Music Business Commons^™

Profits For Spotify, Pennies For Artists, Joshua R. Rosenberg

Capstones

Major recording labels have always been king-making investment houses. They market the music and manage the careers of artists such as New York singer-songwriter Blake Morgan, who has to fight tooth and nail to escape being mistreated financially. But digital distribution services have now come along and upped the parasitic ante. By dominating global market share and distributing millions of songs for the labels, companies like Spotify are piggybacking on the music industry’s already exploitative system and magnifying it exponentially. The more content you control, the larger the overall profit–even if the overwhelming majority of content creators are essentially starving. …