Podcast: #BrokenRecord & the campaign to fix streaming

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The lack of income in the last year for musicians during a pandemic highlighted just how little streaming pays out in terms of an artist’s overall revenue.

The most streamed artist in the world in 2019 was Drake who only made 30% of his money from streaming.

Something is broken.

The #BrokenRecord campaign started by Tom Gray in the UK has been mounting pressure on music streaming services and labels to change the way they do business. Aided by UK Parliamentary Inquiries and a groundswell of support that lead to 156 musicians including Paul McCartney, Damon Albarn, Gary Barlow, Kano, Annie Lennox, Kate Bush, Mike Skinner, Noel Gallagher and Roots Manuva release an open letter to the Prime Minister calling him to intervene to put the value of music back “in the hands of music makers.”

On this episode, Niall and Andrea contextualise how the campaign got here, how a typical major label deal works, the issues around streaming rates and how Spotify royalties works, recent streaming developments and the responses in the past year from musicians towards the issue.

Plus, why your algorithmic playlists on Spotify might be problematic, and the alternatives to the big DSPs.

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Andrea has a Substack newsletter to subscribe to.

See Also

A triple bill of Asian-Irish music artists is announced for Dublin this month

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Previous podcast episodes in this series

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