WASHINGTON — After years of hanging their heads or sitting on the sidelines as disruptive digital forces chipped away at the music industry’s bottom line, working-class musicians and songwriters are starting to embrace the power of banding together and agitating for change, whether it’s engaging lawmakers to influence policy or joining coalitions that will fight for their interests. At the Future of Music Coaltion’s 15th annual Music Policy Summit here, the unofficial theme that emerged was a need to organize and rally to bring about real changes in the way musicians and songwriters are compensated in an evolving industry. read more

As a result of the consent decrees, performers are typically paid much more than songwriters. That’s because performers are paid on an entirely different system, one based on direct deals negotiated between labels and the streaming services. Here’s a chart breaking down royalty splits by tech blogger Michael DeGusta for the ‘90s song “Low” by the band Cracker; you can see how small the slice has become for songwriters (in green).

Casey Rae, a musician and the CEO of advocacy group The Future of Music Coalition, describes the info here as “quite solid.” read more

And just as there are more avenues for consumers to pay for creative work, there are more ways to be compensated for making that work. Think of that signature flourish of 2000s-­era television artistry: the exquisitely curated (and usually obscure) song that signals the transition from final shot to the rolling credits. Having a track featured during the credits of ‘‘Girls’’ or ‘‘Breaking Bad’’ or ‘‘True Blood’’ can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to a songwriter. (Before that point, the idea of licensing a popular song for the credits of a television series was almost unheard-­of.) Video-­game budgets pay for actors, composers, writers and song licenses.

There are a number of reasons for the inaccessibility of this information, one of which is the frequent sale of individual works and entire catalogs and the infrequent recordation of these sales. Further, in recent years there has been a proliferation, particularly in pop music, of songs with many writers, each of whom generally owns a share of the work, making it difficult for potential licensees without great knowledge of music licensing to determine whose permission they need for a certain use. The Future of Music Coalition illustrated this point using a hit song by Flo Rida that had 13 writers who were represented by a total of 17 publishers.