UMG wants to change how streamers pay artists: Here’s how

Recent announcements of UMG experiments with music streamers Deezer and Tidal and subsequent interviews offer a glimpse of how the world’s largest music group wants to change how Spotify, Apple Music, and other music streamers pay artists and labels.

UMG calls their approach “Artist Centric” with a goal of developing “new methods that holistically reward recording artists and songwriters for the value they create and to reimagine and update the engagement model (for fans) “and the artists they love.”

That would mean creating a new royalty system that rewards stream counts and fan engagement.

Direct Artist Subscriptions

Deezer’s CEO Jeronimo Folgueira hinted at one likely experiment in an interview with Billboard: direct artist subscriptions.

“We believe that working together with the label and the artists to figure out ways of helping the artist directly access their fanbase and monetize that fandom would benefit us and them as well,” he said. “If we find ways of monetizing better, let’s say, if we would allow fans to subscribe directly to artists, we would have an additional revenue source that we would share with labels and the artists, which will improve our growth and profitability profile.”

“Non-Music”

In the original UMG partnership announcement, Folgueira also pointed to “increasing amounts of non-music tracks uploaded on platforms, poor quality covers with misspelled artists’ names and songs to ‘steal’ streams, and people trying to trick the system with the length of tracks.”

UMG boss Lucien Grainge recently decried how “consumers are increasingly being guided by algorithms to lower-quality functional content that in some cases can barely pass for music… Just witness the thousands and thousands of 31-second track uploads of sound files whose sole purpose is to game the system and divert royalties.”

Sounds great, but…

This all seems laudable until you ask who gets to decide which music is of “poor quality” or what exactly a “non-music” track is. Is hip hop “music” but a poem recited to a backing track “non-music?”

Or is a self-released cover likely to be dubbed “poor quality,” while a release by UMG, WMG, or Sony is labeled “high quality”?

Banning 31-second up-loads seems easy, but what’s to stop scammers from uploading 40, 50, and 60-second tracks? Where would a floor on song length need to be for it to be effective, and how might it stifle creativity?

Grainge promises to find “a model that supports all artists—DIY, indie and major,” but his first responsibility is to UMG shareholders, and it is very easy to imagine how profits could take precedence over fairness.

Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of the Skyline Artists Agency, and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.