US-based digital store Bandcamp prides itself on paying a good rate of return to artists. Click on the first album listed on its page of bestselling releases and you will hear a woman’s breathy voice singing about dollar bills: “I’m gonna get paid, yeah, just give me my moolah-la-la-la.”
The song is “Sad Girlz Luv Money” by Amaarae, a Ghanaian-American singer-songwriter. Its cash-me-out message will resonate with her fellow recording artists. “Just give me my moolah” is the cry from aggrieved musicians and songwriters, infuriated by what they perceive as underpayment from giant streaming services such as Apple Music and Spotify. Music industry revenues are growing, up almost 20 per cent to $25.9bn last year, and so are demands for a fairer distribution of spoils.
The complaints are not going unheard. Bandcamp, founded in 2008, has positioned itself as an equitable alternative. It takes a cut of just 10 to 15 per cent from artists for downloads and sales of vinyl, CDs and merchandise. Among streaming services, the Berlin-based music sharing platform SoundCloud introduced a “fan-powered royalty” system last year, which channels subscribers’ fees directly to the acts they listen to. It claims the result has been a 60 per cent rise in average artist revenue. And new technologies for distributing music are proliferating, from non-fungible tokens to Kanye West’s quixotic Stem Player audio device, with which he bundled his 2021 album Donda.