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Spotify to let artists post music without labels:
In a move with the power to shake up the music industry, Spotify said Thursday that it will allow select artists to upload songs directly without record labels or distributors.
Spotify, by far the biggest player in the fast-growing format of streaming, said that the feature for now is only in the test phase for select US-based independent artists who have secured their own copyrights.
But the feature, if eventually put to scale, could in the long run drastically change the business decisions for artists who would not need to go through a label or one of the batch of new companies, such as TuneCore, that provide uploading services for independent artists.
Spotify said artists would simply upload their songs to the platform, first seeing a preview of how it will look, with the Swedish company automatically sending royalties each month.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bradley13 on Friday September 21 2018, @01:52PM (2 children)
Just like indie authors no longer need the big publishers: why should musicians need the big labels? Aside from a few carefully created exceptions, most musicians are poorly served, and would be better off if they could sell their music directly.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @05:19PM
Would be nice if that would happen.
They just need to remember that when Kim Dotcom was about to launch an independent new worlwide service with that exact same idea after the negotioation with the labels failed, he got swatted, confiscated, shut down, and until today... you guess the rest.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 21 2018, @07:38PM
Basically the biggest music streaming service wants to take on the role that SoundCloud has played... you may have heard of the phrase "SoundCloud rappers" [afr.com]. They have been exploding in popularity lately. Lil Pump recently did a wacky video [youtube.com] with Kanye West.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tara Li on Friday September 21 2018, @01:53PM (16 children)
The artist gets the copyright as soon as they create the work! So, there's very little reason for them not to open this up pretty damned quick to *every* artist that isn't locked into a contract with one of the labels.
Sure, some of the artists will be making a few pennies a month. Some will make enough to get a meal or two out of it. Some, however, might start making real money - money not being funneled into the label's pockets to be skimmed off before it ever gets to the artists. Hopefully, the royalty collection agencies will be disappearing soon.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday September 21 2018, @02:04PM (8 children)
From what I've read on TechDirt in years past, the real money is from touring and selling merchandise.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RS3 on Friday September 21 2018, @03:34PM (4 children)
Yes, that's been the trend since so many artists signed away too many rights to their own work and the label / distribution companies make the profits. Of course artists have been self recording, producing, distributing for many years, but only a few get much attention. Without the big labels' marketing, advertising, and promotion, independents don't have much chance, so some still sign away their rights.
Hopefully this move by Spotify will help open up the markets and loosen the stranglehold the big labels have, so that artists can make $ from their recordings as well as live performance.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 21 2018, @05:17PM (3 children)
Agree that the biggest thing that needs to happen is to break the stranglehold of the RIAA and their labels.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday September 21 2018, @06:43PM (2 children)
Not to steal mostcynical's thunder, but my fear now is that Spotify will become the big green monster... but not likely, since it's too easy to compete... I think and hope.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 21 2018, @07:51PM
They kind of have been in some ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JCuEiis8Hw [youtube.com]
Although Spotify faces an intense challenge from Apple Music, there are only a handful of major players and it will be hard for upstarts to compete with services that have 50+ million paying subscribers. See also the long, bumpy road that Tidal [wikipedia.org] has taken in trying to challenge Spotify.
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(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday September 21 2018, @10:04PM
While hosting is less of an issue these days, and a web site and an app are relatively easy things to set up, exposure and content are still massive barriers. Why would an artist use your service, rather than spotify or soundcloud, or even myspace or tumblr, or whatever, if all they want is exposure (and eventually, money)?
What can your "platform" offer?
How to you get the artist more exposure and sales than someone else?
How do you keep the content secure?
How to you organise payment?
While hosting and payment models exist, they also all take a cut. Margins are already thin.
Oh, and with the new compulsory copyright filtering / automated take down crap, you also open yourself up to a world of pain if you don't have all that filtering .. whoch youtube and spotify and the like have been "perfecting" for years.
(Note: "perfecting" the business model of being the gatekeeper and keeping the "labels" happy, not actually doing the best for the artists or consumers)
Tl;dr: while tastes are fickle, and the distribution channel may look different, whatever you get will be controlled by the "labels" for a while yet. Also, people are lazy, and apple and spotify are "easy".
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Tara Li on Friday September 21 2018, @05:00PM
I've seen that as well - and in part, that's because the labels rip them over. I'm not sure it's so true among the unsigned artists/groups, unless you count CD/MP3 sales as merchandise.
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Friday September 21 2018, @08:12PM (1 child)
That's a shame, because concerts are awful. Between spending $$$ per ticket, then having every nearly every asshat in the audience stand up and hold his or her smartphone above his or her head the entire time to record the concert (like they'll actually go back to watch it), I stopped going to concerts years ago.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 24 2018, @05:23PM
At least at a movie theater you can also get to enjoy people's cell phones going off.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday September 21 2018, @03:15PM (1 child)
There. FTFY.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Tara Li on Friday September 21 2018, @04:48PM
Actually, Spotify, Amazon, Apple, and the like are not really that bad over all, save when they start going for exclusive contracts (and even that is more something I blame on the idiots who give it to them - see the idiots in the early computer industry that gave MS their near-monopoly by agreeing to contracts requiring them to pay even when they didn't install Windows, and agreeing to *only* install Windows... Bill Gates was bad enough, but I blame the idiots who *AGREED* to it at least as much.)
But services like Spotify et al. actually do serve a purpose - if nothing else, I couldn't buy a big enough pipe to serve everyone at a price that would pay if one of my songs went majorly viral. Where as, over all, Spotify likely wouldn't notice it except as a minor uptick in their overall bandwidth serving out hundreds of thousands of different songs, perhaps a quarter of which goes to serve out the top 100 or so songs out of that massive collection.
Even exclusive deals for a limited period aren't that bad of a thing - as long as they're a once-off thing. This bit of series hopping from Hulu to Amazon Prime to Netflix to whatever as exclusives for 6 months or a year at a time is not serving anyone well, and neither will producer/distributor lock-ups like CBS All Access or Disney's rumored plan.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday September 21 2018, @03:17PM (3 children)
Not necessarily. Your composition might turn out to be an accidental infringement, and no copyright subsists in work that is used unlawfully. (See 17 USC 103(a) [copyright.gov].) For example, George Harrison thought he wrote the song "My Sweet Lord", but it turned out to be a subconscious cover of "He's So Fine" by The Chiffons written by Ronald Mack. So how is it even possible to know whether you own a valid copyright in a song you wrote?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Tara Li on Friday September 21 2018, @04:38PM (2 children)
I really think that's more a problem with the legal system. Just listened to each, as well as a "Beetle's Minute" video on YouTube comparing the two, and... Seriously, those are considered the same song? I'm not hearing it. This strikes me, at best, as a "a donut and a coffee cup are the same shape" comparison, where perhaps in the most technical sense in some particular branch of musicology it might be true - but the average listener is going to look at you like you're crazy.
Of course, longer term, you run into Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants" problem.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday September 21 2018, @10:25PM (1 child)
Ignore the accompaniment and lyrics and look at the basic melodic structure of both "HSF" and "MSL". They both have this structure:
Repeat 4 times these quarter notes at 8-beat intervals, with nonsense words between: D B B~A
Repeat 3 times these eighth notes at 8-beat intervals, with nonsense words between: D E G E G G
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 22 2018, @02:59AM
So you can now get copyright and presumably exclusive use of a string of 34 characters.
Well, fuck the copyright industry. DBBADBBADBBADBBADEGEGGDEGEGGDEGEGG.
Here, I'll do it again DBBADBBADBBADBBADEGEGGDEGEGGDEGEGG.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday September 21 2018, @04:38PM
Have you seen the number of YouTube channels that post somebody else's copyrighted material? Just because you have a copy of the music and claim to be its author, doesn't mean you own its copyright.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday September 21 2018, @02:03PM
Anything that unseats the powerful RIAA leech industry is a good thing. They harm tech. They are behind DRM. The DMCA, which is now accepted as normal, is a travesty of corruption and special interest. An IP address is not a person. How the RIAA hurts artists is well documented. All of these and more issues about the RIAA need to be
disgustdiscussed by the public and artists.The internet can enable artists and fans to connect and conduct commerce without the middle man that gets the lions share of the money. No more need for physical media.
The fact that I can buy tracks and albums from Amazon, at reasonable prices, and as downloadable genuine mp3 files was a huge step in the right direction. I still sometimes prefer physical CDs which I can rip myself. Other times I prefer mp3s that Amazon lets me download. Now if only it would work this way for movies and ebooks.
BTW, I have no incentive to share or pirate mp3 files I download from Amazon. I put them on all of my personal devices, and that's it. Also if I rip the mp3s from a CD I purchase. This would also hold true if I could download paid for movies and ebooks.
Oh, and another question to be
disgustdiscussed: Why does a movie, which might cost hundreds of millions of dollars and a couple years to make, cost less than a CD from the RIAA? Especially when the CD has maybe two good tracks, and eight filler tracks. Why does an eBook cost so much, usually from a single author, compared to a movie that cost vast time and money to create? (I can somewhat understand this for books with a limited audience: "Butterfly wing colors and their historical effect upon the British empire")When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 21 2018, @02:04PM (2 children)
This is a welcome move. Making it easier for artists to create, find collaborators, and new audiences, will help creativity flourish.
I am of the opinion that MBAs, lawyers, accountants, and PR flacks are antithetical to human ingenuity, the soul, and all things wholesome and good in the universe, so cutting them out of the loop (if you want) at Spotify by not requiring labels ranks as a win. Thanks, Spotify!
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 21 2018, @02:08PM (1 child)
Didn't Douglas Adams put that group into a space ship and send them to some remote undesirable planet (called Earth) where they would no longer bother the other 2/3 of the population, who were later to join them in 2 more space ships, but never did once they realized that they had rid themselves of the useless 1/3 drag on society?
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 21 2018, @04:01PM
Yes, and it would have worked brilliantly if they hadn't been wiped out by a disease spread by unsanitized telephones.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday September 21 2018, @02:16PM (1 child)
...?
It isn't clear that spotify have musicians interests at heart. What happens to musicians' leverage when the record labels are no longer negotiating bulk licensing contracts?
(Score: 2) by schad on Friday September 21 2018, @04:39PM
That's an interesting point, and I was wondering that too. It's a lot like a workplace that has both union and non-union employees.
I wonder how this will play out. Will payments to independent musicians be governed by the same contracts as for signed musicians? If so, certainly we should expect to see some kind of mandatory payment/revenue sharing ("agency fees") in the very near future. If not, it may spell the beginning of the end for record labels -- assuming, of course, that Spotify is actually offering a better deal for individual musicians than the labels are. (From what I've heard of Spotify's payment practices, they very well might not. Which is pathetic.)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @02:25PM
There is no label anymore ... or is there?
Are artists allowed to upload their music elsewhere too? If not, then Spotify _is_ a label now.
And even if it is still allowed for now, you can bet your ass that it will change in 5-10 years max, as soon as they have bullied the other labels out of the market through sheer size.
Because "being of good service to otherwise free musicians" is much less profitable than "squeezing captive musicians for all they're worth".
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday September 21 2018, @02:46PM
Soon to come: legislation saying this is illegal (if the RIAA/MIAA/DRM-people have their way).
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @03:57PM (2 children)
The MAFFIA lawyers will take them down right smart
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Friday September 21 2018, @05:49PM
Get your acronyms right... it's called the MAFIAA (Music And Film Industry Association of America)*
* This public service announcement was brought to you by the NMAAA (No More Acronyms Association of America)
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @08:52PM
Doubt they can do it via the courts, but they can simply no longer grant spotify a license for 'their' music. Put them out of business overnight.
(Score: 2, Informative) by oldmac31310 on Friday September 21 2018, @08:18PM
That is according to Fortune:
http://fortune.com/2018/05/03/spotify-earnings/ [fortune.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @08:26PM (1 child)
Of course the mpaa will end up pulling their license .. They are a cartel, and if you mess with them, Guido will come visit, in effect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @10:05PM
I think the RIAA will have something to say if MPAA tries muscling in on their racket.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @09:23PM (1 child)
Without money, how will record label execs buy hookers and blow?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @09:28PM
by suing their customers and paying for 'media taxes'