Protecting Your Rights And Earnings

Why do you think music artists and other people working in the media are concerned about the digital reproduction of their work?

Music artists and other people within the music industry, especially the music labels and music management, are very concerned about the reproduction of their work circulating because it means that the music industry earns a lot less money. If music owners are earning less from sales the artists themselves are definitely going to be more poorly remunerated, so piracy affects everyone whatever their rung of the ladder. More than 33 million albums and 10 million singles were downloaded illegally in the first six months of this year from the popular file sharing network BitTorrent. This created a loss of over 500 million pounds, the figures highlight why music companies are concerned about the damage this might do to their long term sales.

Why is a website such as www.fairplayforcreators.com a help to organisations like the PRS?

The site, fairplayforcreators.com, was created due to PRS's on going row with YouTube over payment for songwriters. It is intended to allow creators to publicly demonstrate their concern over the way their work is treated by online businesses. PRS needs websites such as this to help back up the rights of music artists legally and with licensing.

What might happen if sites like YouTube are forced to pay too much money to show digital media content?

If YouTube were forced to pay too much to show digital media content it would be forced to shut down due to the millions of videos that Youtube would have to account for, paying for them just wouldn't be possible

Royalty Payments

Some Artists have had growing concerns on products such as Spotify and the effects it is having on the music industry. Spotify is a commercial music streaming service. Launched in October 2008 by Swedish startup Spotify AB, the service had approximately 10 million users as of 15 September 2010^[update], about 2.5 million of whom were paying users. Total users reached 20 million by December 2012, 5 million of whom pay a monthly subscription. However this isn't enough according to some artists opinions such as Thom Yorke, Thom Yorke claims that Spotify is 'the last desperate fart of a dying corpse'. Thom is under the impression that spotify is not paying the artists enough. Some artists and managers in the music industry however have a much different opinion and regard spotify as the saviour of the music industry