Cool, so not only do Spotify pay big record labels/artists more than smaller artists (because if I listen exclusively to artist X, my subscription money is paid across all streams globally on the platform, not just the artist I actually listened to) but then it double dips and those artists could be getting fucked over twice.
I agree with you that pro-rata streaming royalties are not ideal. DSPs like Deezer do have 'artist centric' royalty systems, which I think are great.
That being said, the MLC has been holding this money for 6 years, and by law (The Music Modernization Act 2018), they can't hold it forever, so they have to disperse it somehow. So the best thing for artists to do here is go register their songs so they get their money.
The code behind this is a whole AWS stack built as part of our larger infrastructure. It's not just a simple script, it's a full data pipeline. The MLC data is ~400GB of raw TSV data dropped on an FTP server every week, which we then process, index, make available internally for our tools. The Blackbox site is a frontend that leverages this infrastructure.
That being said, everything we use here, the MLC Bulk Data feed and the Spotify API are publicly available.
Wow, streaming is great.
That being said, the MLC has been holding this money for 6 years, and by law (The Music Modernization Act 2018), they can't hold it forever, so they have to disperse it somehow. So the best thing for artists to do here is go register their songs so they get their money.
On that note, would it really be hard to use my own deployment of your app to check against the datasources your deployment uses?
That being said, everything we use here, the MLC Bulk Data feed and the Spotify API are publicly available.
https://www.themlc.com/bulk-database-feed ($100 sign up fee and $25/mo)