From "SONGWRITERS OF NORTH AMERICA HIT BACK AT SPOTIFY CRB APPEAL"

This morning, I started reading Apple's open letter to Spotify.

Even though I feel a lot of anger towards how certain big streaming services financially cripple musicians, including Apple, the behemoths—Spotify, Google, Pandora, and Amazon—that want to further damage songwriters by reducing their payouts are greedy and vile in the extreme.

From Apple's letter:

https://www.highly.co/hl/2RFCQVQLLxR51A

Despite Apple being out for blood in the sense that they don't agree with Spotify when they want to pay Apple nothing for being distributed on their platform (which is, frankly, ludicrous), the bit about songwriters is interesting.

This is a good summation of the problem at its core, from this blog post:

https://www.highly.co/hl/P6UkK0qjRnApNb

Another voice about this:

https://www.highly.co/hl/XNZ8bsEtdkRC2Y

https://twitter.com/dinalapolt/status/1104872786294648832

LaPolt has a lot of good things to say about all of that; from this article:

“Whenever you have a group publicly mobilise, it’s very effective,” she said. “We see that in everything in life, even with the MMA when we were under attack by certain special interest groups, you saw the songwriter community mobilise in a way that it never had before.

“They moved the needle and got some of their recording artist brothers and sisters mobilised with them, who control hundreds of millions of social media followers. That’s never a good look for any company, especially one that is publicly traded.

“There are two different types of courts, the court of law, and the court of public opinion, and sometimes the court of public opinion can really affect your bottom line.”

That's just hurtful greed on the behalf of companies like Amazon and Spotify.

And yes, people, take the power back.