
A shared financial undertaking is conspicuous by its absence. This idea is briefly nodded towards in the Code, where it mentions that rights-holders will “ undertake as part of their industry-level anti-piracy and content protection operations reasonable investigations to identify stream manipulation.” Yet this doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. They could commit to a specific and collaborative level of financing to fund both the investigation of stream farms, and subsequent litigation against their operators. The three major record companies jointly generated more than $13 billion in revenues last year. Specific industry-wide investment in stream-farm crackdownsĪ simple, practical policy, for starters. And, make no mistake, this is a very serious problem: Stream fraud could be taking $300 million a year out of the pockets of deserving artists and labels, according to recent music-biz insider estimates.ġ.
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Rather than gripe and moan - which I could do all day, considering that stream fraud is literally ripping off artists who deserve to earn more from these platforms - it’s perhaps more useful to look at what was actually missing from the code the proposals it could have contained that would have made a real, material difference to the problem. You can read more on the Code’s tragically limp set of proposals here, but its powerlessness is ultimately summed up by a single sentence: “ This Code is not legally binding and does not create any contractual or pre-contractual obligations under any law or legal system.”
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The Code includes some imprecise promises by the streaming services to monitor and crack down on illegal streaming activity (which they already do), plus some even more imprecise pledges by the labels to share information whenever they spot suspicious goings-on (which they already do). This is often achieved via “stream farms,” where banks of devices all running services like Spotify continually play the music of the paying party in order to boost their play counts (and, as a consequence, boost their chart position, market share, royalty payouts, or simply their perceived industry “hotness”). On June 20th, a powerful group of industry organizations - including the three major labels plus publishing groups owned by Universal, Sony and Warner - inked a “Code of Best Practice” designed to tackle the blight of “fake streams” in the modern music business.įake streams, in a nutshell, cover any instance - whether for monetary or industry/charting benefit - whereby one party pays another party to rack up illegitimate plays of an artist’s music.


And if you needed further evidence to back it up, the modern music industry has just provided it in abundance. It’s from Margaret Thatcher - the free-market–loving British prime minister (1979-1990) who happened to authorize some of the severest cuts in arts funding the U.K. This quote didn’t come from a particular friend of music. “Consensus is the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no-one believes, but to which no-one objects the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead.”
