How Musicians Make Money — Or Don’t at All — in 2018

I spotted this interesting article on Rolling Stone’s website earlier this month. Here’s the first couple of paragraphs. Read the rest here.

The buzziest word in music this year is the one that used to be the most utterly boring.

Copyright — ownership of songs and albums as creative works — is a riotous knot of rules and processes in the music industry, with the players much more numerous and entangled than the ordinary fan might think. But between Congress mulling over the much-anticipated Music Modernization Act, plagiarism battles between major songwriters raging and Wall Street scrutinizing Spotify’s lack of profitability as a public company, it’s helpful to have at least a basic understanding of music’s U.S. financial system in order to ponder its future.

To begin with: “Royalties” are the sums paid to rights-holders when their creations are sold, distributed, embedded in other media or monetized in any other way. Here’s Rolling Stone‘s guide to how musicians, songwriters and producers in the digital era actually get their hands on that money.