There are also on-demand broadcasts, i.e., broadcasts for which the audience pays something and chooses what they want to hear, such as on Rdio, Deezer or ZIK.
For these other broadcasts, the performers have to negotiate compensation under their recording contract. However, a number of songs on these sites come under contracts that were entered into at a time when such technological developments were inconceivable. Several artists complain that they get absolutely nothing for these broadcasts. The same situation occurs with more recent contracts, which is even harder to explain.
Finally, there is the purchase of music on sites like iTunes. There too, the performers are stuck with what they managed to negotiate under their recording contracts. More often than not, given that sales have plummeted and that royalties have been scaled back, along with album production costs, they rarely receive any remuneration for these uses.
In order to get an accurate picture of musical income sharing in the digital universe, we believe it would be useful to conduct a study of online uses not covered by equitable remuneration in order to determine how the royalties are distributed among various stakeholders in the music industry.
Artisti and the Union des artistes would like, at the very least, to make sure these studies identify what percentage of the royalties or income from music that is used or sold makes its way back to the performers. In short, what do they get back after they have paid off all of the non-subsidized album production costs.