Fairness in music industry — why should we care?

Online services such as Apple Music, Spotify, or Amazon Prime have clearly dominated the market of music streaming services. Although consumers are in a very favorable position of having a range of services to choose from making access to one’s favorite music easier than ever, artists are often on the other end of the spectrum. Especially the ones whose music is not that popular, often make barely a profit from these platforms. If this would be the case of purely not fitting the trends with their productions in a given community or a country, no one would be in a position to challenge the current status quo. However, what often is the case is that the artists are simply not paid accordingly.

While this could have numerous consequences for artists, one of the key ones is that it often leaves them with no chances for actual development. Cementing the current market and not allowing some prospective artists to grow is not an augmented reality but rather a situation that the community of artists and listeners has to face. While some could probably argue that these services are not disallowing producers and artists to develop, they clearly hinder their progress and limit artists’ chances to acquire an increasingly big audience. The profits made by the artists, instead of being collected to great extent by the giants of the streaming industry, could have been kept by the musicians — thus allowing them to invest in themselves or promote their tracks and new albums. Evidently, a vicious circle can be observed — while an increasingly high number of artists all over the world struggles to make the ends meet, gigantic international corporations continue to exploit them and take the larger and larger piece of the music streaming services’ profits cake.

If you believe that all artists should be paid fairly, join Opus and make change. The stronger we grow, the bigger actual chances of making this scenario happen. You can do it in a few very simple steps here: https://artist.opus.audio (artists) or here: https://player.opus.audio/login (listeners).