As somebody who works in this industry a lot of stuff is suddenly starting to make sense, haha

Music licensing is roughly three times the clusterfuck you probably already think it is https://twitter.com/variety/status/1320731150969499648

I kinda wish the Variety article was a bit more clear though, it’s hard to tell if the letter is about Twitch not acquiring the correct rights for its Soundtrack service, or if the signees are put out by Twitch’s lack of action on other sources of music (or both)

This bit from the letter suggests that it could be that while the smaller labels involved in the Soundtrack tool are happy without mechanical/sync rights, the industry as a whole sees it as a worrying precedent

If (big if) I’ve understood it correctly, it sounds greedy but it’s actually a pretty big issue in licensing right now. There’s a lot of music out there, and a lot of people who want to use that music but don’t want to pay for it

So right now there’s a lot of people trying to position themselves to take over that space in the market, wanting to be the Spotify of music licensing

The problem with that is that while it’s great for consumers it devalues music to a pretty ridiculous extent

Production music especially is a specific skill. Producing versatile music for videos is a specialism that people have spent years mastering. Now you have some new companies storming in and going “yeah, people don’t want to pay, so you only get pennies for this now”

Which just ends up the same as most “for exposure” bullshit. Some people do well off the free promotion and hit it big, many more suddenly see their livelihoods drying up because some Silicon Valley dudebros don’t think their product is worth money any more

So yeah, it’s kinda easy to look at this and see the RIAA getting pissy as usual, but this is representative of a much deeper issue where it’s becoming harder and harder for musicians to make a living because their product is getting devalued from all angles

The situation is currently so bad that Coca-cola or Apple could make an advert that costs a quarter of a million dollars and pay $140 for perpetual usage of the music, which is /fucked/

Of which the artist might literally see pennies

(For fairness’ sake, this probably wouldn’t happen much because big companies either have in-house teams or want exclusive use of the music, but the fact remains that if they wanted to do this they could)