That's a great question, and a very complicated one. I don't actually pretend to have all the answers, but I'll give you a couple of examples that you might find interesting.
If you have a million plays of one of your songs on Rhapsody, for instance, that will get you $11,000. That's a million plays—an extraordinary amount, a bona fide hit. Then we go down to YouTube, where a million plays gets you a whopping $1,750. This is assuming you wrote the song yourself. If you co-wrote it, then you actually get half that amount.
The problem we're seeing is that these massive, massive global companies are coming in, and basically they're start-ups. They talk to the labels, and the labels licence their entire catalogue, because that's how the service works. If you can't get all the songs, no one will want to use the service. So they licence the entire catalogue, and then there are the provisions where a company like that, if they licence the entire catalogue, doesn't actually have to share the revenue stream, because it's licensed for them as a whole, so a lot of artists don't participate in that at all.
We also have a problem with how they divide up the amount the record labels get and the amount the publisher or the creator side of it gets. We find that we're not participating in this conversation at all when these companies are starting up and they're being allowed to do business.
It's increasingly looking like it's really just not possible for us to function in this environment. There have been a lot of questions on whether there needs to be more regulation on this business or more cooperation with the government. Essentially they're a tech company, and arguably a telecommunications company.
There are a lot of challenges. Right now we just want to bring light to the issue. It's time to have some serious discussions about this, because this type of activity could be the collapse of the creator side of the business. It's very dire.