{"id":58701,"date":"2016-07-11T16:00:52","date_gmt":"2016-07-11T21:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whisnews21.com\/?p=58701"},"modified":"2016-07-11T16:00:52","modified_gmt":"2016-07-11T21:00:52","slug":"my-song-streamed-178-million-times-i-was-paid-5679","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/2016\/07\/11\/my-song-streamed-178-million-times-i-was-paid-5679\/","title":{"rendered":"My Song Streamed 178 Million Times I Was Paid $5,679"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MeghanTrainor001\"My Song Was Streamed 178 Million Times. I Was Paid $5,679<\/strong><\/h2>\n

If streaming is now worth billions of dollars, where\u2019s all the money going?<\/strong> That\u2019s now a serious question in light of information surrounding\u00a0Meghan Trainor\u2019s \u201cAll About That Bass,\u201d easily one of the top tracks across streaming platforms since its mid-2014 release. \u00a0Yet one of the song\u2019s key writers, Kevin Kadish<\/strong>, is making virtually zero\u00a0off of that success, despite a play count surpassing 178 million streams.<\/p>\n

\"Kevin<\/a>
Kevin Kadish<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kadish shared the figures during a copyright-focused discussion at Belmont University in Nashville this week, where The Tennessean was taking notes. \u00a0\u201cFor a song like \u2018All About That Bass,\u2019 that I wrote, which had 178 million streams,\u201d Kadish began, without specifying any streaming services. \u00a0\u201cI mean $5,679? That\u2019s my share. That\u2019s as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career and number one\u00a0in 78 countries.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut you\u2019re making $5,600.\u00a0How do you feed your family?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s the thing about groceries: you need to pay for them. \u00a0Yet Kadish\u2019s figures outline why this is essentially impossible on streaming platforms, paid or otherwise. \u00a0\u201cI\u2019ve never heard a songwriter complain about radio royalties as much as streaming royalties,\u201d Kadish continued.<\/p>\n

US Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia) led the proceedings, with\u00a0Representatives Darrell Issa (R-California), Blake Farenthold (R-Texas), Doug Collins (R-Georgia), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) in tow. \u00a0That Congressional posse is digging into music copyright ecosystem that seems to be rewarding major corporations and investors but doing little for artists, songwriters, producers, and others in the creative supply chain.<\/p>\n

Leading streaming companies like Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube typically respond to songwriter payout problems by pointing to big, top-level payouts. \u00a0Just yesterday, for example, Pandora pointed to cumulative\u00a0royalty payouts of$1.5 billion<\/strong>, yet songwriters and publishers are getting scraps. \u00a0Similarly, Spotify says it has paid more than $3 billion in cumulative royalties, but a large percentage of that money is getting hoarded by major labels without being distributed to artists.\u00a0This keeps coming up, over and over again. \u00a0Earlier this week, another successful artist, La Roux, pointed to a paltry payment of \u00a3100\u00a0for the past three months of streaming from Spotify. \u00a0\u201cLucky me!\u201d\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks for the\u00a0\u00a3100 for this quarter just gone, one more month and I might be able to afford YOUR premium service, La Roux tweeted.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, songwriters are a dying breed: according to data released by the Nashville Songwriters Association International in January, the number of actively-working songwriters in Nashville has plunged 80 percent since 2000<\/strong>. \u00a0And that doesn\u2019t even count the supporting cast of studio technicians, licensing administrators, producers, and session musicians that once earned solid salaries.<\/p>\n

– Digital Music News<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Song Was Streamed 178 Million Times. I Was Paid $5,679 If streaming is now worth billions of dollars, where\u2019s all the money going? That\u2019s now a serious question in light of information surrounding\u00a0Meghan Trainor\u2019s \u201cAll About That Bass,\u201d easily one of the top tracks across streaming platforms since its mid-2014 release. \u00a0Yet one of the song\u2019s key writers, Kevin Kadish, is making virtually zero\u00a0off of that success, despite a play count surpassing 178 million streams. Kadish shared the figures during a copyright-focused discussion at Belmont University in Nashville this<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":58702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58701"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}