Labels are to blame for streaming pittance – former Spotify exec

Jehan addressed the issue in an interview with Globes, an Israeli publication. The interview is no longer available on the Hebrew-language site. However, Music Ally on 9 September reported on the article using Google Translate before it was removed. Globes has not said why the interview was taken down.

Jehan was quoted as saying: “The artists get paid low [for music streaming], but the blame is on the labels. Today, streaming is a big chunk of global music revenues, and I think the future is positive, and that streaming is going to help artists in the long run, but that model is not reflected today in artists’ contracts.

“Companies like Spotify return 75% of the revenue to the industry, but they never pay directly to the artists, but to the labels. The problem is that today, artists still only get 10-15% of the revenue and the labels keep the rest.”

Jehan joined Spotify in 2014 after it acquired The Echo Nest, a music-data platform he had co-founded in 2005. He held his position with Spotify until February this year before moving to his current employer TechnoArt, an Israeli startup incubator and support firm.

Low per-stream royalties from Spotify and other streaming services have been a bone of contention for a long time. Last month, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told musicians that they needed to release more music if they wanted to survive.

"There is a narrative fallacy here, combined with the fact that, obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough,” Ek said.

Musicians fired back at EK’s comments on social media. “In the middle of the seemingly endless and expensive and expertise-requiring tasks that are involved in putting out a record, and so in the perfect frame of mind to honestly say: go f*ck yourself, Daniel Ek,” a Twitter user wrote. 

The expletives didn’t end with that user. US rock musician Dee Snider of Twisted Sister fame wrote: “While you (the listener) benefit & enjoy Spotify, it's part of what's killing a major income stream for artist/creators. The amount of artists 'rich enough' to withstand this loss are about .0001%. Daniel Ek's solution is for us to write & record more on our dime?! F*ck him!”

The articulate Snider is known for his decades-long music activism, particularly when he testified at a US Senate hearing in 1985 led by Tipper Gore. The result of the hearing, which was about censoring music containing offensive material, led to the general 'Parental Advisory: Explicit Content' label. 

Meanwhile, Kobalt-owned music platform AWAL recently said hundreds of its artists were earning more than $100 000 a year from streaming revenues.