This New Platform Wants to Give Musicians the Payment They Deserve

Sonic Innovation #12 - How to get the Payment you Deserve

You're an emerging musician and you want to get paid. Where do you go? Spotify only pays artists £0.007 per play, iTunes isn't much better, and almost everyone will avoid you if you're aggressively selling your mixtape by approaching strangers and asking them "if they like hip-hop". Unless you're lucky enough to get signed by a record label, pick up a sponsorship deal, or guest on a track with someone like Disclosure, making money is increasingly becoming a problem for upcoming musicians.

A new platform called Songeist aims to change this by giving artists a fair share of their record sales, allowing them to continue working on music instead of slaving for rent in Tesco because a bigger fat-cat took away most of their royalties. Songeist deducts the essential costs, barely takes any money for themselves, and leaves the artist with more than they'd make in a conventional record deal.

I chatted to Paul “Barney” Barnes who’s a member of DIY band Sonic Boom Six and now also the community manager of Songeist about how the company wants to give musicians a bigger slice of the musical pie.

Noisey:What motivated you to create Songeist?

Barney: The genesis of the site actually came from the idea of creating a platform specifically for emerging artists; we all can relate to the trials and tribulations of an emerging musician and wanted to help.

So, how does your model differ from the traditional major label model?

Well, it offers artists an alternative DIY way of distributing music without having to share a large chunk of revenue with a record label. Songeist is free to use for both artists and fans.

Yeah but it's not actually free, because you still take a bit from each sale. Right?

Sure, we take a flat 12p per track sale, regardless of what price the track is set at. We also deduct and pay the VAT and PRS payment (royalty payment to the songwriter) from the sale leaving the artist with the majority share of the profit. Working with a label you’re getting far less of the overall money coming in from the sale of your music based on the principle that the promotion the label is providing is worth that trade-off. For many artists, that’s a trade-off that works but more and more people are relying instead on being proactive on social media and utilising freelance PRs for their own DIY releases.

But labels do so much for artists - they can help them get on radio, get sponsorship deals, and advertising. Selling the music is a pretty small part of being signed to a label. Does Songeist offer anything beyond the sale?

What we’re trying to provide with Songeist is a hub where we have features that go beyond just being the platform to buy music. We’re listening to all our artists and forging a community on our blog with tips and interviews with our bands. We’re championing our favourite artists and putting exclusive showcase sessions on our YouTube channel.

So have you had any recent success stories?

We really haven’t had the time to see any of our artists become household names yet. It’s the nature of dealing with emerging artists that right now the success stories out there are too big to have used Songeist. Though there are artists on the site being played on Radio 1 and being championed on Pitchfork and in the NME. We’ve also had a Showcase at The Great Escape featuring artists like Swell, Cocoa Futures, Haze and Mas Agua, who are definitely worth checking out.

How has your time as a musician in Sonic Boom Six influenced your opinion on record deals?

Well, it’s definitely given me a lot of experience in the variety of record deals. We’ve self-released and used an array of small DIY labels worldwide. We also ran our own record label putting out other artists and dealt with bigger labels, so yeah I’ve really seen it from every angle. It’s really not a case of me or Songeist being ‘anti’ record label. In fact, after running our own label for four years, the band decided with our last album to get on board with Xtra Mile Recordings and let them help with the business of promoting and selling records. That was a conscious decision because I thought that the band was past the stage of being an ‘emerging artist’ and I didn’t have the time or muscle to deal with the level of promotion that I thought was going to take us to the next level. But I thought releasing our second and third albums on our own label was the best decision we could have made at the time. In fact, 2007, when we released our second album ourselves, was the most lucrative year in Sonic Boom Six history. It was a couple of years later when we started putting out other artists on our label that we started throwing money down a hole!

Any advice for bands?

Ultimately, I can absolutely attest to the fact that if emerging bands want to put the time and effort into being more DIY and dealing with their promotion themselves, they’re going to see more of the money that comes back. And that’s really what Songeist is about.

Though, if an artist was already good enough for a record deal, why would they need to go on Songeist?

We started What The Artist Got music site to show how a record deal may not always be the best option, with the simple fact that being ‘signed’ doesn’t necessarily mean that artists are getting the best deal. We also wanted fans to see where their money was going and to consider the ramifications of that. You only need a cursory look at the websites surrounding the music industry right now to see that the business model is in flux. It’s not a site for people in the music industry and it’s not a precise analysis of data. It’s a starting point for debate.

Cool, thanks Barney.

Follow Dan on Twitter: @KeenDang

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