PRS Endorses Spotify, Rickrolling Earned Pete Waterman Just £11

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PRS Endorses Spotify, Rickrolling Earned Pete Waterman Just £11

PRS For Music is stepping up its negotiating campaign against YouTube by wheeling out another host of artists and waving around a new licensing agreement it’s signed with Spotify.

~~Last night,~~ Wednesday morning, it held a press conference for the “media launch” of FairPlayForCreators.com, the campaign site that we’ve already covered and which is being used as a pro-PRS petition by musicians and producers. On the site, producer Pete Waterman, who co-wrote with Rick Astley the Never Gonna Give You Up track that has become the Rickrolling sensation, grumbles: “(It) must have been played more than 100 million times on YouTube; my PRS for Music income in the year ended September 2008 was £11.” The likes of Dan Le San, Guy Chambers and Sandie Shaw also chip in. PRS chair Ellis Rich: “Maybe we should be calling them MeTube because they certainly don’t care much about You ... We will not allow Google (NSDQ: GOOG) or any other faceless monolithic corporation to disrespect us.”

PRS also says it’s “agreed commercial terms” with Spotify - but so far it has not been able to tell paidContent:UK whether the streaming service has won a special deal, outside of its standard joint online licence (JOL) for internet services - as Google had first time around - or whether Spotify will be governed by the same per-subscriber or per-track fees defined in the JOL.

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Robert Andrews

@robertandrews Apr 8, 2009 11:11 AM ET

Posted In: Entertainment, Music, Companies, Google, YouTube, prs for music, spotify

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Andrew Aversa

I support Pete on this one. He might already be rich, but demonizing him will impact everyone else and jeopardize proper royalties for content creators in general. Wrote a rebuttal piece on the topic;

http://soundtempest.net/industry-news/rickroll-exploitation-debate-a-rebuttal-to-mike-masnick/

Henry Harding

But this is about the industry screwing the plucky artist Bob. If you think Â£11 is reasonable for 150 million plays then you need to do some basic maths. Most songwriters are not Pete Waterman and are not rich. Only 3% of PRS members actually earn enough to make a living, the rest of us are on subsitance, mainly because people simply don't want to pay for our work. Fine, if you don't want to pay, don't listen to it. It isn't your property, it belongs to the writer. I'm sure you'd be less than happy if I came round and just took your car and left a fiver on the drive with a message that you should stop complaining because it's my right to steal your property.

bob

This really makes me laugh - of course the PRS have signed a deal with Spotify, Spotify aren't interested in trying to build a sustainable profit generating business at the moment as they're in classic start-up mode: go for user growth while burning cash, look to sell at a high price based on large user numbers.

The simple truth is that the PRS just cannot get their head around the fact that collectively everyone involved (artists, the PRS, the media owners and service providers, the labels) has to build a profitable online music business, otherwise the whole music business is screwed. This isn't about big corporates trying to screw the plucky artists, its about simple economics for the music business: build something profitable or no-one will make any money and everyone loses