Sound Cloud will pay artists based on playing time

“The industry has been calling for it for years. We are pleased to be the first to bring this innovation to support artists,” said the CEO.

Photo: Pixabay

AFP: Sound Cloud will pay artists 

SoundCloud will become the first music platform in April to pay artists based on the time during which they are listened to, replacing a system that benefits the big stars above all.

“The industry has been calling for it for years. We are happy to be the first to bring this innovation to support artists,” Michael Weissman, CEO of the German platform, told AFP.

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Like its big rivals, Spotify and Deezer, SoundCloud currently has a controversial remuneration system based on the pro-rata of total views.

Known as “market centric” this system is opposed to the “user centric” model, based on individual subscribers’ reproductions. The first favors the big stars, to the detriment of lesser-known artists.

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The first also assumes that the money paid monthly by subscribers to these platforms is not used to remunerate the artists who listen.

In total, the new system will benefit “nearly 100,000 independent artists,” according to SoundCloud.

It will be more “fair” and will favor greater musical diversity, added the platform founded in 2007 and which has a repertoire of more than 250 million songs created by 30 million artists.

The new mechanism will appease the anger of the artists who for months have denounced the way in which the platforms pay them?

“It is an interesting initiative,” Jean-Philippe Thiellay, president of the French National Music Center, the body that coordinates the music sector, told AFP. “Things are moving in the world of streaming, that’s positive. Now we have to see how it will change exactly for artists.”

In a recent study carried out by the Deloitte cabinet, the institution estimates that this change in the distribution system of musical platforms would have a minor impact on the remuneration of lesser-known musicians and that its main effect would be to stabilize the “half of the classification” .

Photo: Pixabay

The report, which only examined the cases of Spotify and Deezer, confirms that the change would generate greater musical diversity, with an increase of 24% in income for classical music, 22% for “hard rock”, and 18 % for the “blues”. In contrast, the most popular genres, such as rap, would register a loss of 21%.

For its part, the British Academy of Authors-Composers, which is currently campaigning for fairer pay, applauded SoundCloud’s announcement. “When you go to the ‘market centric’ system, the remuneration of artists who have an audience increases significantly,” its president Crispin Hunt told AFP.

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“The basic principle of all markets is that the more customers, the more income. The remuneration of artists based on the duration of the reproductions is based precisely on this idea,” he adds.

“Deezer is ready to launch a pilot project” with this new formula, reported the French music platform. “In that sense, we hope that SoundCloud will support us in our policy of persuasion with the record labels”, some of which have a lot to lose with this new remuneration system.