Talking Heads frontman David Byrne penned an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times that took the debate a step further: Reform, Byrne argued, is tough to achieve because streaming services and record labels have been secretive about their practices.
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Lots of people like to blame Spotify, Apple Music and the like for this problem, but as Mr Byrne points out, they’re at least partially powerless to do anything about it. These services pay a huge amount of their revenue to record labels, which in turn pocket most of the revenue.
Byrne wrote: “Even as the musical audience has grown, ways have been found to siphon off a greater percentage than ever of the money that customers and music fans pay for recorded music”. Artists, especially those affiliated with the big three major labels, take home a very small part of the streaming loot.
In October 2013, Byrne was more critical of music streaming services in an essay for The Guardian, warning that the medium’s low royalty rates would dissuade artists from pursuing a career in music and that “our future as a musical culture looks grim”.
Byrne has spoken out against streaming services before. He went on to reveal that he had tried to get Apple Music to break down their royalty calculations over their three-month trial period, only to be told that he would have to get his lawyers involved. The labels are screwing artists over as they have for time immemorial.
But soon the lack of real adaptation by major labels to a thoroughly new landscape of music consumption becomes apparent, still thriving by their adherence to paying their artists 15% of royalties. For example, I asked YouTube how ad revenue from videos that contain music is shared (which should be an incredibly basic question). They might give him 3 per cent – or 10 per cent. What’s to stop them?
Read David Byrne’s opinion piece, “Open the Music Industry’s Black Box” here, and listen to “Who” – from his collaborative “Love This Giant” album with St Vincent’ – below. It turns out that it’s not just the labels who are at fault here.
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Byrne concluded by saying a radical, or “disruptive” approach might be necessary in order to fix what he sees as a broken system that breeds mistrust and has led to a “rising tide of dissatisfaction”.
