IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cepnwp/hal-04286879.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Rethinking royalties - Alternative payment systems on music streaming platforms

Author

Listed:
  • Frederik Juul Jensen

    (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, CEPN - Centre d'Economie de l'Université Paris Nord - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Université Sorbonne Paris Nord)

Abstract

Music streaming changed the recorded music industry's business model from individual product sales to unlimited on-demand access subscriptions. The streaming platforms experienced strong growth during the 2010s and now drive most of the industry's revenue, up to 90% in the most mature markets. The payment system for rights holders has remained unchanged. Many industry stakeholders criticise the system's alleged unfairness, and artist organisations, independent labels and major labels all propose different ideas to 'fix' the music streaming payment system. The current 'Pro Rata' payment system pools all subscription fees, with each rights holder receiving a payment proportional to their share of the accumulated number of streams. The system does not look to align the individual users' payments with their actual musical preferences and consumption. Therefore, this paper defines the problem of the current music streaming payment system as its allocation of equal value on all streams. The paper proposes a framework to systematically evaluate alternative payment systems inspired by policy analysis and planning. It additionally contributes with a structured evaluation of six alternative payment systems that rethinks how streams are calculated and remunerated to restore the price discrimination between different listening behaviours. The paper finds that developing a mixture of the alternative systems can likely solve many of the current system's challenges.

Suggested Citation

  • Frederik Juul Jensen, 2023. "Rethinking royalties - Alternative payment systems on music streaming platforms," CEPN Working Papers hal-04286879, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:cepnwp:hal-04286879
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04286879v1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hal.science/hal-04286879v1/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Aguiar, Luis & Waldfogel, Joel, 2016. "Even the losers get lucky sometimes: New products and the evolution of music quality since Napster," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 1-15.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Marc Ivaldi & Ambre Nicolle & Frank Verboven & Jiekai Zhang, 2024. "Displacement and complementarity in the recorded music industry: evidence from France," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 48(1), pages 43-94, March.
    2. Alagöz, Nazli, 2024. "Promotion and technological change in the music industry," Other publications TiSEM 511ceba0-62a0-4c60-a76c-f, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    3. Alexander Cuntz & Carsten Fink & Hansueli Stamm, 2024. "Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property : An Economic Perspective," WIPO Economic Research Working Papers 77, World Intellectual Property Organization - Economics and Statistics Division.
    4. Essling, Christian & Koenen, Johannes & Peukert, Christian, 2017. "Competition for attention in the digital age: The case of single releases in the recorded music industry," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 26-40.
    5. Joel Waldfogel, 2017. "How Digitization Has Created a Golden Age of Music, Movies, Books, and Television," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 31(3), pages 195-214, Summer.
    6. T. Randolph Beard & George S. Ford & Gilad Sorek & Lawrence J. Spiwak, 2018. "Piracy, Imitation, and Optimal Copyright Policy," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 84(3), pages 815-830, January.
    7. Moreau, François & Wikström, Patrik & Haampland, Ola & Johannessen, Rune, 2024. "Alternative payment models in the music streaming market: A comparative approach based on stream-level data," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    8. Shinichi Yamaguchi, 2021. "The effect of online C2C markets on new-product-purchasing behavior: an empirical analysis of Japanese selling apps," SN Business & Economics, Springer, vol. 1(1), pages 1-21, January.
    9. Marc Bourreau & François Moreau & Patrik Wikström, 2022. "Does digitization lead to the homogenization of cultural content?," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 60(1), pages 427-453, January.
    10. Luis Aguiar & Imke Reimers & Joel Waldfogel, 2024. "Platforms and the transformation of the content industries," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(2), pages 317-326, March.
    11. Luis Aguiar & Joel Waldfogel, 2018. "Quality Predictability and the Welfare Benefits from New Products: Evidence from the Digitization of Recorded Music," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 126(2), pages 492-524.
    12. Aguiar, Luis & Martens, Bertin, 2016. "Digital music consumption on the Internet: Evidence from clickstream data," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 27-43.
    13. Daniel Kaimann & Ilka Tanneberg & Joe Cox, 2021. "“I will survive”: Online streaming and the chart survival of music tracks," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(1), pages 3-20, January.
    14. Savelkoul, Ruben, 2020. "Superstars vs the long tail: How does music piracy affect digital song sales for different segments of the industry?," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 50(C).
    15. Telang, Rahul & Waldfogel, Joel, 2018. "Piracy and new product creation: A Bollywood story," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 1-11.
    16. Christian Peukert & Margaritha Windisch, 2023. "The Economics of Copyright in the Digital Age," CESifo Working Paper Series 10687, CESifo.
    17. Joel Waldfogel, 2017. "The Random Long Tail and the Golden Age of Television," Innovation Policy and the Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 17(1), pages 1-25.
    18. Kevin J. Boudreau, 2018. "Amateurs Crowds & Professional Entrepreneurs as Platform Complementors," NBER Working Papers 24512, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Tobias Kretschmer & Christian Peukert, 2020. "Video Killed the Radio Star? Online Music Videos and Recorded Music Sales," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 31(3), pages 776-800, September.
    20. Johannes Loh, 2022. "Selection, Consumption, and New Music Exploration in an Online Social Network: A Dyadic Approach," CESifo Working Paper Series 10120, CESifo.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Recorded music industry digitisation business models; Recorded music industry; digitisation; business models;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:cepnwp:hal-04286879. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.