European Union Demands Streaming Services To Increase Royalty Payments To Musicians

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JAKARTA - The European Union calls for changes to the music streaming business, including fairer royalty distributions and increased payments to musicians.

On Wednesday, January 17, the European Union adopted a resolution to address the imbalance in revenue allocation in music streaming, including creating a new legal framework for streaming. Currently, no EU regulations apply to this sector.

In that resolution, pre-digital royalty rates must be revised, in which the European Union criticizes a business model that "forces creators to accept lower or no income at all in return for greater visibility".

They also proposed to reflect the possibility of taking action against very many amounts of music'' on streaming platforms. A study published a few days ago found that about a quarter of music in streaming services was not played at all throughout 2023. Therefore, legislation may include quotas for European music work''.

In addition, the European Union calls for better transparency in algorithmic and AI tools (artificial intelligence) to avoid streaming number manipulation (expectedly used to reduce artist costs). They also demand that songs produced by AI be labeled like that, so that music deepfakes can be handled, and request that platforms identify copyright holders by allocate metadata correctly' so that their work is more visible.

Finally, the European Union shows the need for diversity in streaming revenue. They emphasize that most revenue is allocated to the most popular big labels and artists; less popular styles or common languages are less visible. Each EU law must consider diverse genres and languages, as well as independent creators.

Spanish politician Ibmen Garc Del Blanco was among the supporters of the European Union's proposal and praised them for suppressing the concerns of European creators, who are the heart of the music streaming market'.

"Traditional diversity and ensuring that songwriters are rewarded and fair payments are always our priority," he added. This is why we ask for rules that ensure algorithms and recommendation tools used by transparent music streaming services as well as the use of AI tools, thus placing European creators as their centers.

The proposal follows Spotify's confirmation that all songs on the platform must have a minimum of 1,000 streams before they can get royalties. This policy change was criticized by independent artists such as Damon & Naomi, who claimed that the policy would "making around $40-46 million per year from artists like Damon & Naomi to artists like Ed Sheeran."

In other news, Spotify withdrew its services from Uruguay after the country's copyright law demanded fair payments to artists.