In Great Britain, the debate about the effects of streaming and any changes to the framework conditions has already reached a parliamentary committee.

In this country, the discussion is only gradually getting going.

Of course, this is also because the matter is complicated, says Birte Wiemann, Chairwoman of the Association of Independent Music Companies (VUT), in which the smaller labels, publishers, distributors, but also independent artists are organized.

Benjamin Fisher

Editor in Business.

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Sometimes representatives from the industry themselves do not make the task any easier: "The demand for one cent per stream that is circulating in the USA sounds catchy, but it only helps the matter to a limited extent because it suppresses the complexity of the system," says Wiemann in an interview with the FAZ After all, no service pays a fixed rate per stream “and in addition, implementing the requirement would probably overwhelm some streaming services financially”.

"Lack of transparency is currently the biggest problem"

How the distribution works in principle is not trivial, but no secret.

All services pay around two-thirds of their revenue to rights holders on the music industry side.

Around 80 percent of this goes to the side of the recording, 20 percent to the owners of the rights to the underlying texts and compositions.

How much ultimately reaches performers and songwriters ultimately depends on their individual contracts with labels, publishers and distributors.

Wiemann sees a need for improvement in the way Spotify and Co. make the payments: "From our point of view, a lack of transparency is currently the biggest problem," she says.

“First of all, that has nothing to do with distributive justice.” First of all, everyone involved should be able to understand how the services actually calculate.

"Why does a label sometimes have three different monetizations for a song on a platform in one day?" asks Wiemann.

As is well known, monthly fluctuations can be explained by the fact that various factors such as the subscriber base, the total number of streams in the respective markets and the proportion of their own songs are never the same.

But different values ​​in one day could not be understood.

A spokesman for market leader Spotify explained the observation to the FAZ as follows: "Since streams of the differently priced subscription models - individual, duo, family - as well as the advertising-financed version are taken into account to different extents in the billing, including different currencies of the different countries, there are also different values ​​for one and the same song in one day when a label or act looks at the daily performance and calculates an individual per-stream rate from it.”

Many conceivable variants around a usage-based system

For the VUT, a move away from the billing system described, known as pro rata, is also on the agenda as soon as possible.

"A usage-based billing model is inevitably needed," says Wiemann.

A user's funds should therefore only be distributed among the songs heard and not according to market share among all streamed songs in a market.

However, it is unclear how billing can then work transparently and effectively in day-to-day business.

"As an industry, we have to investigate which alternative model works best - whether it's a pure user-centric model without additional measures, a mixture of pro rata and user-centric or even different payouts depending on the song length or for active and passive streams." Here, too, the help of the services is required.