SONY MUSIC PAYING INDIE LABELS SPOTIFY PROCEEDS

Following the liquidation of half its 5.707% stake in the streaming giant back in April (a net of about 761m), Sony Music informed indie labels via email on 6/14 that they would begin to share in the proceeds, starting by the end of August.

The profits will be doled out to "eligible artists and participants as soon as possible,” with a plan to calculate payouts by weighing the company's overall revenue and its Spotify revenues during the time it had equity.

The email states:

"SME obtained Spotify equity by, in part, balancing the strength of over one hundred years of SME’s history and success, both the past and the present. Therefore we are going to use an allocation methodology which equally weighs both SME’s overall revenue and SME’s Spotify revenue during the period SME held the equity (“The Calculation Period”) to share Spotify Net Proceeds with eligible artists and participants. We believe this allocation methodology gives proper recognition to those artists currently on roster and in our catalog that were the foundation of SME when the Spotify equity was obtained. This results in an allocation to nearly 100,000 eligible artists and participants across almost 2 million unique titles."

Story developing...