 Best of wishes to you, I know that lockdown and lock-in is tough on you. Same for you as well. And same for you guys listening and watching as well, because it's been a very tough time, not just for everyone in general, obviously for artists as well, and you guys watching. It's been pretty tricky. And one of the big debates this month has been sort of going on mainly in the UK, elsewhere as well, is about Spotify and other DSPs needing to do more to support artists with regards to helping them financially because they're not getting any income from touring right now. Obviously live stream has been helping to an extent, but there's a lot of lost income. And also there's been a lot of bad blood between artists and Spotify and our music and things for not getting enough money for years now. And it's really sort of like ramped up this debate of late. There's been a campaign called Broken Records over here using the hashtag to try and campaign to get Spotify to pay more. It all kicked off at the beginning of the month as an artist called Tim Burgess, who tweeted Spotify directly. He said, hey, Spotify, I feel like I'm working for you here. I really think we should look at how much you give to artists. We should work together on it. It's just not fair at the moment. You have an amazing thing. It just needs to be fairer. So it's all snowballed. There's more loads of articles and the press about it. The Guardian covered it. Vice have covered it. Musicale, I've done some pieces on it. And there's been a lot of new campaigns started since then. But what I thought we'd sort of try and discuss is sort of like explain some of the potential options to give out a small money and why it's not as simple as Spotify should triple their royalty pay amounts, for example. So I'm going to try and explain to you guys a bit about to give you the lowdown on what could be done and what situation is. Yeah, let's give me your words on why is the why it's not as simple as tripling the payment that part, because we can really floor all kind of versions of the stakeholders or who should be giving up what. But yeah, just the just the why it's not that simple part. What's your perspective? Yeah, because I've been quite guilty of not really thinking it through myself. So I've been doing a lot of reading and it's been insightful because obviously the first thing to point out is that Spotify doesn't pay you guys as artists or songwriters directly. They pay their money to labels and distributors and publishers and collective societies and then they pay you. So let's say I think right now, Spotify has a royalty pool and they pay about 65% of revenue to the labels. And so they keep the other 35% to help them run their business. And obviously, this goes to the labels, they then give you some money and obviously there's a lot of figures floating around about how much you get per stream. Like there's a big one, which is like 0.00348 dollars. Now that this would have been worked out obviously after it's all been said and done. So you can turn that into a per stream rate by dividing your royalties by your number of streams after the fact. But also that's depending on how much the label actually gives you as an artist. So Spotify can't just triple this from 0.00348 to 0.01044 dollars because that would mean it would have to triple its percentage from 65% to like 195%, not physically possible obviously. So it's not up to Spotify to triple the royalty rate. They can't physically do that. So it's very important to understand from that regard. So who are we blaming? Who are we blaming? Well, I guess it all comes into everyone. So there's a few different options I'm going to go through. But first one is an alternative method in terms of the way artists get paid because one very popular system that people have been lobbying for for a few years is a user centric payout system. Because right now we operate on a pro-rata system. So this means that the biggest artists get most of the money. So for example, if Drake gets 5% of the total streamed on Spotify for that month then his right-holders get 5%, which means Drake's music gets 5% of your subscription. So even if you never listened to Drake on Spotify in that month, 5% of your money will still go to him. So the big artists always win. But in the user centric model, your money goes to the artist you listen to only. So if you only listen to one artist that whole month somehow then they'll get 9.99, they'll get all the money, they'll get subscription. Got it. Interesting. I like that. You do, yeah. But how would that fuck shit up? So that means maybe Drake is pulling from a smaller pool because it might be a small number of people listening to him a lot of times in an extreme state. So that means that could easily, even the playing field in some ways. Or obviously the lesson, generally speaking, when you're talking about somebody like Drake, of course their level of commercial ability, they're getting listened to by a lot of people. But does that ever backfire at some point? So if I'm your fan base and now the split is between the 1,000 people that listen to you, all right, and so 1,000 times, let's just say this month, 9.99, well, no, we'll just stick with 10. So we'll say $100,000 to split. That's the pool as far as the collective amount of money those people pay them. But then you have to split still between those other people that those people listen to, right? That's how that system will work. So you're pulling from a smaller pool potentially at that point. And I wonder if it will benefit some people, but then some people it'll obviously make their numbers even smaller just because of, you know, you might have a very few power listeners, which that could suck. So I think that one has to be thought through before you even demand the user century. It sounds better, but I will want to walk down the line and really look at the stats on how many artists have an average of how many unique listeners. Yes, I guess monthly listeners is probably that gauge. But all right, but when we look at the full spectrum, how many artists are at what level? And then now what are you talking about? Because you mean how many artists have, no, how many monthly listeners do artists have on average at different levels, and then you also need how many different artists an individual user listens to on average. Those are the two primary numbers in that equation. I'm getting that correct. So I will be interested to see and hear more of that. So I could at least get some averages before saying that would be to go to. I don't think it's a great idea in a sense that obviously the romantics will say that it's taking from the rich and giving to the poor, you know, as in like because the super fans might give them smaller artists more money than you usually get. However, we live in a very sort of like lean back listening culture at the moment with all these streaming platforms and most of the big players people will put on will have the big artists on. So therefore they'll still be listening to those big artists. And the other point is that my concern with this system is that it can be very easily exploited. You could just stream. You could just concede stream one one artist on your account and they get all the money so you could build like bought accounts and fake accounts and really drive up revenue. So there are there's a lot of things that we need to be ironed out with this. Yeah, that's interesting. Even the bot angle and also. In some ways, the rich deserve it. Because when you have a certain level of commercial success, there's a certain amount of fans that are on there and a certain level of legitimacy to the platform that made it that platform. So the company itself Spotify has to favor that in some way. If there is no far better option that gives, you know, that makes everybody happy, you have to really favor the people that are the reason that your platform was able to hit a threshold in the first place. Exactly. Yeah. But they're not going to change it in a certain way, unless they're absolutely sure because obviously they find they keep Spotify alive with labels and then they feel they're not getting a fair share of the of the royalties now and they're going to pull the plug and that's the end of Spotify. So obviously it sounds really harsh, but you know, the end of the day it's a business and they go keep their best interests at heart and it just needs this system could work, but needs testing. I know that these are very keen in the past about trying to implement this. They were first doing a trial run this year, just in France only, but it hasn't happened yet. But they are very keen on trying this model and seeing I'm interested to see the results if it does go ahead. But obviously, given what's happened, they're going to pull the plug on that for a while, but it's certainly an interesting model. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I kind of like the idea of really artists just getting a better deal in the first place on the front end when it comes to relationships with labels, managers or whatever, because this alludes and it'll kind of start to jump ahead, honestly, to I know one or something else you want to talk about, which is the Joe Rogan deal. But it all speaks to one big pocket and one big elephant in the room that we don't address enough. All right. Spotify in their mission, right, is this huge thing they want to do for artists like helping so many but have a livable wage and all that stuff. Right. It's a very pro artist mission that they have. But the issue is, right, a Spotify is a baby being born into a world of sin. Right. They come into the music industry and it's already set up against them. You can't help the artist any more than you can get rid of the labels or go through the labels. You already have to go through the system that is set up against them. The labels have these artists locked in and they're the ones doing the licensing. You don't you can't control or change the structure of their deals. You can only create a deal and whether it's one hundred percent the best deal or not still doesn't change the fact that whatever your deal is, the the screwing that goes in on the on the back end of them getting a small portion of that. So it's an altruistic mission that is kind of set up to fail. Or no, not kind of. It is set up to fail as long as the labels or institutions that people think are scoring them over are the ones that are in control because also because of that control that they're they're given and gifted because of the catalog they have, they have a district portion that influence on Spotify because that's so you have to run through that. So you have to negotiate with it. It might be more artists society. Right. Yes. There's far more people on the bottom, but the people with the influence and what most of the weight is held is at the top. And unfortunately, for artists in general, it creates a situation whether or not platform Spotify truly wants to, right? It's not it's almost unachievable, which is why Spotify is a company when we look at like the deals like Joe Organ, we start talking about the the podcasting direction. I'm a firm believer that into some extent Spotify has done just like like so people so many people in the music industry, right? How do these how does Jay-Z make his money? How does insert big artists make his money? Most of these people make their money outside of music, right? Especially not directly the sale of the music. Most of these people say, oh, I need to go somewhere else to get rich. And I think Spotify is saying it is hard to make money in the music industry just like so many other people and say, how can we go make some money? And that's what it comes down to. It's the network.