What Does Streaming’s Future Mean for Creators
The future of media has made consuming content tremendously easy for most of us; it’s right there on our phones, just a couple of taps away. And the system is clearly designed with us and our continued consumption in mind; frankly, it’s a surprise when the platform in question doesn’t send us directly on to the next show or movie or song after the last has ended. But if we pull back the curtain slightly, it’s worth wondering if this content engine is working for the creators that power it.
Paula Mejia of NPR notes that the future of music is in streaming, which comes as news only to those recently awoken from a years-long slumber in the Catskills. But that same article also describes a system of royalty payments that has failed to match the technological advances of streaming, meaning that, for as easy as it might be for people to hear your music, it’s potentially that hard to get paid.
The reasons for those difficulties are manifold, and many aren’t particularly new: both the services and record labels are taking their cut of the proceeds, and the smaller the artist, the less likely it is that their contracts have favorable terms for revenue sharing coming from streaming. In this, the new system hasn’t changed much from the way of doing business from every previous iteration of the artist/distributor model over the years, save that there’s a new intermediary to take their percentage as well.
And that’s if they have the information to pay out to the songwriter; the switch from physical media to digital streaming has left a host of musical works with missing or incomplete metadata, and the industry has only just put in place a plan and entity to sort out the mess of finding rightsholders and mechanizing royalty payments. This highlights another added wrinkle of the new normal of music: the money you pay to listen to music goes to the streaming service, and from there it disappears from our view, leaving us to only wonder and hope that it’s being administered and paid out fairly to the artists.
Regardless of what we think of the current system, it’s the future of music for the major stars of the industry. But does it have to be for the small, independent artists who can’t count on millions of streams or favorable deals with Spotify or Apple Music? What these working musicians need is, funny enough, a return to old principles with a new twist. People used to be able to support artists directly, by buying their albums on the physical medium of the day. And while CDs and LPs are a thing of the past, directly supporting the artists that we like is a current concept, one one made possible through channels that allow fans to subscribe and pay the musicians they favor.
If it sounds like an impossible reversal, it’s not; it’s what RightsLedger is building with MilStage and MilDeals. Head over to our social media to learn more about what we’re doing to empower creators.
To learn more about Milio, MilStage, MilDeals, visit our website.
