Photo & Illustration: Utopia
UTOPIA MUSIC - Fair pay for every play What we’re doing and why - or: What the music industry has to do with pizza. Imagine you are running an Italian restaurant, but for some meals you get paid five years later. Crazy, right? In fact, imagine you are not really sure how many pizzas you have actually sold. Nor do you know who you need to pay for the tomatoes. Oh, and while keeping track of reservations, you have to deal with an increasing number of bookings every day. Yes, that sounds insane. And it surely can’t be happening anywhere, can it? Well, this is actually how parts of the music business operate.
A systematic problem Seriously. Think about this: If a song plays on radio stations and such are not tracked properly, no one gets paid for them. If the rights to a track are not transparent, it’s hard to channel the revenue into the right hands. And since music consumption is increasing exponentially, one can’t do the math with the limited infrastructure of old. Even worse: The
payment lag literally can be years. Now it’s not all bad: Music excites, unites and entertains all over the world, always has, always will. It’s a robust business with a worldwide volume of 60 BUSD. But that’s far from its full potential. Even the garlic industry reports 40 BUSD a year, and we dare to say that music is all around, garlic definitely less so. (If that is good or bad, we leave up to you and your favourite Italian restaurant.) In fact, performers, songwriters, rights holders, labels and funds lose vast amounts to the tune of billions per year because of incomplete data, inefficient structures and slow payments.
“up to 60% of all global radio plays are not properly reported and claimed” Even after the first digital revolution the music business was transaction based like in the old days, with
