Cultura Voice

Deezer has launched a new website and social media campaign to publicly champion a user-centric payment system (UCPS) and is planning to launch a pilot in France early next year – if it can get rightsholders onboard. Speaking to journalists at a briefing in Paris last week, the company said that it has a “technical solution in place”, the implementation of which “does not require significant investment” and is now in talks with rightsholders and French policy makers to rally support for the new system. Music companies that support Deezer’s UCPS proposal so far include Because Music, Wagram Music, Play Two, Idol, Tot ou tard, Outhere Music, #NP, Believe Distribution Services, Six et Sept, International Artist Organization of Music, FELIN, UPFI, MMF France and GAM. Over 40 labels globally have agreed to Deezer’s UCPS, including the majority of French labels, but there are notable major absentees from the list of partners shared by the company. Deezer, which has 14 milli...

For a long time, we’ve heard Spotify boss Daniel Ek discuss his ambitions for the service to become a true “two-sided marketplace” for artists. In layman’s terms, this means Spotify wants to provide tools for creators that improve the music they make (and the way they market it), as opposed to just giving fans the means to play their tracks. If Spotify can justifiably charge artists money to use these tools, Ek’s comments lead us to assume, then all the better. Last year, Ek’s aspiration for Spotify to become “two-sided” in this manner made a big step forward when the firm acquired part of Distrokid, and announced it was becoming a digital distributor in its own right. Those plans have since been scrapped. Today (September 12), however, Spotify has confirmed that it’s becoming a very different type of “two-sided” proposition – after buying New York-based SoundBetter, a freelance marketplace which allows creators to book exclusive contributions from producers, songwriters, ma...