Are We Taking Music Industry Monopolies Seriously Enough?

(Hypebot) — As weakening antitrust legal guidelines and consolidation of companies proceed, nearly each nook of the music business is now managed by a selection few firms, whether or not its streaming or dwell music, writes Will Meyer. Right here he explores why these monopolies have to be taken significantly.
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Visitor submit by Will Meyer of CASH Music

Everybody can agree, at this level, that almost all corners of the music business are dominated by a small variety of firms.

Take streaming providers, for instance. Just some years in the past, enterprise commentators praised the wholesome competitors that existed between providers like Pandora, Rhapsody, Tidal, Google Play, Spotify and Apple Music. Right this moment, nevertheless, that “competitors” has basically grow to be a two-horse race between Apple Music and Spotify.

The dwell music business isn’t all that completely different. Dwell Nation and AEG have an amazing grip on North American venues and festivals. (Dwell Nation owns Home of Blues and Lollapalooza, whereas AEG simply bought Bowery Presents.) The identical goes for labels. Three of them — Sony, Common and Warner — management 80 p.c of the market.

Most of those firms are additionally vertically and horizontally “built-in,” that means they personal different firms which are related to their monetary success. For instance, Sony, Common and Warner — The Huge Three — are all partial homeowners in Spotify. Dwell Nation, in the meantime, owns Ticketmaster and has tentacles in venue sponsorship, artist administration and promotion. Spotify is branching out into music journalism and playlist “curation,” as properly.

Due to integration, platforms will not be impartial. Ticketmaster will enhance Dwell Nation occasions. Spotify, as Liz Pelly identified right here at Watt, options playlists owned and managed by main labels.

The listing goes on.

After all, there’s a phrase for all of this: Monopoly energy.

Antitrust legal guidelines give the federal authorities the power to interrupt up monopolies or a minimum of cut back their energy. Within the Eighties, nevertheless, these legal guidelines have been weakened (extra on that later).

However because the legitimacy of the unprecedented market dominance of Fb, Google and Amazon goes on trial within the court docket of public opinion, musicians and different cultural producers want to start taking monopoly energy significantly — and possibly even do one thing about it.

Why? As a result of we must always have a say over who we work for and what the phrases are.

Step one is knowing the historical past of monopolies and the shifting concepts of who and what they threaten.

Breaking apart monopolies was a requirement of the Populist Motion, led by indebted farmers, of the late nineteenth century. In these days, monopoly energy was considered unfair to producers — individuals who make stuff. The pondering was that in an effort to guarantee political democracy, the federal government had to make sure truthful competitors for financial democracy. In different phrases, the financial energy inside the economic system needed to be distributed so producers might select the place they wished to work. A musician, for instance, mustn’t have to decide on between solely Spotify or Apple Music — whose phrases and royalty charges are decided by The Huge Three.

The Populist Motion helped affect the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, the primary antitrust invoice on the federal degree. The Progressive Period, when politicians confirmed actual urge for food for reining in energy, adopted. President Theodore Roosevelt sued 45 firms below the Sherman Act. Not lengthy after his presidency, extra antitrust laws was handed, increasing the scope of the federal government’s means to manage enterprise. Huge firms, like Commonplace Oil, have been damaged up or pressured to dump components of their companies that gave them an unfair benefit. The Clayton Act of 1914, fought towards worth fixing and corrected for different anti-competitive practices — examples at the moment could be Ticketmaster selling Dwell Nation occasions or Amazon hawking Alexas earlier than different surveillance robots of their search outcomes.

By the late Seventies, although, antitrust legal guidelines initially aimed toward defending producers from monopoly energy, pivoted to the safety of shoppers. Throughout Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the antitrust division of the justice division started focusing not on the consolidation of energy, however on low costs, in essence clearing the trail for the music business’s consolidation of energy that additional pits artists towards shareholders.

The business has skilled massive adjustments over the previous couple of many years, in fact. Within the Nineteen Nineties, unbiased document retailers have been wolfed up by chain shops. Then got here pirating and on-line gross sales. Now now we have streaming providers. These adjustments all occurred whereas six main document labels consolidated into The Huge Three.

Adjustments in know-how typically overpower political circumstances in our perceptions of how the music business — and the bigger economic system, for that matter — capabilities. Company monopoly energy in america is contingent on the political local weather it exists inside. Be it the Progressive Period, Reagan’s ’80s, or at the moment. You will need to perceive and use the framework of monopoly energy in an effort to transfer past such bleak energy relations.

The consolidation within the music business at the moment is a risk to not solely musicians and their means to make a residing, however to the rules of political and financial equality.