We reported yesterday on Pandora CEO Brian McAndrews’ defence of free streaming music. It only took a day for the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) to hit back, also in an op-ed piece for Billboard. Boss David Israelite wasn’t impressed.
“Perhaps one of the reasons many Americans do not pay for music is because Pandora has told them they no longer need to, since Pandora expects songwriters to subsidise its business by paying them almost nothing – and fighting to pay them even less,” he wrote.
The NMPA’s issue remains the split in Pandora’s royalty payments: 42% of its revenues are paid out to labels and artists, but only 4% go to publishers and songwriters. “It is a bold statement for a technology company to tell songwriters that what it is doing with the songwriters’ intellectual property is ‘good for them’ while the songwriters vehemently disagree…”
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…