At the end of the day, what do artists really want out of SPOTIFY? According to the close to 5,000 musicians, producers, road crew and other industry workers who had signed their names to this online petition by end of day Monday, it starts with a penny-per-stream royalty, which is about triple what Spotify is currently paying (on average), and which, all things being equal, presumably would bankrupt the company faster than you can say KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD, to randomly pick out the name of one of the many prominent indie artists whose signatures are sprinkled throughout the petition. The UNION OF MUSICIANS AND ALLIED WORKERS, which is behind the petition, is OK with that. "If Spotify's model can’t pay artists fairly," says musician and musicologist DAMON KRUKOWSKI, one of the petition's organizers, "it shouldn’t exist." This is neither a new complaint nor a new fight, but it's become more urgent in the face of a pandemic that has robbed artists of other, better ways of making money. It's time, they're saying, for models to change. The petition's other demands include that Spotify open its books on all its sources of revenue and make public its contracts with labels, distributors and other providers, and that it switch to a user-centric royalty model, which on its own wouldn't change how much money the service pays out but would change which artists and labels the money goes to. That much-debated, barely-tried model is a favorite of music's middle class, which argues it would more fairly distribute streaming royalties among the full range of artists whose music subscription users actually stream. Many of the petition's signatories, including MOOR MOTHER, SAD13, ZOLA JESUS, DEERHOOF and MARY LATTIMORE, are the kind of artists who likely would benefit. The petition doesn't seem to have circulated among the A-list pop stars who benefit most from streaming's current pooled-royalty model, leaving one to wonder where the interests of your TAYLOR SWIFTs, RIHANNAs and CARDI Bs do and don't align with their indie counterparts. User-centric royalties have never been a big pop-star cause. But higher royalties, any artist can get behind that. And contractual transparency is in sync with KANYE WEST's recent tweetstorms, even if West is playing a somewhat different sport. While others are petitioning Spotify, he's talking about buying UNIVERSAL MUSIC. But his chaos energy and the focused rage of artists and workers who are also petitioning for Spotify to "Stop Fighting Artists" could, one imagines, be a potent combo... If you walk away, walk away, it will follow: Remember that U2 album that APPLE put on your computer and your phone whether you wanted it or not? Did you ever try to get rid of it? Behold one man's amazing and infuriating six-year odyssey as he tries to put out that unforgettable fire... BILLBOARD charts the decline in the percentage of songs written by—or, at least credited to—a single writer over the decades. Forty-four percent of the songs that reached #1 in the Billboard Hot 100 in the 1970s had one credited writer. That had dwindled to 4 percent by the 2010s and zero percent in the 10 months of the current decade, which has blessed us with 17 #1 songs to date, all apparently the product of some kind of writers' room. But so what? Does it tell us anything about the songs themselves? No doubt methods of pop songwriting and production have changed over the years, but so have methods of crediting the work. These days everyone in the room, or on the text chain, knows what a credit is worth and how to demand it—as do their managers and lawyers. The same people contributing to the same song in 1980 almost certainly would have been credited differently, which tells us more about the business than about the music. (Also, for what it's worth, Billboard's calculation that 29 percent of the #1s in the 1960s were solo jobs is an undercount, missing all those BEATLES hits that one man wrote and two men took credit for; songwriting credits are, as I've said many times before, subjective things)... The 50 most screamable bars in rap... RINGO STARR, KEITH RICHARDS and BILL CLINTON are among those belatedly celebrating JERRY JEE LEWIS' 85th birthday (his actual birthday is the same day as mine) with a benefit concert that premieres online at 8pm ET tonight... RIP SOS DMANN.