Here the people at the Future Of Music Coalition speak with Sharky Laguana of the band Creeper Lagoon about his recent piece entitled “Streaming Music is Ripping You Off” in which he criticizes streaming services for their use of the “Big Pool” method of royalty distribution.

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Is the idea that musicians should be allowed to participate fully in our country’s economy unrealistic? I hope not; though—barring the introduction of a completely new economy that treats musicians as valuable members of society­—I believe it will require a sea change. We will need to demystify the music industry and the nitty gritty of what it means to be a professional musician. We need: read more

“This industry really has to get its shit together not only to generate revenue, but to get money to those people who actually need it and deserve it,” Casey Rae, CEO of the artist-forward nonprofit Future Of Music Coalition, said at the opening panel on transparency and its relation to money. He then noted that the music industry had three flavors of transparency to grapple with: Structural, or the understanding of how services generate and pay out royalties; deal and terms transparency, which examines how contracts lay down the terms for music’s use and compensation; and repertoire, which deals with the data and information management systems that track the consumption and usage of music.

The Data Journalism That Wasn’t – The New York Times story about print v. digital publishing yesterday reminded me of this piece from the Future of Music Coalition, disputing the article, “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t,” which ostensibly relied on data provided by FMC.

Johnson’s piece, of course, rankled people who have devoted a lot of time to pondering this issue. The Future of Music Coalition penned a lengthy response to the article on their website, basically saying that statistics about wages do not take into account the widely varying amounts of success that people employed in the industry experience. Not everyone can be Kanye West but throwing a few people of his stature into the numbers paints a different picture than the reality faced by typical artists.

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