Introduction
INTRODUCTION “Forty years ago, co-writing a song with Ringo Starr would have provided me a house and a pool. Now, estimating a hundred thousand plays on Spotify, we guessed we’d split about eighty dollars,”! explains world-renowned composer, songwriter, and musician Van Dyke Parks. In a "#$% op-ed, Parks describes heading up to Ringo Starr’s home and spending two straight days working on a song together.& For the sake of argument, let’s say that they each spent two typical workdays—eight hours per day—on the song. Splitting the aforementioned eighty dollars, which Parks later describes as “optimistic”' because Spotify typ- ically pays a fraction of a cent per play, would result in a payment of forty dollars each for sixteen hours of work, or $ “Van Dyke Parks on How Songwriters Are Getting Screwed in the Digital Age,” Daily Beast, updated July $", "#$(. " Ibid. ) Ibid. IntR odU ctI on · 13 *".+# per hour. For comparison, US federal minimum wage in "#$% was *(."+/hour., Songwriters are not usually paid by the hour, though that might be more lucrative than how they typically get paid. Sometimes, they don’t get paid at all. When it is deemed di-cult to trace a song back to its copyright owners, royal- ties end up in what the industry has termed a “black box.”. /e royalties never reach the owners of the copyright so the streaming services, or whoever is attempting to pay the roy- alties, can keep the owed money inde0nitely. Further, the US Copyright O-ce allowed for bulk-0ling of the necessary forms to claim that the owner of the copyright was too di-cult to discern or 0nd, which gave streaming services an easy out from having to 0nd the rights’ owners.1 /ese services would 0le thousands of claims at once to avoid having to search for the rights holders to pay when songs from their catalogs were streamed.
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