Way, WAY back in 2009, Lady Gaga was at the centre of one of the first artist-royalties controversies around Spotify, when it was reported that she’d only earned $167 for a million streams of her ‘Poker Face’ track. It turned out this was only her portion of songwriting royalties paid by a single collecting society (STIM in Sweden) for a period just after Spotify’s launch the year before, and did not include direct-publishing or recording royalties.
That’s all in the past, though: in 2019, Lady Gaga has some other concerns about streaming in general. In between songs at a Las Vegas gig, she called for ‘more variety’ in the streaming world: “so that we can listen to different genres of music all at the same time, and appreciate all the different types of artists that are out there, and that it’s not just one playlist and that we’re told and fed what to hear”.
According to Uproxx, she continued: “Don’t you remember — maybe some of you don’t remember — but there was a time when there was pop, dance, rock and roll, pop, everything that you could imagine, it was all out there… And I really wish that for the world. I love streaming, I just want more variety. I think we can do it.”
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…