<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/14/private-equity-is-using-copyright-to-cannibalize-the-past-at-the-expense-of-the-future/>
"
Walled Culture has been warning about the financialization and
securitization of music for two years now. Those obscure but important
developments mean that the owners of copyrights are increasingly detached from
the creative production process. They regard music as just another asset, like
gold, petroleum or property, to be exploited to the maximum. A Guest Essay in
the
New York Times points out one of the many bad consequences of this trend:
Does that song on your phone or on the radio or in the movie theater sound
familiar? Private equity — the industry responsible for bankrupting
companies, slashing jobs and raising the mortality rates at the nursing
homes it acquires — is making money by gobbling up the rights to old hits
and pumping them back into our present. The result is a markedly blander
music scene, as financiers cannibalize the past at the expense of the future
and make it even harder for us to build those new artists whose
contributions will enrich our entire culture.
As well as impoverishing our culture, the financialization and securitization
of music is making life even harder for the musicians it depends on:
In the 1990s, as the musician and indie label founder Jenny Toomey wrote
recently in Fast Company, a band could sell 10,000 copies of an album and
bring in about $50,000 in revenue. To earn the same amount in 2024, the
band’s whole album would need to rack up a million streams — roughly enough
to put each song among Spotify’s top 1 percent of tracks. The music
industry’s revenues recently hit a new high, with major labels raking in
record earnings, while the streaming platforms’ models mean that the
fractions of pennies that trickle through to artists are skewed toward
megastars.
Part of the problem is the extremely low rates paid by streaming services. But
the larger issue is the power imbalance within all the industries based on
copyright. The people who actually create books, music, films and the rest are
forced to accept bad deals with the distribution companies.
Walled Culture
the book (free ebook versions) details the painfully low income the vast
majority of artists derive from their creativity, and how most are forced to
take side jobs to survive. This daily struggle is so widespread that it is no
longer remarked upon. It is one of the copyright world’s greatest successes
that the public and many creators now regard this state of affairs as a sad but
unavoidable fact of life. It isn’t."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
