i’m feeling for eliza doolittle, it seems she’s sick of being compared to me all the time. then again, maybe if she’d gone in a different direction with her artwork and wasn’t riding around on a chopper in her new video……….

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Lily Allen is scheduled to make her final live appearance at the Big Chill Festival on August 5—and it’s a pretty good way to go out when you consider she’ll be performing alongside Thom Yorke, Massive Attack and MIA.

Its a bit of a shame how Lily’s music career turned out, but she is now reportedly going to open her vintage fashion store and is also planning to design a vintage clothing line that will come out in 2011. This is going to be a million worlds away from the music industry, but Im sure with her exposure already its not going to be tough to build the stores reputation.

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According to a report today, Lady Gaga’s track “Poker Face” was one of the most popular tracks during a five month period on Spotify and was played more than a million times. So how much money does she get paid by STIM (the Swedish Performing Rights Society) for this massive achievement?

SEK 1150 – that’s around $167 or roughly 113 Euros.

But that’s not quite the whole story… The performing rights contribution splits out to $0.000167 a play, but so what? Lady G (or more likely her record label) will also be being paid directly by Spotify with a flat fee per play (a couple of pennies per track) and a chunk of the service’s ad revenue. Lady Gaga’s direct revenues from that many streams will be in the five figure $USD range, and the performing rights system probably does more to support their own bureaucratic infrastructure than it contributes towards paying her a sensible wage. It would be interesting to know exactly what proportion of their receipts is paid to artists, and what is spent on running the society, as well as why the PRS collects a fee for every track played on services like Spotify, even those of tracks by non-PRS-members.

Lily Allen has previously complained on Twitter “@citricsquid did you know the major own hold massive stakes in Spotify, and earn advertising revenue at yet another loss to the artist” that she’s not seeing any of the revenue from her Spotify plays, but this is likely to be because the majors have all bought shares in Spotify, and are both giving them an easy ride on the music licensing fees and taking their own substantial cut of anything that comes back. Lily Allen would do well to have a little faith in Spotify, given her well publicised feelings against file sharing.

Of course, this diminished revenue wouldn’t be a problem if she’d signed her music up for digital distribution to with someone like RouteNote, who get the full per track rate, and only take 10% on the back end.

That said, the decision of the majors to support Spotify and other streaming services is a pragmatic one; if it is really the case that freemium services are reducing piracy and providing a way for labels to ‘monetize’ their catalogues online then it makes sense for the majors to be in on the ground floor and take advantage of future success, especially since they’re looking such ghastly financials [pg. 33 for the headlines] in the face. Right, now that’s sorted we can all go back to wondering whether or not the Lady is a trap…

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[EDIT] We’ve mentioned Dan Bull before on this blog, and his other nostalgia inducing track ‘Generation Gaming’: if this raises a smile you might want to go and check out our favourite gaming blog Wire Ninja

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The heated discussion continues without her – politicians, ISP’s, heavyweight industry bodies, and artist coalition groups are pitching in, as well as individuals like Allen. Opinions range between extremes; some think that sharing files helps boost artists profiles, others that it is choking the life out of the industry by draining revenue that should go to fund the success of major artists and the development of up-and-coming new acts. What is unarguably true is that people are not going to stop sharing music across the internet. If a great new band starts up next door to me I want to tell people about them, the same if I stumble across them on the web, and the most convenient way to let my friends know about them is by sharing their content online. Where there is an easy, legal way to do so, any sane person would use it – that’s one of the reasons why Myspace was so successful, there was (and still is, although their star seems to be waning) so much great music up online for people to discuss – but where there isn’t an easy way to do it, like when people refuse to allow their music to be available for free, then people will look for other, less forthright, but still convenient ways to do the same thing.

What then, is the right way forward? Filesharers (many of whom are avid music fans, gig attendees and t-shirt purchasers) won’t stop wanting to hear and distribute good and new music online. For obvious business reasons, ISP’s are extremely reluctant to bear the costs involved in filesharing, or to pass it on to their customers. Artists are undoubtedly losing revenue, since if it’s quicker and easier to steal an album than to buy it, and the likelihood of any repurcussions is tiny, then album sales will fall. Someone needs to come up with a way that music fans can share music onliine, that is legal, and that profits artists. Who could that white knight be?

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