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Spotify will end service in Uruguay due to bill requiring fair pay for artists:: The Uruguayan Parliament approved an amendment to the country’s copyright law last month
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After reading the whole article, I still don’t know what Uruguay wants to happen.
Found an earlier article by El Observador before the legislation passed. Under Uruguay’s old laws Spotify, YouTube, an other streaming platforms paid little to nothing in artist royalties. With the new legislation artists will now see fair compensation.
The Guardian does a better job explaining Spotify’s problem: do the royalties come from rights holders (I am assuming they’re referring to record labels) or the streaming services? The later case they believe will cause them to pay double what they’re paying for streaming rights.
The issue just needs to back to Uruguay’s government to sort out who pays the artist royalties, or if both labels and streaming share a proportionate responsibility.
Thanks.
Putting the El Observador article through translate
When a song in Uruguay is played on radio, television or at a party, the rights are collected by the General Association of Authors of Uruguay (Agadu) which retains the 60% of what is paid. The remaining 40% is divided equally between performers and record labels.
Spotify says that it already pays for the rights. This understanding would mean that the players in Uruguay should work out how that is to be split.
Spotify fears that the new law turns what they pay currently, simply into one share of the total, implying an extreme increase of the cost.
What is Agadu? Seems like a pretty high tax considering the remaining 40% go to those who made the music .
AGADU is the society of authors. Kind of an union (it’s not an union but sort of). It’s suppossed role is defending the rights of authors
It’s a copyright management firm. Some countries have government-sponsored monopolists for that. This looks like one of those.
The author of a song and the performers may not be the same (most obvious with covers). Most of the money collected by Agadu is presumably paid out to the authors/songwriters (or whoever they sold the rights to?), minus management fees. Whether the pay-out scheme is fair, may be another point of contention. Think about a live band playing covers by various authors in some bar: How is it tracked what they play, and how much should be given to each of the many different authors? I don’t know how that works in Uruguay, but my country has a system of that sort.
How does this work for international performers though?
I mean, it sounds like they want their artists to recieve fair compensation.
I see that not everyone’s a cynic, yet.
What does that mean, though?
And that’s exactly why Spotify is leaving.
Spotify already paid rights holder (…the record labels, which is the one supposed to pay the artists). Under the new law, its ill defined which could make spotify pay to artists on top of paying the record labels, thus double the pay.
Oh well, I suppose everyone will lay down and die with no access to music. What will artists do without that all important half a peso for 5000 streams?
Cash money says there’s already a native competitor just waiting to get that money. If not there will be soon. Maybe people will just buy records again, shit. Uruguay isn’t doing half bad, financially, maybe they’ll bring tapes back.
It has been quite something to see American tech companies rolling out across the world trying to pull that same old “sign the EULA or lose everything” bullshit and it’s just not working for them. Too bad we can’t kick them in the dick like other nations can.
Spotify is Swedish.
Cash money says there’s already a native competitor just waiting to get that money
There isn’t and probably won’t be. At least not one with a library even half a size to that of spotify. People will probably flock to some competition like apple music or youtube music (neither of those services, as they are not very popular, seem to have said anything about this copyright law amendment). Also a senator already pointed out that if you have a valid argentinian credit card (there’s one very easy to get here), you can just register as an argentinian and pay less than a dollar instead of the seven dollars it costs here as a turnaround.
We can… We’re just too busy arguing over immigration, what gay/trans people and women are allowed to do, where the line is between church and state, and to what extent guns should be a part of our society… Oh and Trump.
So they admitted here that they don’t pay artists fairly.
Fuck Daniel Ek.
W Uruguay?
Big Tech = Evil Tech
Good on the Uruguayan Parliament. For profit companies understand one thing, money. If enough people would understand this and be willing to deal with some inconvenience, companies like Spotify would come around surprisingly fast.
See, this is one of the reasons why I haven’t listened to music in almost a decade. Paying fairly to artists is provably unaffordable for the average joe, unless a shady workaround like the streaming service subscription exists (and even then, that barely fills the belly of the artists that dedicate exclusively to art).
Physical records make good money for the artists, if it weren’t for the greedy discographies of course.
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Anyone who doesn’t know how to use a VPN?
So people who have smartphones but down know how to download apps? That doesn’t sound like a statistically significant amount of people.
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Have you met people?
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Nope. I have no concept of language.
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So basically unaffordable for the people in that country?
No, it’s as indicated, that is, to have artists paid fairly for their creative talents. Trickle down economics exemplified. It is akin to you working your job through an agency but the agency paying you far less than minimal wage. Like a lottery, only a few will make real money.
But according to the article 70% of the money they make from music is already going to record labels and publishers, so what exactly is Spotify supposed to do here to give more money to the artists?
Exactly… The issue isn’t spotify taking a very normal cut, it’s the record labels taking a majority cut and it seems this bill misses that entirely
That’s definitely the case, and that’s not the only country with laws that protect artists this way, for example Brazil right next to it also have it’s own set of laws, had then even before Spotify was a thing, but Spotify is happily in Brazil since 2014.
The Uruguayan law is just not well though, and that’s what happens when you put incompetent people in charge of making laws for things they don’t have the slightest clue of how they work. They kill an entire industry.
I feel like this whole bill is kind of a government sized “thanks Obama”.
Spotify is still signing unfair contracts with those labels though. They could throw their weight around and demand higher cuts for artists but they aren’t. No need to let them off the hook when they’re choosing to participate and profit in a corrupt industry, IMO.
Is it Spotify that arrange the cut for artists or the label though?
I don’t know but I’d think it’s the labels as it’s too much for Spotify to negotiate per-artist?When food companies use slave labour or cut down old growth forest for intensive farms do we get mad at Walmart/Tesco/Carrefour for having a normal margin on what they buy from the food companies (which may or may not leave enough for the products to be sourced sustainably, but that’s a separate argument as the food companies would likely take a higher margin over keeping the same one and making their food more sustainable if paid more) or do we blame the food companies/their suppliers?
I mean, yes, but at the same time, the grocery stores can exert pressure on the food suppliers by saying “we aren’t going to buy food that isn’t sourced sustainably and responsibly,” the same way Spotify can exert pressure on labels with unfair contracts by saying “we want to make sure everyone gets paid fairly for their music getting paid”
idk if I found out a store I frequent was knowingly selling food grown with slave labor yes I would have a big issue with them!
I have bad news for you unless you’re buying direct from local farms I guess
iirc spotify has some weird revenue sharing thing where that 70% is split between all artists in a very non-linear way. You don’t get money based on how many of your songs get sold you get a slice of the total pie based on some weird formula. The result is that top artists get paid for more than their own songs sales and everyone elses gets less than their own songs sales to provide that extra cut to the top performers.
That’s not just Spotify though. Everyone uses a similar algorithm. Deezer and Tidal have talked about implementing user-centric payments but have not done so.
IIRC Tidal gives 10% of the subscription to the most listened-to artist. Not a lot exactly, but still miles ahead of Spotify who gives functionally zero.
That was part of their “direct artist payouts” that they discontinued earlier this year.
Ah thanks for clarifying. What a bummer!
I think the law has more to do with indie artists not getting paid shit. People who want to self publish and cut out the middle man ( record labels )
“According to the article”…
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Considering that there are 0 Uruguayan artists on Spotify, it shouldn’t make any difference.
Citation needed*
I was looking at a map the other day with my buddy Joe from New York, and I pointed at a blob in South America and said “Hey what’s that?!” He said “Uraguay.” I said “Yeah. I’m aware and comfortable with my gender, thanks. But what is country on the map?”
Spotify claims that “because of streaming, the music industry in Uruguay has grown 20% in 2022 alone.”
Yeah, sure, you must be totally right.
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