Popjustice
  • Home
    • Briefing archive
  • Features
  • Playlists
  • Get Popjustice emails
  • About Popjustice
    • About
    • Popjustice: Est 2000
    • The Popjustice Twenty Quid Music Prize
  • Contact
    • General contact details
    • Submit music
  • Forum
Recent Posts
  • New Music Friday: Let's kick off 2021 with some KLF
  • The Top 45 Singles Of 2020
  • New Music Friday: Mae Muller doesn't want to be dependent
  • New Music Friday: There's a big one from Royal & The Serpent
  • New Music Friday: Baby Queen takes the throne
Hello! In theory you should only be seeing this if you're using a mobile or tablet. How's the site looking? If anything's wonky click here and tell us so we can fix it. Thanks! x
Popjustice
  • Briefing
  • Features
  • Playlists
    • New Music Friday: The Popjustice Edit
    • Big Hit Energy
    • 21st Century Pop
    • 2018% Solid Pop Music
    • Full archive
  • About
    • About Popjustice
    • Contacting Popjustice
    • Send music
    • Popjustice: Est 2000
    • The Popjustice Twenty Quid Music Prize
  • Forum
  • The Briefing

Relax everyone — we've saved the music business

  • March 16, 2009
  • Popjustice

Services like Spotify pay a little bit of money to labels and artists every time a song is played.

Record labels should set up huge rooms full of computers pro­grammed to play their artists' songs on repeat forever.

They should also set up a scheme where they pay people — music fans or not — to listen to their songs. If you had 1000 people whose computers each listened to 140 songs each night while
they were in bed, at 0.25p per track that would be £350 per night, or £127,750
per year. That's not loads of money, but it's enough to keep a few people in jobs, and it's based on only one thousand people getting involved.

If just one in five students in the UK took this scheme up that would pull in £51,100,000. Universal Music could then donate half of that — that's twenty five million pounds — to British higher education, and they'd still have £25m left over. That's enough money left over to employ more than 700 people at £35K a year. Alternatively, they'd present it as a com­pet­i­tion across all uni­ver­sit­ies in the UK — the 25 uni­ver­sit­ies with the highest col­lect­ive play counts would each receive a £1m cheque (for libraries or whatever), and the com­pet­i­tion element would make the play counts even higher. If the idea of teamwork didn't work out, how about this: leave your computer on overnight, playing a specific playlist of songs, and you're entered into a lottery to have your tuition fees paid off for that year.

Basically, £25m is a lot of money.

We haven't even factored in the idea of computers playing Spotify alongside YouTube, Last.fm etc, and even if royalty rates are 25% of 0.25p per play there's still money to be had.

There is NO FLAW to this plan. Right?

EDIT: We didn't mention labels paying artists or musicians — under our new regime artists and musicians and song­writers will actually pay the record label to release their music, bringing in yet more revenue. We will cover this another day.

Previous Article
  • The Briefing

Birds on a wire

  • March 16, 2009
  • Popjustice
Have a read
Next Article
  • The Briefing

Multiple formats for albums look a bit silly when they're all together

  • March 16, 2009
  • Popjustice
Have a read
Pop as in popular
  • 1
    New Music Friday: Let's kick off 2021 with some KLF
  • 2
    The Top 45 Singles Of 2020
Further listening
Greatest hits
  • 50 questions with Mark Ronson…
  • Nicola Roberts interview: "I feel like I discovered the singing again"
  • Sandi Thom's Real Tooting
Further reading
  • 1
    New Music Friday: Let's kick off 2021 with some KLF
  • 2
    The Top 45 Singles Of 2020
  • 3
    New Music Friday: Mae Muller doesn't want to be dependent
  • 4
    New Music Friday: There's a big one from Royal & The Serpent
  • 5
    New Music Friday: Baby Queen takes the throne
  • 6
    Twenty Quid 2020: Dua Lipa is the winner
Est 2000. Still going.
Socials

 Spotify
 Facebook
 Twitter
 Instagram
 Soundcloud

'Quick links'

About Popjustice
Contact Popjustice
Sign up for the news­let­ter
Submit music
Est 2000
Twenty Quid Music Prize

Playlists

21st Century Pop
New Music Friday: The Popjustice Edit
2018% Solid Pop Music
The Sound Of Popjustice
Playlist archive

© 2020 Popjustice Ltd. Scrolled to the bottom now you're here
  • Privacy, Ts & Cs, cookies etc
  • Corrections

Input your search keywords and press Enter.