Congressional agents Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman presented the proposed Living Wage for Musicians Act on Thursday, targeted at increasing streaming royalties for artists online.
The resolution, produced in collaboration with the United Musicians and Allied Workers union, calls “for financial justice and fairness in streaming,” a release from Tlaib’s workplace checks out.
Per the release, the act “would develop a brand-new streaming royalty, with the objective to compensate artists and artists more relatively at a cent per stream when their music plays on streaming services.”
The report goes on to state that streaming has actually grown to represent 84 percent of documented music market profits, however that Spotify, the leading music streaming platform, just pays a typical per-stream royalty of $0.003, indicating an artist needs to reach 800,000 regular monthly streams to equate to a full-time $15/hour task.
The proposed brand-new royalty would be paid in addition to existing royalties, making sure that artists get a minimum of one cent per stream with an ultimate cap on the quantity of possible revenue each month. The extra payments would be moneyed by means of a tax on the streaming platforms’ non-subscription earnings and a little boost to the expense of music streaming memberships.
Tlaib, an agent of Detroit, stated in a declaration that her city’s artists “have actually altered the music market and our culture in many unbelievable methods. It’s just best that individuals who develop the music we like get their reasonable share, so that they can prosper, not simply make it through.”
Bowman, an agent of the Bronx in New York and creator of the Congressional Hip-Hop Task Force, included that “it is unconscionable that in order to purchase a cup of coffee, an artist requires somebody to stream their tune over a thousand times. Artists and artists throughout the nation are worthy of to be spent for their work.”
Tlaib and Bowman formerly collaborated in 2022 when they presented a comparable resolution requiring financial justice and fairness in streaming.