This is reflective of a broader trend—artists want direct ownership over the relationship with their fans, and to be compensated based on how these fans interact with their music. Case in point: SoundCloud’s recent foray into ‘fan-centric’ payouts, Deezer’s continued experimentation with user-centric payout models, and the ongoing parliamentary... See more

The most frequent complaint I hear about streaming services is that they don’t pay artists fairly. Michael Pelczynski, the former Vice President of Strategy at SoundCloud, took that complaint personally. Over his five years with the streaming service, he helped conceive and implement a novel payment scheme that received much praise.

In an hour-long... See more

Spotify is rolling up the internet audio market, which their CEO, Daniel Ek, thinks will grow from $100 billion in revenue a year to somewhere near the video market, which is $1 trillion. People spend about the same amount of time consuming audio as video content. “Are our eyes,” he asks, “really worth 10 times more than our ears?”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to go through a very similar journey where even the concept of what a podcast or audio actually is will become re-imagined.”

He understood that physical distribution was going away, that digital license strategies needed to change. He shared his view back then that Pandora should be incentivized to build a subscription business, Spotify to enter the radio space, new entrants to have an advantage in the beginning, and much more international access to digital content. The... See more