When doing Songwriting workshops, I often find myself saying, with total sincerity, “It’s a great time to be a songwriter!”… but then I have to add… “Creatively, that is; not financially.”

Look, I’m a believer in the value of ‘free’. In any modern content-related business, there’s a lot of giving away that goes on at the early stage of a relationship. But if people want a higher level of service, education, pleasure uninterrupted by ads, or some deeper level of engagement and involvement, they will start to pay… and if they want more, they pay more. Witness Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, Dropbox, etc., etc. Free is now the entry-level price.

But in spite of the proliferation of music everywhere – everywhere! – in our digital world, we songwriters have found our checks shrinking down to almost nothing (so have recording artists and producers, but we’ll come back to that later). And there is no higher level of payment for us after ‘almost free’… from businesses that are literally built on our ideas and labor.

Why is this the case? I’ve recently joined an organization called Music Answers that has helped me find some… Answers.

Most music these days is consumed through streaming services and on websites such as YouTube. Songwriters make literally a few dollars for hundreds of thousands of plays (not exaggerating).

But think about this – the plays are just a part of it. Companies like YouTube, Spotify, etc, use the music to bring people to them. Once there, the digital companies gather data on the visitors, and sell advertising to advertisers. Then they not only use the data to sell more advertising, they also sell the data to other companies – a tremendously lucrative business.

So not only does the songwriter get almost nothing for ‘plays’, we get absolutely nothing from the enormous related income that the music draws in.

It gets better (that is, worse). The deals that music companies make involve the tech giants paying the music companies massive advances. The music companies hang on to the advances and dole out payments to the creators when they get ‘plays’. We get no advances from the advances. And a good portion of the money never gets doled out at all – the music company just keeps whatever’s left. So they not only get the use of the money for a long time before they pay it out, they often don’t have to pay it (our money) out at all.

Wait… it gets better (worse). There are “side deals’. The tech giant allows the music company to buy stock at a discount rate. When the tech company goes public or gets sold, the music company gets a big taste… solely because of the artists’ music that they control. So naturally they share this windfall with the artists, right? As you probably guessed, No Way.

As they say on infomercials… Wait… there’s more! The music companies and the tech companies sign NDAs – non-disclosure agreements – so there is no way the music creators can find out how much money is involved in any of this (although it’s clearly many, many billions). Due to NDAs, there is no financial transparency to any of the above.

This post just scratches the surface. To put it mildly, songwriters, artists, and producers are and have been getting the short end of the stick… and the stick’s getting shorter all the time.

One of the many reasons, but an important one, is that songwriters, artists, and producers have not advocated together – we’ve gone to the government separately to address our particular unfair situation, and none of our organizations are strong enough alone. There are some people in power who recognize that the current situation is untenable. But the only way we can make some real changes is to present a united front.

Music Answers is an organization that has not only provided me with most of the information I’ve discussed here, they’re also the first – and so far only – group to unite songwriters, artist/performers, and producers to pursue our mutual interests in effecting change, which ultimately has to come legislatively. This is, as I’m sure you know, a tall order. But if not us… who?

Go to Music Answers. Educate yourself with the videos and written information there. And Sign The Petition! It’s important, even if you’re not (yet) a professional songwriter.

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