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Future of Music Coalition Profile picture
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12 Aug, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Guess how much of Spotify's equity is owned by major labels right now (no cheating)
The answer is around 6-7%. Most of y’all were way off!
Major labels do have a lot of power in the industry. So do large technology firms. The specifics of where that power lies and how it’s leveraged are extremely important in figuring out the right solutions.
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More from @future_of_music

Future of Music Coalition Profile picture
12 Aug
The answer is 6-7%. Fascinatingly, most respondents dramatically overestimated the amount.
For a while, all 3 majors and Merlin (a rights aggregator representing independent labels) had equity totaling close to 18%. But those numbers went down after more investment rounds. Merlin and Warner sold off their equity post-IPO. Sony eventually sold half of its stake.
So now it’s just Universal and Sony that have small stakes in the company. Now, you might ask, “does that mean these companies get 6-7% of my monthly subscription?” It’s complicated, but that’s a different pool of money.
Read 13 tweets
Future of Music Coalition Profile picture
11 Aug
Sometimes people look at the challenges artists, songwriters, and indie labels face in trying to earn sustainable revenues from recorded music and conclude "copyright is broken." Let's unpack that with a quick THREAD. #FixStreaming 1/?
"Copyright is broken" is an attractive bumper sticker; it expresses legitimate frustrations that might be felt by creators, audiences, etc. But it doesn't do much to advance understanding of the situation we're all in. 2/
To begin with, it's binary. It imagines copyright (a system that has evolved over hundreds of years that encompasses laws, abstract concepts, real-world practices, institutions) as something that can either be broken or unbroken. 3/
Read 26 tweets
Future of Music Coalition Profile picture
20 Feb
Much of the chatter about Twitch and Metallica and copyright is getting the facts and the history wrong. Quick thread.
The short version is that people are confusing the DMCA itself with particular companies' choices about how to implement the DMCA. That works to the benefit of huge companies like Amazon (owner of Twitch); they end up escaping scrutiny.
Jeff Bezos is worth $197 Billion. Twitch can afford to pay for music licensing! And any artist who controls their own publishing has the ability to waive their exclusive rights if they want to perform their own material and don't mind that the service isn't paying them.
Read 22 tweets
Future of Music Coalition Profile picture
20 Feb
This is a really interesting small study on what's working with music livestreams. It's also a good example of how to present research. (quick thread) nmbx.newmusicusa.org/livestream-com…
First, the study acknowledges its limitations up front. It's a quite small sample size, and a specific group of respondents whose experience may not be representative of broader populations.
Importantly the authors make an effort to identify gaps in the data: "none of the respondents identified as disabled/having a disability ...we do not have the perspective of anyone who is blind/low vision or deaf/hard-of-hearing [... ] trying to navigate livestreams."
Read 6 tweets
Future of Music Coalition Profile picture
1 Jan
The @FCC was required to release its Communications Marketplace Report before the end of 2020. Congress requires the agency to assess what's happening in the competitive landscape every 2 years. So they did, late yesterday. (THREAD) docs.fcc.gov/public/attachm…
This is the first time the report has been prepared by the FCC's new office of Economics and Analytics. FCC staff put a lot of work in, and it's useful to have this data publicly available, but there are some real problems, as noted by both @JRosenworcel and @GeoffreyStarks.
The report centers economics but comes up short on analysis. Most of the data comes from industry or investment banking firms. When they're the ones funding the research, the research reflects the questions they're interested in.
Read 24 tweets
Future of Music Coalition Profile picture
11 Dec 20
There’s a new bill that harmonizes penalties for illegal streaming services with penalties for illegal download services. FMC has long supported harmonization while wanting to make sure policies don’t have unintended consequences. So how is this bill?
Turns out, it’s pretty narrowly tailored to deal with truly bad actors! Even more narrow than previous attempts to deal with the problem. Unfortunately one of the problems with internet policy is that rhetoric gets heated.
The last couple times bills dealing with these issues were floated, some people made outlandish and frankly dishonest claims, like that it would have sent Justin Bieber to prison.
Read 4 tweets

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