RADIO// Radio 4

It has been long established that the music industry has changed irrevocably over the past decade, with the internet disrupting the status quo as it has many other sectors. But the story has moved on from an industry dying from dwindling record sales.

The traditional way of releasing your record has changed thanks to new publishing companies, companies that gather music statistics and the streaming services such as Spotify and Deezer. Now these companies are disrupting the industry once again. Peter Day speaks with the key businesses involved such as Spotify and Musicmetric and the traditional, established players such as Sony Music.

Yet streaming services have also caused controversy because their payments to musicians are seemingly minuscule. Radiohead's lead singer Thom Yorke has battled against Spotify, calling it the 'last fart of a dying corpse' ; how can musicians make money now? Peter hears from a band just starting out, Yossarian, to Moby who has sold millions of records and singer songwriter Billy Bragg. We compare how much musicians receive from different sources of revenue.

But others see the streaming services as saviours and the future of the music industry. Is the problem of small returns from songs streamed actually a clash between a new way of listening to music and the traditional way the industry has been run? Sony Music explain how they are writing their record deals with musicians and that they are thinking about changing this for the new digital age.

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Notes

• Digital Medieval- Jeremy Silver
  author of ‘Digital Medieval: the last twenty years of the music industry, and the next twenty’ and Chairman of Musicmetric

- Steve Jobs and ITunes.

• Fred Bolsa- 

Radio head- Spotify. Disagress with spotify. 

'To me this isn't the mainstream, this is like a last fart, a desperate fart of a dieing corpse. To me Spotify is such a massive battle because its about the future of all music, its about weather we believe there is a a future in music' Thom Yorke

SPOTIFY PAYMENT MODEL

Paid out over 1 billion dollars to rights holders.

2009- 2012 spotify paid out over 500 million dollars to the industry.

2013 alone another 500 million dollars.

Billy Brag on Spotify.

" Spotify is not a bad thing, railing against Spotify will be like railing against cassettes, saying I don't want my music on cassettes i want 12" by 12". Spotify is another excess to music, its not perfect its not as it was, but it's the beginning of a new music industry and as such I think we should give it a little bit more time and space rather than railing against it. I don't see where the problem is, if there is a problem in that the whole Spotify situation, its the whole analogue royalty rate that people resist on rating for digital plays and digital streaming"