Universal Music Group (UMG) and the French music streaming platform Deezer has announced on a future “model” designed “to better remunerate artists”, planned in France for the fourth quarter of 2023 before other markets.
“The collaboration to launch an artist-centric model is driven by both companies recognizing that the current music streaming model needs to be re-imagined,” they wrote in a joint statement.
Today, a subscriber, who pays around 10 euros per month on a music streaming platform and does not listen to musicians at the top of the charts, sees the majority of this sum migrate to other artists who are much more “streamed”
This is “market centric” (in proportion to total listening). The agreement between Universal and Deezer approaches a model called “user centric”, theorized by its defenders as one centered on the individual listenings of subscribers.
Deezer presents this future remuneration model with Universal under the name “artist-centric”. The French platform thus wants to focus on “professional artists (who have at least 1,000 streams per month with at least 500 unique listeners), in order to remunerate them more fairly”.
“The goal of the +artist-centric+ model is to ensure that we better support and reward artists at all stages of their career, whether they have 1,000, 100,000 or 100 million fans,” says Michael Nash, digital manager of UMG in the press release.
Jeronimo Folgueira, Managing Director of Deezer, adds: “There is no other industry where all content has the same value, and it should be obvious to everyone that the sounds of rain or washing machines (referring to ambient playlists, editor’s note) do not have the same value as a song by your favorite artist broadcast in high quality”.
