This is a turf battle. They are saying, 'The songwriters aren't getting paid.' Baloney. Songwriters are getting paid. They're paid sync rights and (mechanical) rights. They aren't getting paid for the public performance in a download because there is no public performance in a download.
Serious music usually doesn't pay.
Spotify wants to make consuming music simpler and at the same time pay the rights owners.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think music should be free.
I did albums for Cash Money. I didn't do singles - I did whole albums for Cash Money - and at the end of the day, I'm saying I wasn't paid for albums, so its like you're doing 10 songs, and somebody pays you for 1.
If you get 100 million streams on a song and you're only being paid on 20 percent, the check's not going to look good. The money's not going to look fair.
How do we let people pay for music?
If you can play live and support yourself, it's one of the few ways you're going to actually get paid in this business these days.
I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is how do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, how do we let people pay for music?
