Part of making sure your business is growing is to keep up with music industry news and adapt when needed.
WordPlay T. Jay does this for himself and has some updates to share, especially regarding streaming services and royalties.
Recently, the National Copyright Board has opened up negotiations with streaming services aiming to increase royalty payments to artists through 2027.
The Board has proposed a 34 percent increase, up to about 20 percent of streaming services’ total. Currently, services like Spotify must pay about 15 percent of their income to artists, or $15 out of every $100 earned.
Spotify earned about $9.5 billion last year, meaning it paid artists about $1.4 billion. The proposed change would add almost another half a billion dollars to artist payments.
“Indie artists obviously do not earn a ton of that because of the lower number of streams, but hopefully, this is negotiated and we can see the raise,” T. Jay said. “The onus is on Indie artists to get creative when marketing to make money. You have to sell your work, do merchandise and use things like Patreon. You also have to engage your audience and promote your work so you aren’t relying heavily on streaming payments for income.”
In other industry news, Pandora is partnering with SoundCloud to launch a new station, The Lookout.
“Pandora already has one of the best algorithms, so it’s good they are beefing up hip-hop culture and offering more artists the opportunity to be heard,” T. Jay said.
Finally, Pandora is dropping its data app, Next Big Sound, on Nov. 1. People who use that can switch over to the Pandora Amp app. Pandora owns Next Big Sound, so those features are being rolled into Amp.

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