Erstellt am: 27. 7. 2015 - 12:38 Uhr

Today's Webtip: A Breach of Moral Trust

Things we learned in an artist coalitions's lawsuit against Sony.

It's not news that musicians are a little less than happy with the trend toward music streaming services. You have probably already read many stories of artists taking issue with the way the get paid for streams.

One of the things that tend not to get mentioned is that some of those services are actually part owned by major music labels. Spotify, for example. A handful of major labels all purchased shares of the company a while ago.

The newspaper Computer Sweden apparently reported about that a while ago, with the share breakdown looking like this:

Sony BMG 5,8 percent, Universal Music 4,8 percent, Warner Music 3,8 percent and EMI 1,9 percent.

On the one hand that is sort of a good thing. It means the companies are maybe a bit less likely to try to kill those services (although I am still not convinced Last.FM came out of their buyout very well). On the other hand, it means things could get a little complicated when the labels are negotiating streaming deals.

When the Sony-Spotify contract was leaked, it sparked a bit of a debate. It also left a few people asking questions about just who the deal would actually benefit.

It eventually led to a lawsuit against Sony by the Featured Artists Coalition. Sony apparently defended itself by claiming it was not required "to structure its affairs in whatever way yields the greatest royalties".

The really interesting thing for me, was that I found the lawsuit post on the same day I found one talking about Berklee Institutes study on the current state of the music industry. It got quite a bit of coverage, from NPR and Rolling Stone to Forbes and even Bloomberg.

Your Streaming Fees are Going Where?

It has brought up some very interesting issues, and might actually help change some of the discussion around the future of the music business.

But.

That report also generated some controversy, and one of the really fun facts about it is that it seems to have been funded by some very interested parties:

Report Funding by Kobalt Music. Kobalt Music is a Google Ventures company. Google owns YouTube. Maybe that’s why they didn’t mention Youtube. Google runs the ad networks that serve ads on these services. Maybe that’s why they didn’t mention the ad acquisition costs.