Thursday, September 12, 2019

@jameshanley5: ‘It’s a better way’: Deezer unveils User Centric Payment System ambitions #irespectmusic | MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY

[Deezer is getting out ahead of the growing backlash against streaming service royalties with a blog post on the company’s site entitled “Deezer wants artists to be paid fairly.”  Deezer  becomes the first platform to commit to implementing a User Centric system (can we please not start calling it “UCPS”).  I’ll be interested to see their proposal in action.  Deezer does seem to have grasped the core issue of User Centric, whether it’s based on the ethical pool concept or otherwise:  There is no reason for the vast numerical majority of artists to stay in a system that results in fans paying for music they don’t listen to and an ever declining payout for those who are in it.  In the cold light of dawn, the science is in and the artists are out.

Streaming “Catalog” is any release older than 18 months–I cannot tell you how insane that is, but that is a topic for another day.  When you consider that “catalog” makes up a substantial majority of streams, it compounds the need for user centric royalty distribution instead of the current crisis.

Catalog Chart

And if songwriters were given a chance to abandon their legacy revenue share structure that they will be stuck with for years to come in favor of a penny rate as Apple proposed in the CRB Phonorecords III, they’d probably do it, too.]

[Deezer] CEO Alexis De Gemini said Deezer’s market-leading position in its home country had inspired the shift.

“We’re now a very important financier of the creation of music in France,” he said. “The streaming industry right now, through its paying system, generates more revenues towards specific genres loved by younger users, to the point that… important genres for people above 35 and 40 have their artists making less money than expected in the previous world, where each CD was sold, and the money was going artist by artist.

“We have started to take that mission to try and change the way the money is reallocated. It doesn’t have any impact on Deezer turnover in France, nor globally. But we believe it has an impact in the way we impact creativity, hence, the music we will bring to our users in the future.

“Just in France, UCPS is going to have the top streaming artists make, maybe, 10% less revenues. And on the other side, those who are making very weak revenues are going to be maybe making 30% more. We believe that this readjustment, which is tiny, can help a lot of artists who today are not getting any dime from the streaming business.”

Read the post on Music Week.



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