This piece was originally published in the September 2024 issue of Pandora Curated.
For years, songwriters have been fighting an uphill battle. The explosion of streaming platforms has turned the music industry on its head, but for many creators, that hasn’t translated into fair compensation. While the hits they craft rake in billions of streams globally, the pennies per stream model leaves many wondering: “Where’s the money?” Artists are often left in the dark about what they’re truly owed.
Enter TIDAL, an artist-first, fan-centred music streaming service, known for its high-quality audio and dedication to artist empowerment. While platforms like Spotify may dominate the conversation, TIDAL has carved a niche by focusing on transparency and support for those at the heart of the music industry.
The service was sold in 2015 to Project Panther Ltd, a company owned by the American rapper and businessman Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter. After the acquisition, stars such as Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kanye West, Madonna, Alicia Keys and Nicki Minaj became its co-owners, intending to foster artist-friendly procedures and a fairer royalties system.
These celebrity stakeholders contributed to creating awareness about TIDAL as a platform that is focused on musicians’ welfare with better quality content, and with better revenue share compared to the other existing services. The second change happened in April 2021 when TIDAL was sold to Square (now Block, Inc.), a company owned by Jack Dorsey who planned on transforming it into a music-financial technology firm.
Now, they’re going a step further with a new service aimed directly at songwriters: a royalty management tool designed to give creators more control and insight into their revenue.
This tool intends to offer songwriters some control and visibility over the revenue earned from streaming. TIDAL aims to improve transparency for songwriters since this has been noted as a weakness in the music industry, a frequent complaint filed by artists, who feel overlooked.
Along with suggesting earnings for individual songs, albums, territories, and time, this new service provides songwriters with real-time insights into streams and their respective royalties.. The platform further breaks down the payment structure of royalties from various revenue sources such as performance rights organisations (PROs), mechanical royalties, and digital streaming royalties to demystify the complexities of royalties. In so many ways, the service assists songwriters in improving their financial planning.
Songwriters and artists alike have previously lamented not receiving their fair share of income generated from their work. Those under traditional deals often sign away large sections of their publishing rights to receive advances or deal terms with publishers, labels, or intermediaries, entitled to the majority of income emanating from a hit song. Songwriters are left with only the crumbs of what they were initially owed.
A prominent example is Taylor Swift, who has been vocal about songwriters' challenges in retaining ownership. One of her most famous battles involves her record masters, where she criticised how the entirety of her early music catalogue was sold without her consent. In this case, Swift didn’t have the rights to her recordings, meaning she wasn’t fully compensated for the streams or the usage of her songs.
In 2014, Swift also pulled her music from Spotify, criticising the platform's free tier, which she felt devalued the work of songwriters and artists by offering low per-stream payouts. She later penned an open letter to Apple Music, protesting their policy of not paying artists during users' free trial periods.
With the shift in the music industry from physical music sales to video and audio streaming, the world of royalty payments has become even murkier. Instead of a fixed payment per sales unit, streaming royalties are paid per play, and then divided again between various parties including the songwriter, performer, publisher, and label. Because of this process, songwriters may find it difficult to verify how much they are being owed, and if and when they might be paid.
Streaming services have also been criticised for the overall rate paid per stream. Apps like Spotify, Apple Music, etc. have enabled billions of streams to be generated daily. However, individual artists and songwriters get paid only a few cents for each stream. Many are saying that the low per-stream payment is not a sustainable solution for most creators who exclusively write songs and use it as a source of income.
Tools such as TIDAL's new royalty management tool are vital for songwriters to improve the playing field. With access to consistent, detailed, and transparent data, TIDAL's tool promises songwriters the ability to hold platforms, pubs, and all respective stakeholders accountable for proper payment. It offers the ability to negotiate a more favourable deal with a publisher or collect other sources of earnings they didn't know were available.
TIDAL’s new tool offers hope to songwriters, giving them the transparency, control, and accountability they have long demanded, perhaps finally shifting the balance of power in their favour.
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