music streaming

“We have to overcome some legal hurdles, but we could unionize musicians tomorrow,” DeFrancesco said. “SAG is like an alternate history for musicians. We’ve done all this before and won, just not within recent memory.”

Some musicians are in fact unionized. The American Federation of Musicians, with 80,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, collectively... See more

That is, of course, more or less the rub: if the Xerox machine is somewhat of a troubling invention, everything about our modern-day computer-rich ecosystem is a thousand times worse. My phone syncs to my tablet syncs to my laptop; the value proposition of every device on my person is that it instantaneously and unquestioningly shares copies — of t... See more

The story, Kelley writes, is “the tale of what happens when working-class consumption of popular culture overrides the interests or concerns of popular culture workers . . . a story about the limits of solidarity . . . [set by] consumers whose own self-interest may actually clash with the demands of laboring artists.”

In other words, streaming is a lot more profitable for all the actual value creators after we bypass these technopolies.

There is also a slightly subtler impact, noted by labels that we interviewed, on new artists, whereby their growth trajectory has been impacted due to the chilling effect on their ability to monetise the earliest stage of their career, and their access to support and services from platforms. Applying arbitrary thresholds to artists who are just sta... See more

The study estimates that the music industry has lost over £10 million in revenue to AI-generated content, but this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Consider that one North Carolina musician, with a relatively small-scale operation, was allegedly able to generate hundreds of thousands of fake tracks, rack up billions of plays, and syphon off m... See more