It’s a SPOTIFY and HIPGNOSIS special today.
The article I am referencing is from Music Business Worldwide.
NEW ROYALTY MODEL
There will be an annual stream count that artists must meet in order to start generating Spotify royalties.
Spotify is targeting a tiny proportion of tracks on its service that are very low in popularity.
In total, the tracks Spotify is targeting, generate royalties that when combined add up to tens of millions of dollars a year. If no action is taken, these tracks accumulated together will generate around $40 million.
SO WHAT HAPPENS TO THE $40 MILLION?
It will go back into Spotify’s ‘Streamshare’ royalty pot.
And the monies in the pot will be re-distributed amongst the tracks that are, more popular.
Take from the poor so that the rich get richer.
Spotify is telling the world that this targets the royalty payouts whose value is being destroyed or who are not even being paid to the creators because they haven’t met the digital aggregator minimum level for payments. And they are sitting in their bank accounts, earning interest.
Spotify seems to forget that every artist begins with low plays/streams.
MMM. SO THIS HELPS THE ARTISTS HOW
So while Spotify is thinking of keeping streaming money in their bank account to pay the larger artists, Hipgnosis who is an investment fund is doing something fishy.
As you probably are aware, Hipgnosis purchased a lot of rights to valuable intellectual properties. It’s share price doesn’t reflect what the company believes it’s worth.
It wanted to do something sneaky to inflate or boost its share price by selling a stake of the company to another entity owned by Hipgnosis and to use the profits of the sale to pay down debt.
This was all contingent on some mathematical equations about retroactive Copyright payments from the US.
Hipgnosis estimated they were due USD$21.7M however when all the dust settled they are only getting $9.9 million.
So they had this share but back scheme which they have now shelved and their share price went down even further.
All of these schemes and creative accounts on the backs of the rights they own from artists.
And Yes, I do know that the artists sold their rights to Hipgnosis for a large fee.
destroyerofharmony 
It’s an awful move by Spotify. This doesn’t just kneecap independent music, this beheads independents. It’s enough to have me considering making the jump to a different service, most of what I use streaming for is to check out underground stuff.
I feel so bad for the non-established current artists that rely on streams and all that stuff. This will make it even harder for them to get by now, besides ticket prices being ridiculous.