Meta has "excluded" the music repertoire by tens of thousands of Italian songwriters from Facebook, in a "shock move", as reported by MBW. The Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE) says that “Meta presented a ‘take it or leave it’ economic offer, threatening to remove the content if the offer was not accepted by SIAE”. SIAE didn’t accept this offer, so Meta “suddenly and unilaterally” started to remove its content.

Spotify has struck a major four-year sponsorship agreement with Barcelona worth $310 million. MBW calculated that in order for an artist to generate $310 million in recorded music royalties on the Spotify platform – at $0.00348 per-stream average rate – they would need to rack up a gigantic 89.08 billion plays on the service. No artist in the history of Spotify has ever, across their entire catalog, attracted that many plays. The most cumulative streams ever recorded by a single artist on Spotify is Drake with 62.84 billion.

TIDAL is planning to launch a user-centric royalties system for a new $19.99 HiFi Plus membership option, Music Business Worldwide reports. Starting in 2022, the music streaming service is planning to adopt what it calls a 'Fan-centered royalties' approach where royalties attributed to HiFi Plus subscribers will be paid based on their individual streaming activity as opposed to the industry-standard method of aggregating streams and paying out to artists from a pool at the end of a payment period. TIDAL has also launched monthly direct-to-artist payments, which will see a percentage of HiFi Plus subscribers' membership fees directed towards their top streamed artist. TIDAL was acquired by Jack Dorsey's fintech firm Square earlier this year for over $300 million.

Rolling Stone covers the story of R&B and disco star Johnnie Taylor whose family claims Sony hasn’t been transparent with royalty payments for his music. Music royalty manager Tim Langridge gives a simple albeit shocking explanation: "Nobody knows royalties; even people [who work in] royalties don’t understand it”. The system, he says, is “so convoluted and crazy so artists don’t understand it. Of course heirs don’t understand it, and most people in the music business don’t even understand it”.

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee of the UK parliament is calling for a "complete reset" of the market, with musicians given a "fair share" of the £736.5 million that UK record labels earn from streaming. In a report, they said royalties should be split 50/50, instead of the current rate, where artists receive about 16%, BBC reports. Musician Tom Gray, whose #BrokenRecord campaign prompted the inquiry, said "It feels like a massive vindication. They've really come to the same conclusions that we've been saying for a very long time".

Portishead have released their 2015 cover of ABBA’s 'SOS' exclusively on SoundCloud, utilizing SoundCloud’s “fan-powered royalty” system, whereby revenue from its streams is driven directly by the artist’s fan base, Variety reports. The fan-powered system means royalties from each listener’s subscription or advertising revenue are distributed to the artists they actually listened to.

MBW goes into some fun music math regarding Queen: the British rock band generated £41.95 million ($58.1 million) in 12 months prior to September 2020, with royalties amounting to £41.67 million ($57.7 million). In FY2019 (the 12 months to the end of September 2019), Queen Productions Ltd generated £72.77 million ($100.8m), of which £71.53 million ($99m) was from royalties. On the other hand, Hipgnosis Songs Fund takes 18 multiple as a reasonable reflection of the market value of gold-standard music publishing rights today. In the past three years, according to Queen Productions Ltd, the band’s rights have generated some £134.5 million ($186 million) in royalties. That’s an average across these three years of $62 million per annum. So, an 18 multiple on $62 million would make Queen’s royalty-bearing rights worth - $1.1 billion today.

The European independent music companies’ association proposed a 10-point plan to reform the streaming economy. IMPALA has some good ideas: higher payouts for longer songs; higher payouts for tracks that users specifically search for (as opposed to encountering them via playlists or radio); assuring there will be no features that recreate elements of payola; boost local repertoire and languages.

SoundCloud is introducing what it calls “fan-powered royalties” – its own branding of the user-centric royalties model – which it says will mean each SoundCloud listener’s subscription or advertising revenue is distributed among the artists that they listen to, rather than their plays being pooled, MBW reports. “Fan-powered” royalties will launch on SoundCloud on April 1, the platform suggests the move will “benefit rising independent artists with loyal fans”, and cites two independent artists currently operating on SoundCloud – Chevy and Vincent. Chevy currently has 12,700 followers on SoundCloud, Vincent has 124,000. By switching these artists to a “fan powered” model and away from ‘pro rata’, based on their recent playcounts on SoundCloud, the service estimates that Chevy’s monthly royalties will grow 217%, while Vincent’s will multiply by five, up from $120 to $600. Fingers crossed!

Spotify CEO and cofounder Daniel Ek said the company paid out $5 billion in royalties in 2020, Spotify reports. Chief content officer Dawn Ostroff announced that over the last four years, the number of recording artists whose catalogs generated more than $1 million a year across recording and publishing is up over 82% to more than 800 artists (the majority of money is still going to the labels), and the number generating more than $100,000 a year is up 79% to more than 7,500 artists. Spotify this week also announced that it will be introducing a hi-fi option later this year.