If you're running out of playlists, livestreams, music films and music books to catch up on this quarantine season, can I interest you in a 50-page guide to how exactly—really, really exactly—SPOTIFY calculates royalties? The dizzyingly detailed "Definitive Guide to Spotify Royalties," which has been circulating by word-of-mouth and word-of-TWITTER for the past couple weeks, is by JEFF PRICE, founder of digital royalties collection agency AUDIAM and longtime Spotify gadfly. There's a little editorializing at the beginning (the complexity of the calculations "is, frankly, insane," Price writes) and a little more at the end (artists should get more), but the bulk of Price's PDF file is a straightforwardly long and winding journey through a not so straightforwardly long and winding process, the end result of which, he writes on page 48, is that one stream of one song in November 2019 resulted in a payout of $0.005417805576022 to the artist. That's assuming the artist wrote the song, controlled 100 percent of the publishing and the sound recording, and didn't owe a cut to a digital distributor. Or, to put it another way, $0.005417805576022 before expenses. An artist can do worse. Literally, much worse. And if knowledge is power, one of the first steps to doing better might be simply understanding exactly how that half a penny came to be... An online petition, noting the significant money artists stand to lose as the coronavirus crisis continues, is asking Spotify to triple its royalty rates, permanently... BANDCAMP is waiving its revenue share for all sales for one day, today, "to put much needed money directly into artists’ pockets," CEO ETHAN DIAMOND says. Some Bandcamp recommendations from BROOKLYNVEGAN and the QUIETUS... Early online retailer INSOUND is going out of business today... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from J BALVIN, SADA BABY, the WEEKND, KELSEA BALLERINI, IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS, TONY ALLEN & HUGH MASEKELA, HAROLD MABERN (RIP), TOKIMONSTA, ADAM LAMBERT, CONAN GRAY, ELEPHANT HEART, the GLITCH MOB, ROGER ENO & BRIAN ENO, LYRA PRAMUK, CHRISTIAN LÖFFLER, CONSTRICT, MOANING, MORRISSEY, NEGATIVE REACTION, MYRKUR, GORDON LIGHTFOOT, DELTA RAE, FIRESIDE COLLECTIVE, PHANTOM POSSE, CARLA OLSON, HARU NEMURI, PAUL WALL, ISAAC CARREE and the ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD- and ADRIAN YOUNGE-helmed compilation JAZZ IS DEAD 001... RIP MARCELO PERALTA. The Argentine jazz saxophonist died of Covid-19... MusicREDEF is taking a couple days off, though we'll continue, as always, to post stories on our Twitter. We'll be back in your inbox middle of next week.
