Latest / The Price of Music / Morrissey, Mazzy Star, and, erm, Bonnie Tyler: selling The Smiths’ songs, and the truth on music streaming royalties – do artists REALLY get such a bad deal?

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Morrissey, Mazzy Star, and, erm, Bonnie Tyler: selling The Smiths’ songs, and the truth on music streaming royalties – do artists REALLY get such a bad deal? · The Price of Music

0:07
Hello and welcome to The Price of Music, brought to you by
0:10
Music Ally, the show that's fascinated by all the fun and
0:13
games and finances of the music world as explained each week by
0:17
me, Steve Lemack and him, Stuart Dredge.
0:19
If you want an easy guide to what's going on in the music biz
0:23
and how it all works, and one or two revealing stats along the
0:27
way, then here we are. This week, as promised, we will
0:31
be spending a bit of time on one of our listeners questions.
0:35
Which, well, it begs the question whether against the
0:38
sometimes overriding narrative, whether some artists are
0:41
actually much better off in the streaming era than they would
0:45
have been in the heyday of vinyl and CD sales.
0:49
We'll also be asking how much it would cost to buy a bit of The
0:52
Smiths. But first, as always, we'll
0:55
start with a big figure. Well, a big figure and a much
0:58
smaller but still significant stat, both of which are to be
1:01
found in a new report published last week.
1:03
The big figure, and I'm not going to inject any fake
1:06
suspense here because Stuart already knows this one.
1:09
I'll just tell you the big figure is £6.68 billion, which
1:17
is the total consumer spend on live music across the UK in
1:23
2024. This according to the annual
1:27
report from Live, which is of course the live music industry
1:30
trade body, £6.68 billion, which is it's a new record for
1:37
spending on live music and it's been helped along the way by by
1:41
the pop music market. Of all, there's a breakdown of
1:44
genres and of all the genres of music, pop music was the biggest
1:49
hitter in 2024, driven by the likes of, well, Taylor Swift
1:54
obviously, but also charged Xex and Dua Lipa.
1:57
So pop music accounted for 32.1% of the live spend total.
2:04
That's the big figure. The smaller one, and we actually
2:07
alluded to this in one of our Patreon only pilots, which we
2:11
did a little while ago, but the smaller number is 137, which is
2:17
I can ask you this one Stuart 137 refers to. 1 gig being held
2:24
every 137 seconds in the UK last year, yeah. 1 gig every 137
2:31
seconds. I mean, you've actually gone for
2:33
most of them, yeah. Not not even I'm that prolific,
2:37
but yeah, what a year. I mean, the the report in
2:39
general, I mean the top line obviously much like last year is
2:42
the appetite for live music, especially at stadium and arena
2:46
level is, you know, that's more healthy than ever.
2:50
I mean, certainly the turnover is up, but set again, this, if
2:54
you dig into the report, it does also go on to reiterate that
2:59
these are still very challenging times for the grassroots live
3:03
music scene, for venues and promoters, artists at that level
3:08
and independent festivals as well for I mean, obviously for
3:12
all the reasons which we have touched on previously on this
3:15
show. Just one other thing for now, in
3:18
terms of geographical spread, London is still the leading city
3:22
for live music spends. I think it's doubt, I think it's
3:26
lost some of its percentage lead though.
3:29
But London's still the major place for live music, followed
3:33
by the rest of the top five. Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham
3:38
and Cardiff are the top five places where people spend money
3:42
on live music. And that's that's your numbers
3:45
for this week. We picked just one news story
3:48
this week before we go to any other business because we
3:51
couldn't not mention this. Morrissey is, you may have seen
3:54
this story. Morrissey is putting his
3:56
business interests in The Smiths up for sale.
3:59
So what's what's actually on offer, and how much is a piece
4:04
of The Smiths worth? Morrissey's piece of The Smiths?
4:08
What do we think that will eventually fetch?
4:12
Yeah, well, I suppose to say what happened, in case anyone
4:14
hasn't followed this, it was a blog post, wasn't it, on his
4:17
website. I think you've got this section,
4:19
messages from Morrissey. So from the horse's mouth.
4:22
Not that he would thank me for that.
4:25
And yeah, he said Morrissey has no choice but to offer for sale
4:28
all of his business interests in The Smiths, and it listed them.
4:31
So it's the name, all the artwork, which obviously he
4:34
created, merchandising rights, songs, synchronisation rights,
4:40
recordings and contractual rights.
4:42
So basically what he's saying is he's going to sell all his share
4:45
because obviously Johnny Marr has his share of The Smiths and
4:47
all the songs and recordings. But yeah, and he's basically
4:50
saying to any interested bidders and at the end of this blog
4:54
post, there's an there's a Gmail address to, to contact.
4:58
Any serious investors should make contact.
5:00
And a lot of the coverage of this announcement was pointing
5:03
out that it's not the most serious way to sell a catalog is
5:06
to say e-mail this Gmail address.
5:09
But that's happened. And there's some stuff in there
5:11
about how he's he's he's burnt out by his connections to the
5:14
rest of the band. I've had enough of malicious
5:16
associations. It's quite, it's a little bit
5:18
teenagery, dare I say. And I guess this all this all
5:22
comes as a package I imagine. Do you have to buy the the whole
5:26
job lot? Which is it sounds like, yeah,
5:28
he wants to sell the mortal thing.
5:30
I mean, in theory, maybe you could go in and say make an
5:33
offer, but. But yeah, so it made it.
5:35
Well, it made, but us both think, didn't it?
5:37
How much might he get? Because we've spent the last
5:39
year and a half covering these news stories about Queen Pig,
5:43
Floyd Doe Barry, like how much those big rock catalogues are
5:46
worth. So.
5:47
So I've, I've been thinking about it and digging into it and
5:51
it's, it's really fascinating. Like the, the things you do when
5:53
you try and estimate the value of music catalog.
5:55
It's quite a set, a set formula in a way or a set process.
5:59
So you look at past performance, you look at how many sales, how
6:02
many streams, what kind of radio play, you look at the money it's
6:06
been making until now. But you also model forward, you
6:09
model it's future performance. And that's something that
6:12
streaming has had quite a big impact on because you can model
6:14
streaming like unless you do something so terrible that you
6:18
get immediately cancelled by everyone, streaming is quite
6:22
stable. Like if you're doing, I don't
6:24
know, 500 million streams a year now, you'll probably do that
6:27
next year. It might go up a bit.
6:28
It's not going to suddenly drop a Cliff.
6:30
So you can look forward and say, right, I think in the next three
6:32
to five years, this is how many streams it will get, how much
6:34
money it will make. So you do that, you compare it.
6:38
So you sort of say, what did Queen do their catalog for?
6:40
What did, what did Stuart sell his for?
6:42
You try and look for comparable bands or comparable artists and
6:46
say, right, what did they go for?
6:47
Because then you can go out and say, well, we want that kind of
6:50
multiples of work. We want that kind of that much
6:53
times how much money we're making and look, this very
6:56
similar thing solved for this much.
6:57
So we're asking for this and then you look at things like,
7:00
can you, can you do more with it?
7:02
So look at an artist's catalog and go, is it being
7:05
underexploited and you're not getting any good sync deals in
7:07
TV ads or films? Or is it not being promoted on
7:11
streaming sales as well? Can I, do you think you can do
7:13
more with it? So that's the kind of the
7:14
unrealised potential. And then you look at other
7:18
factors or problems or barriers, which with The Smiths, there's
7:21
one obvious one, which is that Mara and Morrissey don't get on
7:23
at all. And so a lot of these things
7:27
about what more could we do the catalog until now you've been
7:30
like, well, do we need to get both of them to agree?
7:33
In which case it's a problem. So you look at all these things
7:35
and that's how you, you kind of come to a some kind of figure.
7:37
So I was looking at, I mean, it's a bit hard to get, but
7:41
they, they, the band sold somewhere between 4 and 5
7:44
million albums in their career. I think they've got a couple of
7:46
sources saying that they've got nearly 21 million monthly
7:49
listens on Spotify, which was quite, I was quite surprised at
7:52
that. Like that's, that's a big tone.
7:53
Not that, you know, not because I don't like The Smiths, but as
7:57
we discussed last week, but that's kind of, you know, a
7:59
decent amount for a pound of that milk.
8:01
And like with a back of the napkin mass, maybe they're make
8:05
their catalogues making somewhere between $5,000,000 and
8:09
$10 million a year now perhaps. And then maybe you'd look at the
8:13
multiple, OK, So what times that is the value of it.
8:16
If you got 10 times that, it might be worth between $50
8:19
million and $100 million. If you've got 15 times that,
8:22
it's 75 million * 50 million. But that's the whole catalog,
8:25
not just Morrissey's share. Yeah, so you're looking at his
8:28
share. So I mean, I was looking at some
8:30
of the figures for like Queen, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan,
8:32
the big hitters. It basically boils down to, I
8:36
don't know if you're Morrissey, you might be able to get like
8:38
$20 million, even $30 million for your share of The Smiths.
8:41
And then that is, we're not even talking about the other stuff,
8:44
the naming rights, the artwork, the the merchandise.
8:47
So it's 10s of millions of dollars that that he could get
8:50
in a sale. The other thing is
8:53
unpredictables. And I was thinking, actually, I
8:55
was watching the the Radio 2 concert at the weekend.
8:58
They had the big concert in Chelmsford and Sophie Ellis
9:00
Bexter was playing and she was doing medical on dance floor,
9:03
you know, to a whole crowd singing along.
9:05
And I suddenly thought it could. If she'd been selling her
9:07
catalog in the summer of 2023, it would have had a certain
9:11
value based on the stream that. But then that November Saltburn
9:14
came out and Murder on the Dance Floor went viral.
9:17
And her whole her career has streams instead of a notch.
9:19
And if she was selling a catalog now, it'd be worth a lot more.
9:22
And no one would have predicted that.
9:24
So that's the other thing is something could happen with this
9:26
myth. They could be, I don't know.
9:28
You basically need a film with someone dancing around naked in
9:30
a closing scene and and Prophet and cease.
9:35
And then and then the problems, like I think the other thing is
9:37
the other thing that can happen is a band who aren't together
9:40
can reunite. So Oasis is the obvious example.
9:43
Their streams went up a lot when they reunited.
9:45
The big spike in that, and that's made their catalog more
9:48
valuable. Are The Smiths going to reunite?
9:51
I mean, we could probably, let's make a face on whether we think
9:54
we're going to reunite ever. If I mean, if anything, surely
9:57
this it's the final nail in the coffin, isn't it, in the
10:01
relationship between Morrissey and Ma?
10:04
Let me. Well, do you remember?
10:07
I mean, this was around the time we first started this podcast.
10:10
Wasn't there a massive falling out between Hall and Oates when
10:14
one of them sold part their share of Hall and Oates?
10:18
Because all of a sudden when this goes through now we've got
10:21
no idea who's going to buy Morrissey's share of The Smiths.
10:26
But whoever is, and it might be, might be a record label could be
10:29
a hedge fund, couldn't it? And then and so Johnny Moore
10:33
will own half The Smiths and somebody not relate unrelated to
10:37
The Smiths will own the other half of The Smiths, which that's
10:40
it think is is is quite uncomfortable for some
10:43
musicians. Although if you're Johnny Maher,
10:46
maybe it's more comfortable than Morrissey and the other half
10:49
because I'm interested thing like, like everything you want
10:51
to do with the catalog now, apart from people just listen to
10:53
it regularly. You need the people who own it
10:55
to agree. And, and it's, I mean, do you
10:57
remember we covered that story, I think when Morrissey said that
11:00
Johnny Maher was going to tour without him with someone else
11:03
and he registered the trademarks.
11:04
And I think Mark said, no, I did that because people were abusing
11:07
them. And I tried to get in touch with
11:09
Morrissey to say, let's sort this out.
11:10
And he didn't reply. So that gave him some of how
11:13
hard it's been for them to work together.
11:15
So in a way this could. And the other thing I was
11:18
thinking was I don't know if Johnny Mayer has any interest in
11:20
doing this, but Johnny Mayer could go to some investors and
11:23
say, look, will you get the will you help me raise the cash to
11:26
buy Morrissey out? If Morrissey would sell to MA
11:29
and and bring it all under one person who is the the Co founder
11:32
of The Smiths. So in a way that might be the
11:35
most positive outcome of this. If it if Johnny Marr was somehow
11:39
able to own it all and then he can do stuff and he can kind of
11:42
keep the legacy going and not have to worry about some hedge
11:44
fund coming in with ideas. So there's been no report of him
11:49
saying he's going to do that. But it certainly feels like in
11:53
the same way that Taylor Swift brought back her Master
11:55
recordings, artists can be the bidders.
11:58
It doesn't have to just be investors.
12:00
But I mean, I want to come back to the kind of the the way it
12:03
was presented. Because if you want to sell your
12:05
catalog, you get some advisors in who know the onions and you
12:09
get them to shop it around and you get them to start a bidding.
12:12
More ideally, you want a couple of people competing to drive the
12:14
price up. What you putting a, putting A
12:17
blog post out saying I am so sad.
12:20
Here's a Gmail address. That's not the traditional way
12:23
of selling a catalog. And so that is the question I
12:26
think investors will be, might be asking.
12:27
So is that, how serious is he about this?
12:30
Is this something I should spend time and diligence on
12:32
investigating? But could be 10s of $1,000,000.
12:37
And yeah, I, I kind of, I kind of would like, I would love to
12:39
see it end up in the hands of Johnny Ma or his partners so
12:44
that it's, you know, so that that legacy carries on rather
12:47
than, like you say, could be anyone owning it.
12:49
And then you have worries. Yeah, okay.
12:52
That's the price of The Smiths, right?
12:56
We will have obviously more news next week.
12:58
We'll have lots of it, I suspects, by then.
13:00
But for the rest of this episode, as promised a few weeks
13:04
ago now, we had an inquiry come in from listener Simon Hemorrich
13:09
and which I mean we thought was worth a chunk of time because it
13:12
is an interesting point which we wanted to analyse properly.
13:16
And it was this Simon's observation.
13:19
Thank you Simon for your e-mail which said hi there.
13:22
I love the pod. Thank you very much.
13:24
I listened to it in the gym as it's much more interesting than
13:27
high energy house music. Right.
13:28
Stop right there. Let's discuss this for 10
13:30
minutes, because I think this is a good endorsement.
13:32
Yeah, I mean, we are. I mean, we're much more
13:34
interesting on a treadmill than high energy house music running
13:39
to try and get away from us. I have a question, said Simon.
13:42
That I can hope that's I hope you can help me with.
13:45
Artists claim that music doesn't pay as well as it used to
13:50
because of streaming, but for many artists, surely the
13:54
opposite is true. Bonnie Tyler, for instance, has
13:58
15,000,000 listens per month on Spotify, and I guess that means
14:02
about 60 million, say, across all streaming platforms.
14:05
If she gets £800 per million plays, that's £48,000 a month.
14:12
To get that amount from actual album sales she would have had
14:16
to have sold about she'd had to sell 50,000 albums a month, or
14:21
600,000 a year. Now there's no way, Sir Simon,
14:24
that Bonnie would be selling that many copies in 2025,
14:28
whether streaming existed or not.
14:31
Her career peaked 45 years ago, he adds.
14:35
Similarly, Mazzy Star, the band Mazzy Star have 12 million
14:40
monthly Spotify listens. That must be earning them more
14:44
in a year than they ever got from their albums, which barely
14:47
made the Top 40 in the mid 90s. So, he concludes, is it not the
14:52
case that some artists are earning a far better living from
14:56
their music because of streaming?
14:59
Stuart, where would you like to start?
15:02
Because there's quite a lot to this and varying opinions which
15:06
I think you've been canvassing. That's it.
15:09
Yeah. So basically, I, I, I pulled a
15:10
leaf out of your book and talked to my secret sources.
15:14
So one of whom knows a lot about the artist's side of streaming
15:17
and label contracts, and then one from the label side who
15:20
knows about from that point of view.
15:21
So, and they're both, they both gave me quite full responses to
15:24
Simon's question. I guess the short answer is yes,
15:29
like some artists are doing much better thanks to streaming.
15:32
And part of that is because, yeah, you get paid when people
15:34
listen to music now, not just when they buy it.
15:37
So in the old, in the old, in the old times, you'd make a lot
15:40
of money from sales of your CD album when it came out and they
15:43
drop off because everyone had it.
15:45
So that's the change. And it's correct.
15:47
And both my sources agree with that saying, yes, people are
15:50
some people are doing better. But then you get into the real
15:53
nub of this question, which is what you get paid and what you
15:56
get paid depends on your deal, your deals with, your label,
16:00
with your publisher. And that's where none of us know
16:03
what Bonnie Tyler's deal is. None of us know what Mazzy
16:05
Star's deal is. So it's all speculation from the
16:07
outside unless they talk about it.
16:10
But both my sources, actually, they, they politely took issue
16:14
with some of Simon's calculations.
16:15
And I think to go back to it, they said you have Bonnie Tyler
16:19
getting £800 per million streams.
16:21
They both said they both had a disagree with that.
16:26
So what they said was the label source said, yeah, this is based
16:29
on the artist getting a modern digital master Roger rate of 25%
16:33
roughly. So getting 25% of all the
16:35
streaming revenue and being a songwriter and then for all the
16:39
money to flow through accurately and fully and there being no
16:42
unrecute balances or other costs to be deducted.
16:46
And they added, what could possibly go wrong?
16:49
Yeah, so and and then my, my artist contact said the same
16:53
thing. Said Simon is assuming Bonnie is
16:54
getting around 24% on a deal, 24% of the streaming royalties.
16:58
And they said as her deal was signed in the late 1970s and the
17:02
point of signing it was probably closer to 5%.
17:05
And whether or not it's gotten higher now is down to how her
17:08
career has been managed. And that is something both both
17:12
said, this idea of a deal with an artist from that era would
17:16
have been much lower than 24% of royalties and they may have
17:19
renegotiated it since. But that that depends on a whole
17:22
range of factors. And actually my label converted
17:25
the same thing. A lot of artists in the 70s and
17:26
80s were on single digit royalty deals.
17:29
So you would get less than 10%. So and then we've got this whole
17:32
area of recruitment of depending how much advances you label paid
17:35
you, whether you've paid them back, you might not be seeing
17:36
any money from streaming. So yeah, so that's the thing.
17:41
That's where we don't know either in the making in this
17:45
case. But this holds out the thought
17:48
that some artists are still on those deals with single digit
17:51
royalties and maybe not recruit doing terribly from streaming.
17:55
And some artists have renegotiated, they're on good
17:58
modern royalty rates and they're doing well because they meet
18:01
Scott. And then my level of contact
18:02
summarise it saying, look, there are artists who make a better
18:04
living from streaming than from sales back in the day.
18:07
Here's the caveat. If they're continually played.
18:10
So if people are playing the music, if they have good
18:13
partners, paying fully and accurately under decent deal
18:16
terms, and that's what it comes down to.
18:18
And then my artist. Conte added that catalogues
18:22
generates the vast amount of incoming streaming.
18:24
But whether or not artists benefit is always the question.
18:27
So again, separating this idea of lots of money being paid out
18:30
with whether that's going through to those artists.
18:34
That's that's yeah, that's what. So that's interesting just
18:37
before we move on to the next part of the answer.
18:40
That means it sort of adds weight to the maybe to the fact
18:44
that artists, any artist who's renegotiated their deal and is
18:49
on a better percentage now, that surely means that back in the
18:54
day that undermines the argument as well.
18:56
Well, it's not doesn't undermine, it actually enforces
18:58
Simon's argument that, you know, they're making more money now.
19:01
Because if they were only on, you know, 8%, nine percent
19:04
royalty, even if they were selling 1,000,000 millions of
19:07
albums, they were still, they weren't getting as much money as
19:10
I'd imagined. Because that single figure
19:13
royalty rate, which you say from the 70s and 80s, that means they
19:16
weren't, they weren't possibly making the money that I thought
19:20
some of the big artists might have been making.
19:22
Well, that's it. And the pen, you know, obviously
19:24
some artists were selling huge amounts of albums.
19:27
But it's weird to me, talk about Bonnie Tyler, because when I was
19:30
a kid, when I was doing my dad played, he had the Bonnie and
19:33
Meatloaf album. I don't know if that ever came
19:35
onto your CD player. Never on my radar.
19:38
But like he played that a lot in the car and a lot of people
19:41
bought a lot of dads bought that album.
19:43
You know that I were of was that peak CD was Dire Straits
19:47
Meatloaf those that they were selling so much.
19:50
But also, I mean the other thing that what my artist source
19:52
pointed out was radio is a factor in this.
19:53
So someone like Bonnie Tyler was huge on commercial radio in her
19:57
heyday, but she's still there's all these classic radio and
20:00
these hit stations now that would still she's still played a
20:02
lot. And there where that gets
20:05
complicated is OK, how much were they making from radio back in
20:09
the day? How much they're making now.
20:11
And if streaming is taking over from radio, which is a whole
20:14
other show to discuss. But if as streaming gets bigger.
20:18
If radio gets smaller, the way you get paid for those two
20:21
things is different. We talked about this for you.
20:23
An artist gets a bigger share of their radio royalties than they
20:25
do with the streaming royalties. So if you're an artist who was
20:27
big on radio, the rise of streaming may be good for you in
20:31
terms of your royalties from that, but it may also be
20:33
cannibalising some of your radio royalties and that has to be
20:35
factored in. And yeah, the other thing I had
20:39
actually my label contact had some feedback on Simon's Mazi
20:41
Starr question because he pointed out actually he he was
20:44
saying, well, they they only barely cracked the Top 40.
20:47
But in the US in the 1990s, barely crack in the Top 40 was a
20:51
few million album sales. So some of the bands that didn't
20:55
have big chart positions still did sell millions of albums back
20:59
then. I should, I was thinking I
21:01
should ask my boss Paul about this because he was in the
21:03
Sundays. And there I think of them as a
21:05
similar band to Mazy Star in terms of their US profile.
21:09
I looked at their, I looked at their Wikipedia, which I like to
21:11
do. And I think they, they they had
21:14
a couple of just about Top 40 albums in the States, but they
21:17
both went gold. So, you know, again, there's,
21:19
there's often new answers to this of bands you don't think
21:21
sold a lot actually sold more than you think.
21:23
Yeah. But the other thing I've got so,
21:26
so actually I, I went to Spotify as well about this because they
21:28
have been talking recently more about artists payouts.
21:32
We talked about Kate Nash, didn't we, a few months ago.
21:35
And Spotify put out a figure of how much they paid out, and they
21:38
actually shared their payouts last year for both Bonnie Tyler
21:41
and Mazzy Star. Oh, really?
21:43
What you what? You asked them can you tell me
21:46
how much these artists have have made from your streaming
21:49
service? And I said yeah, yeah, we don't.
21:51
Mind, they are doing that more now and, and to be to be clear,
21:54
they're not telling me how much the artists earn, not giving any
21:56
away any secret kind of figures for them.
21:58
It's just payouts and I could calculate it if I went in and
22:01
really crunched the data and said how many streams, what's
22:03
the average payment? But they shot the so basically
22:07
Spotify paid out $1.3 million for Bonnie Tyler's music last
22:11
year. Wow.
22:12
And $1.8 million for Mazzy Star. And that is again, the huge
22:17
caveat that is payments to their rights holders, to their labels,
22:20
publishers. And we don't know how much they
22:22
got, but that's, that's it seems to me, because I think that's a
22:25
sign like Mazzy Star, for example, they have, as Simon
22:27
said, they have 12.8 million monthly on Spotify and that
22:31
equals payouts of $1.8 million a year.
22:34
And as I was saying earlier, that's quite stable.
22:37
Like everyone's not going to stop listening to Mazzy Star
22:39
suddenly next year. So for a band like that, it's
22:43
it's that last year. It won't be so different this
22:46
year. It carries on and it's, it's
22:48
kind of a sort of predictable income, I guess you'd say.
22:52
I guess so. So I guess the change here, and
22:54
this is sort of not, not the point that Simon was exactly
22:58
making, but the conclusion from this is that streaming has, if
23:03
it's not done anything else, it has helped prolong an artist's
23:07
ability to make money. I mean, if nothing, you know, if
23:11
nothing else that that's they've made music, they've made their
23:15
music still available. Because you go back to the
23:18
physical era and unless you were a very top artist, your records
23:22
would have vanished from the shops within six months.
23:24
Your latest album, you wouldn't find it anywhere.
23:27
Whereas these days, obviously all the music's still available
23:30
on streaming platforms because it which means you are still in
23:35
the game. I mean, I guess, I guess some of
23:39
the, you know, some of the big artists, their records are all
23:41
would always have been in WH Smith and your major High Street
23:45
chains like, I don't know, Virgin or HMB or something very
23:49
funny. But but yeah.
23:50
But if you were a certainly if you were a Mazzy Star, you're
23:53
you're there'd be one copy of your album in HMB wouldn't there
23:57
for a while. And sometimes that wouldn't be
23:59
restocked. And then we also have to take
24:02
into account, I mean, obviously albums were from time to time
24:06
reissued, but I remember when, and this goes back to around the
24:10
90s and 90s when a lot of record labels decided, started
24:13
repackaging albums by bands who'd been successful maybe 5 to
24:19
10 years earlier and they came out at mid price.
24:25
So you do a range of mid price reissues, but obviously every
24:29
record that was mid price for, for any artist who found their
24:32
album had been mid priced, they would also find their royalties
24:35
had been mid priced as well. I remember 11 musician saying
24:40
they, they just reissued my album without telling me, put it
24:42
in the mid price range. And so I earned less from it.
24:45
And no one had consulted. No one had consulted them about
24:48
it. But yes, it does.
24:50
It has prolonged the life of a band like Mazzy Star, whose
24:54
records wouldn't necessarily be in the record shops now.
24:57
You just see what I mean. Yeah, I was looking at their
24:59
biggest song. It's fading to you.
25:00
It's got 913 million streams on Spotify alone, and something has
25:04
happened there because it's a long way ahead of their other
25:06
songs. And that's the other thing I
25:07
think you'd like. You say you're there and you
25:09
can. So we've talked, haven't we
25:10
recently about Radioheads Let Down becoming a hit because of
25:13
TikTok? We talked about, OK, what was
25:16
the other one recently? It was Connie Francis, wasn't
25:20
it? Her 1960s hip came because of
25:22
Tiktok. So when you're on streaming, you
25:23
can benefit from these things now where suddenly everyone on
25:27
Tiktok besides your song is great to soundtrack videos with
25:29
and you're you suddenly get loads of streams and money.
25:32
And the other thing I think is so I think you get that, that
25:38
people can discover anything now.
25:40
Like, I think when I was when I was young, God, I'm turning into
25:43
that guy, aren't I? When I was young.
25:45
But like the barrier was having to buy CD, buy records, buy CDs.
25:51
I couldn't just go and listen to anything I wanted because I've
25:54
seen the recommendation. Whereas now young people can
25:57
discover Mazzy Star because an artist they like has mentioned
25:59
them as an influence or because they're put into a playlist by
26:02
the algorithm. I was listening this morning
26:05
actually. You know, St.
26:06
Etienne have got there. It's their final album.
26:08
I think it's just come out, hasn't it?
26:10
And they've got a collaboration with Confidence Man on there who
26:13
obviously really popular at the moment.
26:15
They're kind of surging. And now people who love
26:18
Confidence Man are going to discover St.
26:19
Etienne through that. And now St.
26:22
Etienne's catalog could get a bump from that.
26:24
So that there's when you're on streaming, all these things can
26:27
suddenly happen. Or you can have the Sophie Alex
26:29
Bexer thing where a sink or the Kate Bush thing where a sink in
26:32
ATV show or film. See, like you say, I think all
26:35
of this you could it could happen in the past in different
26:39
ways, that you could have a song in a film and it'd be on the
26:42
soundtrack and you might reissue it.
26:44
So. But now, yeah, so you can have
26:47
your catalog, it can be discovered by people for the
26:49
first time who weren't born when you made the album, and you can
26:52
benefit all these different. So yeah, it's all it's it's it's
26:56
weird because I think this is something that came into my head
26:59
really strongly when I was covering the Uks big streaming
27:01
inquiry. A lot of the noise has been
27:05
streaming services don't pay out enough.
27:08
They're they're, they're, they're making loads of money
27:10
from themselves. They're not paying out enough.
27:12
And there is still arguments about that.
27:13
And you can argue about how much money companies pay themselves
27:16
in dividends and so on. But often what an artist takes
27:21
home, it comes down to the deals.
27:23
It comes down to the right cells.
27:25
And that's where, you know, I mean, Beggar's Group is a good
27:28
example of a label that talks years ago about how it's put
27:31
everyone onto a modern royalty rate and it's it's wiped to some
27:33
recruit balances. A lot of them is doing that now.
27:36
The majors are starting to do things where they payrolled.
27:38
He's right. Even if you're unrecooped, this
27:40
stuff is all improving. So I think, again, maybe next
27:43
year, the outlook for an artist from the 70s or 80s and 90s will
27:48
be better than it was five years ago because of some of these
27:51
changes. So it's changing all the time.
27:53
But yeah, I mean, we should put it down.
27:54
I think Simon Simon is correct. Like there are band, there are
27:57
artists who are doing better from streaming.
28:00
Doesn't invalidate the complaints, invalidate some of
28:03
the criticism of streaming. But yeah, nobody really talks
28:07
about doing well. Is the other thing that people,
28:10
it's something I think that companies like Spotify get
28:11
frustrated by is that artists who are doing better from
28:14
streaming than they were from sales don't tend to talk about
28:17
it. Artists who are across because
28:19
they feel like they've lost income talk about it loudly and
28:24
all those views are valid, but we don't tend to hear as much
28:26
from the artists who are doing well, I guess.
28:28
So, so Simon, in conclusion, then Simon's.
28:31
Simon's basically right in some circumstances, but not but the
28:37
the figures are possibly not the ones that were originally put
28:42
for. You'd have to dig into the
28:43
figures and it presumes, as you say, certain royalty rates and
28:46
stuff. So the figures might not be
28:47
right, but Simon, in some cases you're, you're right.
28:51
And but this is this is heritage artists who these days have a
28:57
position where a loyal fan base or people or listen to their
29:02
music or they are attracting in some way new listeners to their
29:08
their their streaming sites where in the past they wouldn't
29:12
have been able to buy the record.
29:14
That's it. And I think both my sources
29:16
suggested that Simon's figures, although they questioned them in
29:19
terms of these things, they were saying both they're they're kind
29:22
of a best case scenario. And I guess the good news,
29:24
because I am an incorrigible optimist, the good news is that
29:26
these best case scenarios are true for more artists now
29:29
because labels are in negotiating these old deals and
29:33
because the money is getting paid through more often.
29:35
So I think things are improving, even if artists aren't quite
29:38
reaching the level that his figures suggested.
29:41
Yeah. Good question though.
29:43
Good question. Yeah, excellent.
29:45
Thank you, Simon for that. Do you have any other questions
29:48
for us if you do? The e-mail address is coming up.
29:52
If you have any comments or queries or anything you'd like
29:55
us to explain, drop us a line. I'll give you the address in
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