Rebalancing the Song Economy

i’d like to start

with a quote but it’s very embarrassing

because i don’t know where it comes from

but it’s very well put and it goes like

this

provide

fairness for authors but also to enhance

the quality

of life within a society by promoting

the progress of science art and culture

in other words the concept of making it

economically

feasible for creators to create

is now globally recognized as a social

imperative

i have very few memories of writing

lyrics to songs

but there is a particular one from long

ago that i do remember

i was lying on my stomach on a bed in a

small guest room

with a writing pad in front of me in the

master

bedroom next door my then wife agneta

was sleeping undisturbed

the music was playing in my head

so no need for speakers not even

headphones

a melody that still lacks words is

virgin territory upon which

a lyricist must tread lightly

some of the time the final words on the

page

are the result of hard work

deep thought and the intuition that a

songwriter

must learn to trust but sometimes

extraordinary things happen

closed curtains are suddenly drawn and

the melody speaks to you

it starts to conjure up images

and even sequences of events

all you have to do is write it down

write down what you witnessed a song

can come to its creator in bits and

pieces

but when it once in a while appears out

of thin air

in its entirety it seems to suggest

it had already lingered there god knows

how long

perhaps impatiently waiting to be

plucked down

by someone with a keen and sensitive ear

as if it needed the right vessel to flow

through

from the realm of ideas all the way down

to earth

i was deliriously happy when i had

finished

at that moment i was grateful for music

itself

for the sheer existence of this

elusive undefinable phenomenon

that seems to ignore our brains and go

straight to our hearts i wanted to sing

it out loud

but it was two o’clock in the morning

and even in my euphoria i had the good

sense

not to wake the woman who was to sing my

words the next day

if benny anderson and i had written that

song today

you might not have gotten to hear it it

could have been

just another lost stream about 80

000 new songs uploaded to streaming

services

every single day the competition

today is fierce much fiercer than it was

back in 1977 and even if our song

had been clicked very often by spotify

subscribers chances are slim that the

royalties would have paid

anyone’s rent so what i want to talk to

you about

today is how i see the changes

in the song economy using my

perspective of what it was like to be a

songwriter when the music industry

was simpler and perhaps more predictable

these days everything is tracked by our

data

and data from streaming tells us

that listeners much more often click

their favorite song

than their favorite artist on a

streaming service

sometimes they’re not even sure who it

is they’re listening to

if it’s a playlist for example so if

we’re paying more attention to the song

though what about the songwriter

songwriters have been forced into the

back seat

and i would even say bungle into the

trunk

my concern is that songwriters are at

risk of becoming invisible victims

of the change that is taking place

the music business is now a song economy

yet the creators of the songs that fuel

get the smallest slice of the pie how

did that happen

i am not for one moment about to suggest

that we

should turn back the clock which you

may have suspected from an old pop star

but what’s happened in the last decade

has the potential to be incredibly

positive for songwriters

now instead i’m going to describe the

unintended consequences

of the streaming revolution how they are

reshaping the lives of songwriters

and then i will present some proposals

for how the impact of these unintended

consequences

can be addressed it has never been a

better time to be writing and making

making music

anyone today has the potential to find a

global audience

and if they so choose they can even try

to do that

on their own without a record label or

music publisher

a whole music software industry is

emerging

serving the needs of a new generation of

artists and songwriters

streaming has enabled this new music

paradigm once the pandemic stopped

live music in 2020

many artists realized that they couldn’t

pay their bills on streaming alone

some have moved back in with our parents

and

others are driving ubers to make ends

meet

previously streaming had more or less

been promotion

for their tours and live appearances by

far

providing most of their revenue it’s

funny but it was exactly the opposite

for abba

in the 70s we hardly toured at all

and when we did we lost money

but i mean the touring was supposed to

be promotion for the albums

that it didn’t matter and i can’t recall

that we ever complained about the size

of our royalties

which the artists during the pandemic

have done bitterly when streaming

royalties suddenly were the only

source of income

if this is the impact on artists i

thought

welcome to the world of songwriters

most professional songwriters don’t tour

they don’t sell t-shirts or other

merchandise

they rely on the song itself but even

that seems to be changing

because the song has evolved in response

to streaming

and it’s increasingly common for record

labels to get

large teams of songwriters to work

together

creating almost genetically modified

hits

songs are written and structured in ways

that are optimized

for the algorithms that streaming

services use

to decide what music you and i listen to

some research has been done to suggest

that these days

a billboard top 10 hit has on average

five songwriters not one or two but

five and sometimes even ten and on top

of this

they’re having to write more songs and

more quickly simply to keep up with the

insatiable demand for

new music that streaming creates

after abba had won the eurovision song

contest in 1974

with waterloo royalties suddenly came

pouring in and benny and i could afford

to write songs

full time nine to five

i’ve made such a huge difference

we could afford to throw away 95 percent

of what we wrote

and just keep the very very best we we

learned how to recognize

garbage and that’s essential if you want

to get good at your craft

royalties simply gave us time and

creative freedom needless to say

you will have neither if you’re in a

hurry and

someone is breathing down your neck all

the time

the industrial approach to songwriting

is making it harder for many songwriters

to build sustainable careers

those that are successful are very

successful

but those in the layers below who used

to be able to make

living from songwritings are really

suffering

they are becoming parts of a system

that they serve more than it serves them

and here are three key pain points

firstly streaming services typically

pay out about four times more for the

recording than they do

the composition which means a streaming

income

is even smaller for songwriters than it

is for artists

it’s a legacy from the past when

recordings

and the packaging of physical products

were very expensive

so a larger share for recording was

justified

but that has changed but the change has

not yet been

reflected in the division of royalties

secondly even the way that streaming

services

pay royalties is problematic

a listener’s monthly 9.99 subscription

goes into a central pot which then

gets divided by the total number of

streams that month that decides the

value of one stream or listen

this means that you if you have streamed

arnold johnson’s gesture if you have

done that

50 times in the past month and the

neighbor’s teenage daughter has streamed

justin bieber 5 000 times

only a small fraction of your 99 will go

to honor jansen nothing wrong with

justin bieber but

how does that reward your favorite

artist

and thirdly bad metadata

is a big problem metadata being

the relevant information about a song

and it’s recording

very often recordings are injected into

a streaming service

without accurate data the name of the

writer is missing for instance

that means that the streaming service

doesn’t know

where to send the royalties and the

money is put

in a so-called black box just sits there

recently 20 streaming services

distributed

424 million dollars

to a u.s non-profit organization

which is supposed to try and find the

rightful

recipients of all that money it will

take years if they ever find them

the combination of all these issues and

others

are creating a perfect storm for

songwriters

over the last decade i’ve watched this

situation

get progressively worse and during the

past five years

i’ve been engaged in projects that

aim to do something about it so how can

i help

well first of all

i have you all here today listening to

and that’s of course what i want to do

to raise awareness

but i want to do more than just raise

awareness of the issues i also want to

help the industry identify solutions

and here are a few suggestions

out of many

one fan centric royalties

in order to ensure that all songwriters

get paid

fairly i suggest that streaming services

allocate their royalty payments based on

the behavior of individual listeners

the individual description should be

divided by the number of songs the

individual listen

listener has played during a month

that gives each song a value if the

subscription is 9.99

and the listener has played 10

honor johnson again songs that month

each song has the value of .99 almost a

dollar

and that’s the amount that will be paid

on a jansen under the current system

you can be sure that arne would get

the value of .00 something dollars

so this fan centric approach to

royalties will bring

much needed fairness and can build on

the important starts made by diesel and

soundcloud

but perhaps the simplest and most

effective way

to improve streaming royalties

would be for streaming services to

increase how much they charge

streaming pricing has been stuck at

ridiculous 9.99 for more than a decade

meanwhile netflix seems to increase its

pricing every week

research shows that subscribers will pay

9.99 could quite easily become 11.99

perhaps even 12.99

and thirdly the tedious but

absolutely necessary registration

wherever the 80 000 new songs per day

make their entry into the music industry

there should be user-friendly

registration portals

to make sure that relevant information

about the work is captured early

this would diminish the problem with

black boxes and conflicts

in my view it is an obligation for

collecting societies

who collect creators royalties at source

to modernize and to adapt their

technology to the digital age

i know it’s easy for me to stand here

and in front of you

and reel off a list of suggestions

for the industry much easier than making

these changes happen

but change does need to happen and soon

crucially this change needs to be

brought about by the music

industry as a whole each part

working together the song and the

songwriter

fuel everything from the recording

through to live performances even a

t-shirt would not sell if the band

hadn’t good

songs i have created memories

with some of those songs from the

everly brothers and then the beatles

elton john and many more

songs that sometimes would surprise me

with a stab of envy

quickly washed away by their sheer

beauty and the inspiration that they

gave me

i know what they mean and what they

meant to me

i’ve often wondered what would we be

without music less human i’m i’m

convinced of that

if we couldn’t hear music then what else

would we be deaf to

but we never seem to think about that

even though music is

all around us all of the time

this is the moment for the entire music

industry

to invest in supporting what is without

a doubt its most valuable asset

far too many songwriters out there are

suffering in this

creaking system solutions like those

that i have outlined

could help rebalance the song economy

so that more songwriters and their

listeners

will be able to lean back and say in all

honesty

exactly what i said in the song that i

was talking about

in the beginning thank you for the music