SoundCloud’s trying something new for a major music streaming service: paying indie artists a share of their actual listeners’ subscription fees. The company calls this “fan-powered royalties,” and it means a SoundCloud subscriber’s subscription fee or advertising revenue will be divvied up among the artists they actually listen to, rather than going to a big pot and being split up among the platform’s most popular artists.
This is a major change for the industry and one indie artists have pushed for. Currently, most music streaming platforms reward the world’s biggest stars with the most royalties. At Spotify, for example, the company figures out how many streams happened on its platform in a given country and then calculates what…
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