Anti-Copyright Extremists
Spotify and Anna's Archive
Spotify cried foul last week when a non-profit hacker project managed to gain access to its metadata and audio files. Spotify referred to Anna’s Archive as “anti-copyright extremists.”
Musicians might note that 87% of tracks will now receive the same payment from Anna’s Archive as they do from Spotify: zero.
Since April 2024, no track with fewer than a thousand streams a year on Spotify can claim any royalties from the platform. According to music data researchers Luminate, that’s 175.5 million tracks unaccounted to by Spotify, out of a total 202 million. Demonetizing these tracks was a unilateral decision by the platform with no approval from rights holders. It is, you might say, anti-copyright in the extreme.
Yet there is a difference between these two platforms in possession of our tracks. Spotify is a $120 billion company, with the highest paid executives in the music industry and the largest market share of audio streaming. Anna’s Archive is,
“a non-profit project with two goals:
1. Preservation: Backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity.
2. Access: Making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world.”
Two anti-copyright extremists — one with a goal of profit for themselves at any cost to musicians, the other with a goal of making music available to all. You don’t have to choose, if you don’t want to. But if you did…?
Listening to: whatever I damn please
Cooking: mac and cheese from Byron Coley’s recipe
A huge beef of mine is music news & reviews sites that offer up Spotify playlists embedded in their articles as a means of promoting music. The only thing this actually winds up promoting is Spotify itself. Is it too much to ask for these publications, who ostensibly are there to help promote music and musicians, to take a stand against the vehemently anti-musician Spotify? What is our best case to present to them in this matter? What can we suggest to them?
Thank you for that jaw-dropping chart..