Streaming rates suck. We all know it. It’s the #1 complaint of music workers today. Spotify’s average $0.0038/stream is a starvation wage — this is not sustainable. It would take on average 470,000 streams per month to make minimum wage. We can’t support our families and build our careers. And it’s hurting music itself, too. Artists from less privileged backgrounds often can’t take the economic risks of making recordings, starving us all of creative voices we may tragically never hear. The ripple effects of starvation royalty rates are being felt up and down the industry. This is our livelihood. Recordings cost money and we can rarely even make the money back. ​

Spotify’s premium users (~165 million) pay a global average of ~$5/month for access to nearly all recorded music ever. That’s a steal! Two decades ago, people used to pay $15+ for a single CD. Even more people (~200 million) pay nothing on Spotify’s free service. Compare that to what people pay for TV streaming services — the average American household pays ~$55/month for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc while they pay next-to-nothing for music.

Virtually all recorded music is available for free on YouTube. 2 billion people (six times Spotify’s ~365 million users) stream their music for free on YouTube. If Spotify raised their price, they’d simply lose users to YouTube.

Nobody can sell what anybody can get for free.

Spotify (and all streaming services) is effectively selling an interface/app, not access to a music catalogue, since that catalogue is available for free on YouTube!

The reason people pay all that money for TV streaming is that TV shows aren’t simply available for free on YouTube.

We can’t fight for higher pay when our music is available for free.

As long as services which pay us are in competition with mass scale infringement like Youtube — a huge black market for our work — our economy will be distorted, our work devalued, and our pay unsustainable. ​

Nothing!

But it should be OUR choice! Sometimes posting our videos on YouTube for free may help us, but we have a right to determine when our music is free.


If our work can be posted for free without our consent, we can't control how it’s sold and make a living.

Here’s an example: some may want to keep a new release off of YouTube to boost their profile on Bandcamp. The same artist might be glad to let fans stream a live gig or get an old record for free. Others may feel completely different. ​

Furthermore, “free” isn't truly free! Youtube is racking in billions in ad-based and data mining profits each year off of files posted without our consent. And they’re paying us almost nothing. Spotify looks generous next to Youtube. On Youtube, it would take 2.4 million streams per month to make minimum wage.

The open black market created by mass copyright infringement devalues all music everywhere. It’s the ”hole in the bottom of the bucket”.

Even if your music isn’t specifically on Youtube, it affects how much consumers will pay for all music everywhere, including yours.

Plus, are you sure someone hasn’t uploaded your music to Youtube without your knowledge or permission? Have you checked today? What about tomorrow?

Virtually all music is available online for free because platforms like Youtube are profiting off of a system that allows them to host content for free without the creator’s consent.

But let’s back up …

Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution gives individual creators the right to determine whether and how their work is distributed. Copyright is a basic music workers’ right.

When we make music, our ownership of it is called Copyright.

Our ability to make money from our recordings comes from selling and licensing these copyrights. Copyright is literally the right to copy something. It is the system we have to protect our ownership of our work. When you record a song, you own the right to make a copy of it, until you sell or license that right. There’s no money from royalties without our ability to license our recordings in exchange for a cut of the revenues.

But our ability to properly exercise these rights have been taken away…

Normally, if a company profits from your copyrighted work without your consent, you can sue them and win.

Online platforms have a different set of rules than brick-and-mortar businesses.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Section 512, protects online corporations from being legally responsible for hosting copyrighted files posted by others ("3rd parties"), i.e. Youtube can’t be held accountable when somebody uploads our work. ​

This protection from accountability is called a “safe harbor”.​

Alphabet (Google) makes huge profits using these safe harbors to host our files and has incentive to maintain the status quo. They even admit it themselves:​

​“We rely on statutory safe harbors, as set forth in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act […] for various linking, caching, and hosting activities. Any legislation or court rulings affecting these safe harbors may adversely affect us. There are legislative proposals in both the US and EU that could reduce our safe harbor protection.” - Alphabet (Google)’s 10-K “Risk Factors” ​

“Safe harbour. It suffocates the market, and it must come to an end: Safe harbour steals from musicians by removing their right to deny permission or exact a negotiated price for use of their work. They don’t have a say over how their music is used or how much they can earn. Safe harbour forces streaming services that pay for content to compete with those who have treated payment as an option, rather than an obligation. It limits streaming services’ ability to charge enough to reward artists adequately, unless they are major stars. The market is stifled and distorted: too little revenue comes in. Legitimate new entrants to the streaming market must compete with free, which is ruinously difficult. Competition in the field is near impossible, limited to a few huge multinationals.”

–Independent Music Companies Association (IMAPLA)

“Safe harbour provisions that have been transposed into UK law have profoundly impacted the market for digital music consumption. YouTube’s dominance of the music streaming market shows that the market has tipped. Safe harbour gives services that host user-generated content (UGC) a competitive advantage over other services and undermine the music industry’s leverage in licensing negotiations by providing UGC-hosting services with broad limitations of liability. This has suppressed the value of the digital music market both in real and absolute terms even as these services generate multi-billion-dollar advertising revenues.”

–UK Parliament report on streaming

“The scale of online copyright infringement and the lack of effectiveness of section 512 notices to address the situation remain significant problems ... to the many other creators who have seen their livelihoods impacted drastically by ongoing infringement of their works online and for which they can achieve no relief.”

-United States Copyright Office report on DMCA section 512

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the law that governs how copyright functions on the internet. The DMCA was written in 1997-98. AOL was the largest company on the internet at the time. ​Google didn’t exist yet. Streaming platforms didn’t exist yet. Napster hadn’t happened yet. Congress could never have foreseen how the law would be applied. ​

The DMCA Section 512’s Safe Harbors provisions were supposed to protect Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Verizon or Comcast—who were building the physical infrastructure of the internet—from being sued simply because someone transmitted a copyrighted song on their physical cables.

The safe harbors, as they were originally intended, have been distorted to afford Big Tech the power to use our work without our consent, profit from our work without paying us, violate our rights, and destroy the recording economy. 

“While Congress’s original intent in establishing safe harbors and the notice-and-takedown process was to strike a particular balance between the needs of online service providers (OSPs) and those of creators and rightsholders (while also providing certain safeguards for the speech interests of users), in practice this balance has shifted in ways Congress likely did not anticipate.” -US Copyright Office

We need Congress to reform and fix the safe harbor law (DMCA Section 512) so that it works fairly for us.

Policymakers have known for decades that the law is unfair. But Big Tech has stonewalled reform for over twenty years because they’re making too much money selling ads and data-mining on our files. Time’s up!

We also need to ensure indie music workers have a seat at the table. If we want solution to work for us and not just the major labels, we need voice in the process.

We don’t have to start from scratch. Congress has been holding hearings on Section 512 reform for the past two years. There’s new movement on Capitol Hill around these issues. 

MWA members have testified at Congressional hearings about Section 512 reform.​ MWA is part of a larger coalition of organizations representing workers across creative industries who are actively campaigning for section 512 reform. ​

We need to make enough noise so that they prioritize us.​

1) Take MWA’s Streaming Testimonials Survey: https://forms.gle/oxp5dYKSUh95AmTM9

2) Send a letter to your Representatives: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/streaming-justice-tell-congress-we-need-to-get-paid-for-our-work/. After you write, call them!

3) Follow @musicworkers on Twitter and @musicworkersalliance on Instagram and spread the word by retweeting/reposting about the #StreamingJustice campaign. Share this page that you’re on with others.

4) Educate 3-5 friends or colleagues about these issues and get them to fill out the survey and write to their Congresspeople, too.

5) Get involved with organizing the #StreamingJustice campaign. Email musicworkersalliance@gmail.com to get involved. We’re entirely music worker-run. We do everything in a participatory and democratic way. We’d love your involvement.