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Saving The Spotify Revolution: Recalibrating The Power Imbalance In Digital Copyright, Jordan Teague

Jordan Teague

Many believed that Spotify would revolutionize the music industry, offering a legal alternative to file sharing that compensates musicians for use of their digital music. Why, then, have artists been abandoning the Spotify revolution in droves? Because the revolution has a dark side. Since Spotify is part-owned by the major labels, it has a serious conflict of interest with independent artists. Spotify’s lack of transparency about its financial flows gives musicians further reason to suspect whether the service has their interests in mind, particularly in light of the microscopic royalties that Spotify has paid out to artists to date. This …