After reading the title to this piece, I can hear the whispering voices of some of my recording industry colleagues dismissing out of hand the notion that the worldwide recording industry is about to be plunged into a period of upheaval unlike any crisis period that we have experienced - ever.
Do I think it will be a revolution, a civil war and a paradigm shifting tumult?
Maybe…
To my colleagues in the music business, I would direct you to this quote by Winston Churchill: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
There has been considerable media coverage of the financial disparities and even a major inquiry in the UK over music streaming royalties. But call it what you will: the cracks, fissures, foreshocks, anger and frustration from recording artists worldwide are real, palpable and growing louder everyday…
The basic economics of music streaming are bizarre: Spotify, Apple Music and most other major platforms use a so-called “pro-rata system” of royalty distribution. In this model, all the money collected from subscribers or ads for a given month goes into a single pot, which is then divided by the total number of streams after that platform takes their share off the top. If, say, Ed Sheeran had 5 percent of all streams that…
