On the flipside, my father passed away this time last year and his favourite pub the month after. We looked it up on Google Streetview recently and there he was, immortalised stood out front of the pub with a pint in hand.
Waze doesn't seem to allow you to specify whether you're a trade vehicle or not so it keeps routing trade vehicles into Regents (and the other Royal) Park which they are prohibited from and liable to be fined.
A lot of the new players (~past decade) are VC funded and/or starting off in a highly saturated market, needing to landgrab as many artists & labels as possible to establish themselves. So they end up prioritising marketing their service via slick onboarding, PR campaigns, unsustainable offers (see Stem) and cash advances. A couple years down the line they usually fall short of their core model or pivot, as you say, dialling up the cost of the service.
Always enjoy seeing services tout the 'keep 100% of your royalties' when they pipe everything through a third party like CI who take a percentage upfront.
Yes I've seen a handful of services across the years with the "sustainable, fair and innovative" USP, often run by volunteers and withering out after a short time. I'm not too sure on the potential of these as they end up being top heavy, with more artists and labels onboard than paying customers / fans. The only people that seem to have got this balance right is Bandcamp, at the cost of 15% of your revenue.
I've dealt with a distributor who have been around for decades (physical & digital) and sit under the radar, not focussed on growth, soley relying on word of mouth referrals with high profile, revenue generating clients for years. They're not the cheapest on %age, but are reliable, transparent and are well respected for the curation of clients (no open door policy) so as with everything - you get what you pay for. So they do exist, but you won't hear them shouting their own name.
As for labels, I know of plenty who offer a fair deal for artists who end up staying with them in the long term. It's just the bad apples, usually the majors, who have the leverage to offer unscrupulous deals which all comes out in the press when the artists realise how bad the deal was years down the line and they're contracted in for another 10 years.
They're not, but I don't see how it being non-profit would make a difference to the problems you're suggesting. You can be for-profit and still have a sustainable, fair and innovative model.
By marketing I mean marketing themselves as a service, not marketing the music they handle.
If you retain your ISRCs and UPCs when moving from one distributor to another, links and stream counts will remain as is.
Surely that's an issue solved by the market, if there is a distributor that is reliable & fairly priced then people will move to use and stay with them. I think the current issue is that a lot of the big name distributors are marketers first, distributors second.
No it doesn't, Spotify provides line-level accounting for every stream to the rightsholders. What they then do to account to artists could be anything.
They probably took one look at the iTunes style guide.
From the article;
The most impactful way we can improve the experience of delivering music to Spotify for as many artists and labels as possible is to lean into the great work our distribution partners are already doing to serve the artist community. Over the past year, we’ve vastly improved our work with distribution partners to ensure metadata quality, protect artists from infringement, provide their users with instant access to Spotify for Artists, and more.
The best way for us to serve artists and labels is to focus our resources on developing tools in areas where Spotify can uniquely benefit them — like Spotify for Artists (which more than 300,000 creators use to gain new insight into their audience) and our playlist submission tool (which more than 36,000 artists have used to get playlisted for the very first time since it launched a year ago). We have a lot more planned here in the coming months.