A New Year's gift from Mrs. Freeland

Angry Black, Spotify, Giant flow Musically, she just released the song “plogue” on Francofolies de La Rochelle.

Franco Montreal will undoubtedly be the next victim. That's not to say that Spotify is short on users (550 million, including 220 million premium subscribers) nor short on money ($14.6 billion in revenue), but when you're a giant, you don't allow your behavior to be dictated. for him. The French government just had the bad idea of ​​imposing a 1.2% tax on the revenue Spotify generates in France. The tax would raise about $22 million annually. Great for a platform like Spotify.

Here, the Ottawa government also wants to make the digital giants that have driven the audio-visual, music and newspaper industries into bankruptcy pay for themselves. This is what the federal government is seeking to do with new laws related to live broadcasting and online news. For now, only Google has capitulated, although the $100 million it promised and indexed each year is less than we had hoped.

At the last minute, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland decided to give the poor digital giants a small gift on the occasion of the New Year. She is the one who swore that they would be taxed at 3% on their Canadian income starting January 1^any January finally took pity on them. The tax in question has been postponed until the Greek calendars!

Fear of revenge

M^I Was Freeland afraid of retaliation? There is no doubt that following the French government's decision to impose this modest 1.2% tax, intended to support the National Center for Music, Spotify will no longer sponsor Francofolies and Printemps de Bourges, the festival that will celebrate its anniversary. The 47th anniversary is next April. But where does all the money Spotify makes go?

Despite massive growth in its subscribers and despite laying off 2,300 employees, Spotify will be in the red by about $150 million again this year. Its creator, Daniel Ek, clearly has eyes bigger than his stomach. It continues to make acquisitions and launch new products in order to neutralize competition, but is unable to reduce its marketing, administrative and research expenses. In the end, it is the performers and composers who suffer.

Monsieur Ek claims that it rewards artists more generously than all other music platforms, but this is not true. It pays them about the same as Amazon, less than Deezer and Apple, but it pays them a lot more than YouTube, the nastier giant.

it's incomprehensible

I tried to understand how major music platforms pay artists, but I couldn't. It's Kafkaesque complexity. Basically, let's say that out of $10 in revenue, they pay about 50 cents to the performer and $1 in royalties to the composer, but there are so many variables, determined by algorithms, at play that we can't trust that average.

To save a little, starting next Monday, Spotify artists and composers who don't produce 1,000 plays a year won't get a dime. Incidentally, the platform will provide approximately $55 million.

Anyway, Happy New Year, dear artists!