of the music industry
Universal’s new deal on streaming royalties underscores how the major labels have remade themselves throughout the digital era
September 8 2023
Lucian Grainge has struck a deal with Deezer that will guarantee better streaming royalties for Universal artists, who include Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish and Rihanna © FT montage/Getty Images/Dreamstime
In early January, Lucian Grainge returned from the holidays and fired off his New Year’s memo to Universal Music Group’s staff.
As chief executive of the world’s biggest music label, Grainge holds a singular role in the industry, making his annual greeting something of a “state of the union” for the business. In recent history, it has been a jolly message.
After a long era of destruction, the music industry has been growing for eight consecutive years.
The beginning of this year’s email resembled previous iterations, listing examples of UMG’s utter dominance of the music charts. But after a brief victory lap, Grainge’s tone swung to the sound of an alarm. “Bad actors . . . have been swooping in,” he warned.
The very streaming innovations that brought the music industry back to life were now “flooded” with content that “can barely pass for music”, he wrote. But under current royalty agreements, every recording is treated the same. “We need an updated model.”
This week, that model for music streaming arrived. After several months of negotiations, and increasing questions from investors,
UMG introduced the first significant changes to the royalty system since Spotify debuted in 2008.
The deal with French streaming service Deezer will divert more royalty money towards professional artists — defined as those whose work draws at least 1,000 streams a month — and away from bots and white noise soundtracks. It pays more for songs and artists that listeners actively seek out.
Key moments 1: Creation of the MP3
In the 1980s, German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg and researchers with the Moving Picture Experts Group looked at how to improve audio and video encoding, using Suzanne Vega’s a cappella song “Tom’s Diner” to work out which modes of compression traded off the best sound for the smallest digital file. In 1995, they gave the optimal format the file extension .mp3.
Industry participants say this is a big moment, with UMG in effect pulling other major labels and platforms into a new phase of streaming. “
This is the biggest change to the model in 15 years,” says Jeronimo Folgueira, Deezer’s chief executive.
Music tends to be an early candidate for disruption. Illegal file-sharing began eating into the music market after Napster launched in 1999, long before Netflix’s streaming service would start to rattle television. While the recording industry’s peers in Hollywood are still in the middle of a painful transition, with traditional television in freefall and a once-in-a-generation labour strike raging, music companies have arrived at a more mature phase of streaming.
Yet executives now believe the terms they laid out with streaming platforms more than a decade ago — when the industry was in a state of desperation — are outdated. “Music is the only industry where all streams are valued exactly the same, regardless of the quality,” says Folgueira. “A 30-second YouTube video is not worth as much as an episode of Game of Thrones.”
As technology threatens to tear apart their business again — this time, in the form of artificial intelligence that can make Frank Sinatra’s voice sing “Gangsta’s Paradise” — big music is fighting back.
JPMorgan warns that if left unchecked, Spotify’s platform could become littered with AI-generated rubbish, potentially exploding from 100mn songs to more than a billion in a few years. UMG’s “artist-centric” model will dissolve the financial incentives for these AI tracks to proliferate, the analysts say.
Grainge’s proposed solution will direct more money towards musicians but also towards UMG, which controls nearly a third of the world’s music and takes a percentage of the income of a dizzying number of superstars including Taylor Swift, Drake and The Weeknd.
Key moments 2: Napster and the file-sharing revolution
In 1999, American college student Shawn Fanning created a program which allowed users to search for and share MP3s stored on their personal computers over the internet. Napster and peer-to-peer network competitors like Limewire changed the way music was consumed as millions ripped their CDs into MP3 format and began unlawfully downloading other people’s music files in their turn. A blizzard of lawsuits followed.
This week’s news prompted JPMorgan to raise its stock forecast for UMG, estimating that,
if broadly adopted, this new payment system would lift subscription revenue by 9 per cent. If a “dystopian AI future” were to materialise, flooding streaming platforms with clips,
JPMorgan believes this new model could boost UMG’s revenue more than 20 per cent.
Deezer plans to implement these new payment terms from October. UMG executives hope to announce deals with other streamers in the coming months.
Collectively, these streaming services pay the music industry $25bn in royalties a year, the backbone of the modern music business.
It’s no mystery where the balance of power lies. “The labels control everything,” says David Turner, a former SoundCloud executive who was involved in the platform’s work with UMG earlier this year.
“If you don’t have the UMG catalogue, then your entire business collapses. You can’t have Spotify without Taylor Swift or Drake, so you kind of always have to listen to what Lucian Grainge says.”
