FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Spotify Is Getting a Little Better at Crediting Artists and Songwriters

This week has seen royalty amounts rise, and production and songwriting credits added to the streaming service's desktop iteration.
Lauren O'Neill
London, GB
Image by downloadsource.fr on Flickr (license)

A number of artists have gotten into scrapes with streaming services in the past over the amount they're compensated for streams of their music. Famous examples include Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and JAY-Z, who even went ahead and invented his own platform, TIDAL, in order to get a better cut of the proceeds from online plays of his music.

This week, the streaming giant Spotify has appeared to kick into gear with regard to artist recognition: a ruling from the United States Copyright Royalty Board raised artist paychecks from streaming apps across the board by a not insignificant 44 percent. It'll come into effect over the next five years, with 15.1 percent of apps' monthly revenue going towards artist pay by 2022.

Advertisement

This ruling has also made it easier for artists to get their money more promptly. And today, Spotify announced that it would roll out a feature which allows listeners to access songwriting and production credits for a given track, when previously it had just listed artists.

Annika Goldman, ‎director of music publishing operations for Spotify, told Billboard of the move:

The more we share information, the more opportunities we can help create for songwriters. This is just the beginning of making songwriter and producer credits more easily available to Spotify listeners, and we look forward to continually improving that information, in close collaboration with our music industry partners.

This actually seems like a long-overdue ruling. Streaming, quite clearly, is here to stay: it's basically how young people at least consume all of their media, and the conditions for those who create that media should always give them a fair cut, and their proper credits. This seems like a step in the right direction, and will hopefully become an important platform via which new songwriters and producers can get industry recognition.

Follow Noisey on Twitter.