FIM

The Covid-​19 cri­sis has hit music per­form­ers hard. Gigs have been can­celled, fes­ti­vals and per­for­mances post­poned, and record­ing stu­dios closed. It has brought into sharp relief the fact that musi­cians are sus­tained pri­mar­i­ly by income gen­er­at­ed by the live side of the music busi­ness and that stream­ing roy­al­ties are woe­ful­ly insufficient.

It would take 53 mil­lion Spotify streams to break even on a € 24,000 loss, a fig­ure that is unat­tain­able for most musi­cians. In the UK, one in five respon­dents to an MU sur­vey said they were con­sid­er­ing leav­ing music altogether.

Musicians can no longer accept the record labels tak­ing the biggest share of the income gen­er­at­ed by their work and creativity

Launched in the UK by the MU and the Ivors Academy, the Keep Music Alive cam­paign aims to ‘fix stream­ing’. It calls for indus­try stake­hold­ers to come togeth­er to agree an equi­table, sus­tain­able and trans­par­ent mod­el for roy­al­ty dis­tri­b­u­tion in the stream­ing era. The two organ­i­sa­tions have set up a peti­tion call­ing on their Government to urgent­ly under­take a review of stream­ing to ensure that the music ecosys­tem is trans­par­ent and fair. FIM has writ­ten a let­ter to the PM Boris Johnson and to the Secretary of State for Culture Oliver Dowden, to sup­port this legit­i­mate initiative.

The unfair­ness of stream­ing busi­ness mod­els is a con­cern for music per­form­ers world­wide. They can no longer accept the record labels tak­ing the biggest share of the income gen­er­at­ed by their work and cre­ativ­i­ty. We encour­age all of them to join the thou­sands of UK musi­cians who have tak­en to Twitter to high­light this issue, using the hash­tags #BrokenRecord and #FixStreaming.