This is really interesting. Thanks for doing this. Checked one of my favorite artists who I would think is a very minor player in all this, and who is pretty original (Keb' Mo'). If I am reading the results right, he has $7,059 – $16,345 at risk. Wow. I hope this is widely used by the artists to understand the situation. Again, great work imho (I know virtually nothing about the music industry).
When the Music Modernization Act passed in 2018... all US digital streaming mechanical royalties we're just held until the MLC was operational in 2021. So this is money owed from 2018 through 2026, it adds up.
Amazing! The only stream count we can find that is publicly available is Spotify, so we use it as a reference point in our calculation, and it's why we give a range. If they have heavy plays on a different streaming platform like Apple, we don't have a good way of finding that number.
The estimate range is our best guess for money specifically in the MLC, which is for US digital streaming mechanicals for all DSPs (Spotify, Apple, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon, etc.)
Cool, so not only do Spotify pay big record labels/artists more than smaller artists (because if I listen exclusively to artist X, my subscription money is paid across all streams globally on the platform, not just the artist I actually listened to) but then it double dips and those artists could be getting fucked over twice.
I agree with you that pro-rata streaming royalties are not ideal. DSPs like Deezer do have 'artist centric' royalty systems, which I think are great.
That being said, the MLC has been holding this money for 6 years, and by law (The Music Modernization Act 2018), they can't hold it forever, so they have to disperse it somehow. So the best thing for artists to do here is go register their songs so they get their money.
The code behind this is a whole AWS stack built as part of our larger infrastructure. It's not just a simple script, it's a full data pipeline. The MLC data is ~400GB of raw TSV data dropped on an FTP server every week, which we then process, index, make available internally for our tools. The Blackbox site is a frontend that leverages this infrastructure.
That being said, everything we use here, the MLC Bulk Data feed and the Spotify API are publicly available.
This is really interesting. Thanks for doing this. Checked one of my favorite artists who I would think is a very minor player in all this, and who is pretty original (Keb' Mo'). If I am reading the results right, he has $7,059 – $16,345 at risk. Wow. I hope this is widely used by the artists to understand the situation. Again, great work imho (I know virtually nothing about the music industry).
When the Music Modernization Act passed in 2018... all US digital streaming mechanical royalties we're just held until the MLC was operational in 2021. So this is money owed from 2018 through 2026, it adds up.
A note: nowhere in your post or the site (except the footer) is the “MLC” acronym expanded. I certainly didn’t know what it was before now.
Excellent point, I'll fix that.
I tried running an artist through who is a friend, with a few grand found. Will forward the link to her. Is this Spotify only? Thank you.
Amazing! The only stream count we can find that is publicly available is Spotify, so we use it as a reference point in our calculation, and it's why we give a range. If they have heavy plays on a different streaming platform like Apple, we don't have a good way of finding that number.
The estimate range is our best guess for money specifically in the MLC, which is for US digital streaming mechanicals for all DSPs (Spotify, Apple, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon, etc.)
Seems too good to be true (because it is).
I bet you're a blast at parties. Everything about this is publicly verifiable.
it’s true (ran a music company)
Cool, so not only do Spotify pay big record labels/artists more than smaller artists (because if I listen exclusively to artist X, my subscription money is paid across all streams globally on the platform, not just the artist I actually listened to) but then it double dips and those artists could be getting fucked over twice.
Wow, streaming is great.
I agree with you that pro-rata streaming royalties are not ideal. DSPs like Deezer do have 'artist centric' royalty systems, which I think are great.
That being said, the MLC has been holding this money for 6 years, and by law (The Music Modernization Act 2018), they can't hold it forever, so they have to disperse it somehow. So the best thing for artists to do here is go register their songs so they get their money.
Not really any indication that you are collecting data for your own usage. No source code at least?
On that note, would it really be hard to use my own deployment of your app to check against the datasources your deployment uses?
The code behind this is a whole AWS stack built as part of our larger infrastructure. It's not just a simple script, it's a full data pipeline. The MLC data is ~400GB of raw TSV data dropped on an FTP server every week, which we then process, index, make available internally for our tools. The Blackbox site is a frontend that leverages this infrastructure.
That being said, everything we use here, the MLC Bulk Data feed and the Spotify API are publicly available.
https://www.themlc.com/bulk-database-feed ($100 sign up fee and $25/mo)