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泰勒·斯威夫特的版权费之争
Taylor Swift is fighting the wrong part of the music industry（768words）
By Jonathan Ford
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Ever since their incomes from recorded music started to shrink more than a decade ago, musicians have pondered long and hard about whom to blame for their predicament.
They certainly do not lack for potential villains, whether the youthful entrepreneurs who created pirate file-sharing services such as Napster, complacent record label bosses or Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, whose insistence on selling downloads by the track cut album sales to ribbons.
But led by a vocal group of influential artists such as Taylor Swift and Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead, many have chosen instead to point the finger at the technological services that stream music, which include Spotify, Deezer and Apple Music.
These companies may be bringing artists together with audiences. They may also be the only part of the recorded music business in which sales are increasing now that the market for paid-for downloading has started to tail off. But stars such as Ms Swift believe they are “devaluing” the product.
Not only are such services attacked for paying relatively meagre royalties to artists. Critics say that because consumers can get music without paying for it, via services such as Spotify’s free tier, streaming companies also drive down sales of physical music, such as CDs. Ms Swift pulled her entire repertoire from Spotify last year to stop it being listened to on the service’s free tier.
There is just one problem with the underlying thesis. It is almost entirely wrong.
Streaming may not be providing a fat living for the artists. But here is the thing: it is not making much of one for the streaming services either. Spotify, for instance, is absorbing substantial losses as it tries to build its customer base. The company pays four-fifths of its revenues away, the great majority to artists, songwriters and record labels.
As for the price point, it is a trade-off. Charging subscribers $120 a year to listen to all the music they want, as Spotify does, may not sound a whole lot. But even in the golden age of CD sales, the average consumer only spent about $50 a year on music. Giving stuff away for free may be annoying; but unless you offer the consumer a taster you may never build the market.
Rather than agonise about Spotify’s model, artists might do better to direct some pointed questions closer to home if they really want to understand why their royalty cheques are so small. The economics of the music business have changed vastly in recent years. The deals they have with the music labels have not.
It is a point highlighted in a recent report from EY, the professional services firm, and the French record label industry association SNEP, which looked at where streaming revenues end up. What this showed is that while artists and songwriters share about 17 per cent between them, the labels walk off with just under 50 per cent. That is pretty much the same split as when all sales were physical.
Yet it is far from clear why this should be so. The cost structure of digital music is very different from its analogue predecessor. Labels do not, for instance, bear the costs of manufacturing and distributing a physical product. There is no need to do long runs of CDs or vinyl discs and flog them “sale or return” to retailers. Breakages in transit no longer eat into margins.
Moreover, the “digital dividend” goes beyond manufacturing and distribution. Lower start-up costs enable more artists to launch and prove themselves without the aid of labels, which hang back and pick up those who cut through. Artists and repertoire costs — the industry’s version of R&D — have fallen a fifth since 2009. It is one reason why industry margins have held up despite a falling top line.
MrYorke may choose to stigmatise streaming as the “last desperate fart of a dying corpse”. But rather than succumbing to despair, artists might reasonably ask why the labels have not shared the digital dividend with them. It is not as if these companies do anything other than exploit rights granted to them by musicians. It is also not clear that this service has become more valuable in the digital age.
So here is a suggestion for Ms Swift in her guise as spokesperson for the industry. Expend less energy on bashing streaming services; they are the only viable future. Use your clout to make the labels more fair in their dealings with artists. A baseline set of contractual terms for digital, backed by more transparency about who is paying what to whom, might be a start.
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