Just over a year ago, music streaming service Deezer announced its desire to launch a pilot of a ‘user-centric payment system’ (UCPS) by early 2020.
You can read our primer on the user-centric model here, but in a nutshell, it ensures that the money from your streaming subscription only goes to the music you listen to.
It feels like a fairer way to divide out streaming royalties than the current system, where the royalties from your subscription go into a big pool divided by overall share of streams.
[In another nutshell: if BTS or Taylor Swift or Drake or whoever get 5% of everyone’s streams, they get 5% of your subscription even if you never listen to them.]
Nobody’s quite sure exactly who’ll benefit from a switch to user-centric: there have been a few academic studies, and they were all cautious about drawing big, bold conclusions.
That’s exactly why Deezer wanted to run a pilot, in just one country (France) and only with labels (not publishers or collecting societies), to gauge the impact. The company said it had “the majority of French labels” on board, yet a year later the pilot still hasn’t launched.
Yesterday, for a special episode of our Music Ally TV Show, Deezer’s chief content and strategy officer Alexander Holland joined us for an update, and to talk about why the company is still keen to test UCPS.
The post Deezer still pushing for user-centric payouts: ‘We will continue fighting…’ appeared first on Music Ally.
Source: Music ally