Irving Azoff has threatened to remove 20,000 songs off Google’s Youtube including their new “Music key”. According to the Hollywood Reporter “Azoff is the former chairman of Live Nation who is now spearheading a new venture, Global Music Rights (GMR), aimed at extracting higher performance rights royalties for songwriters.”
So this follows on Taylor Swift and what is happening is the music business is trying to get more money by any means necessary. Essentially, they will pressure the distributors into rising prices on streaming and other services so as to pay more to the artists.
In effect, that is capitalism in action except, as learnt in the 1990s, content is too easy to get for free and a goodly portion of the public will do just that.
Spotify is saying hang loose, subscriptions will increase and when subscriptions increase so will your money. The artists are saying, raise our cost per stream and if you have to raise the cost per subscription that’s your problem.
Azoff is saying: hey, you have no business with out me Google. Pay me more or we pass.
The language is clever but the bottom line is, like everything else in life, it is you and I who will be paying it.
At the moment, ASCAP and BMI are fighting with Pandora. Every one is fighting with every one and the only thing I think we can agree upon is that without a shadow of a doubt, whoever wins we will pay.
