You Can’t Find What You Don’t Look For: @theDavidCrosby Gets Screwed Twice by Big Tech | MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY

From Spotify’s F-1:  “Spotify was founded on the belief that music is universal and that streaming is a more robust and seamless access model that benefits both artists and music fans.”

Now bend over for that truly seemless access.

David Crosby is one of the most influential musicians, songwriters, vocalists and performers of his generation.  From The Byrds to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, to his duo with Graham Nash and his solo work, David Crosby is truly one of the most gifted artists you will ever encounter.  If you don’t know his work, he’s not hard to find–start with the move Woodstock and go from there.  And, of course, his music is readily available on any streaming service or the decade-themed channels on SiriusXM.

But David Crosby has a problem–he recorded much of his seminal work in the wrong year for the digerati and for the warm hearted folk like Jim Meyer at SiriusXM, Tim Westergren while at Pandora, the Digital Media Association and the MIC Coalition who oppose treating pre-72 recordings like all others for digtial sound recording performance royalties.

So David gets screwed on the sound recordings.  Not being content with one sleazeball move, Spotify, Google, Amazon and iHeart also screw him on his songs by filing “address unknown” notices with the Copyright Office.  (And, it must be said, the Copyright Office gets their licks in, too, by allowing this to happen.)

Here’s a run on David Crosby’s recordings for which these monopolists have filed at least 156 “address unknown” NOIs:

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, David Crosby said:

Spotify’s plan to go public, filed last week, could generate $23 billion and make the world’s biggest record labels hundreds of millions of dollars richer — but the Swedish streaming giant has yet to soothe grumbling and litigious artists and songwriters who say its royalty payments are unfairly low. “They rigged it so they don’t pay the artist,” David Crosby tells Rolling Stone. “I’ve lost half of my income because of these clever fellas. I used to make money off my records, but now I don’t make any.”

This gives doubling down a whole new meaning.

But Daniel Ek is about to make serious bank while he has many outstanding bills to songwriters and artists, including David Crosby.  And the one thing we know for sure when Spotify files an NOI is that they can’t say “but we paid the labels” or “we paid the publishers”.  They are not paying at all because they use a loophole to get out of any royalty obligation–while getting all the liability insulation of the compulsory license.

Thanks, Copyright Office.

Here’s another thing that’s about to happen to Daniel Ek.  Remember old “million a month” Tim Westergren who sold Pandora stock every month netting him over $1 million a month?  Want to bet that Daniel Ek does the same and that he’s going to make way more than $1 million a month?

We will be happy to bring you that news that you won’t read in the mainstream media as soon as Ek’s filings start to go through the SEC.  Then he can explain to David Crosby how it feels to be a billionaire off the backs of the songwriters and artists he stiffs.

[from http://ift.tt/2llz3cO]