Jimmy Page joins artists calling for fairer streaming royalties
The Led Zep great weighs in on the UK probe on the future of music streaming.
Photo: Kevin Winter / Getty
Jimmy Page has joined a growing list of artists demanding fairer royalty payments from music streaming services.
A UK parliamentary inquiry into the future of music streaming is now underway and will continue to 2021. The probe hears the perspectives of “industry experts, artists and record labels, as well as streaming platforms themselves”.
Page, like many of his peers, is demanding fairness in how streaming services – such as Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music – pay artists.
“I fully appreciate the dilemma surrounding streaming royalties that should be rightfully paid to all musicians and writers who made the music,” the Led Zep legend wrote on Instagram yesterday (10 December).
“The sooner the streaming companies can make fair payments to all musicians whose music is played on or viewed via the internet, and to pay fair royalties to those who give us great pleasure from those who are exploiting it, the better.”
In the parliamentary inquiry session held Tuesday (8 December), Chic guitarist and music industry veteran Nile Rodgers spoke about how the disparity between play counts and payment has to do with the NDAs between labels and streaming services.
According to Rodgers [per BBC], some record labels keep up to 82 per cent of royalties received from services like Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music.
Songwriter Fiona Bevan was another artist who spoke on Tuesday. She stated that for composing and singing on Disco, a No. 1 album by Kylie Minogue, she received only £100 in streaming royalties.
“One of the stats that the [Ivors Academy] have just published, is that eight out of 10 songwriters earn less than £200 a year from streaming,” she said. “So we have a big problem here and people don’t know why they’re getting so little.”
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