Independent music streaming platform Deezer announced a new initiative to fairly pay artists played on the platform. Under the new User Centric Payment System, each Deezer user’s money now only goes to the artists they listen to each month – not by overall global streams.
The company is looking to invest in new technology that divides revenue by individual users’ streams, and not based on market share. Earlier this week, Deezer announced a partnership with Universal Music Group (UMG) to further develop new models for streaming artist royalties.
Deezer CEO Jeronimo Folgueira said, “As a key player in the music industry, we work with all labels to find ways to make the ecosystem fairer and help artists monetize their music better. The current system has clear issues that need to be addressed, such as increasing amounts of non-music tracks uploaded on platforms, poor quality covers with misspelled artists’ names and songs to ‘steal’ streams, and people trying to trick the system with the length of tracks.”
“This hurts true artists, makes it harder for new ones to emerge, and also damages the fan experience. We believe in quality and fairness at Deezer and with this initiative, together with UMG, we will look into how we can improve the model to everyone’s benefit. Music is extremely undervalued today and as part of the artist-centric discussion we are keen to find additional ways of increasing monetization, to the benefit of real artists, the labels, and platforms like Deezer.”
