Universal Wants Streaming Pay Rewritten. The Last Rewrite Drew A Line Under You.

On Thursday the 29th of October, the head of the biggest record company in the world told investors that the way streaming pays has to change.

Lucian Grainge runs Universal Music Group. On the third-quarter results call he said “the structure of our DSP agreements has to change.” DSP means the services: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube. He said paying every stream the same way makes the AI problem worse, and that the next phase of Universal's plan runs to the end of 2028.

The last time Universal pushed a change like this, it came with a line drawn under small artists. If your songs get a few hundred plays a month, you were under that line. Here is what was said, what the last rewrite did, and what you can do before the next one.

What is actually on the record

Digital Music News reported Universal's third-quarter results the same day. The full call transcript was published by Investing.com on the 1st of November. Here is Grainge in his own words: “The uniform application of pro-rata payments makes the problem worse.”

He said fully AI-generated tracks “should never be compensated on the same basis as music that creates real and lasting demand.” He put a number on the flood — “more than 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks are uploaded daily” — and added: “The volume is growing faster than the safeguards.” That number is his, not mine.

Then an analyst described what Universal seemed to want as a “supercharged artist-centric model.” Universal's chief digital officer, Michael Nash, answered: “I liked your characterization.”

Why that reaches your money

Most streaming services pay pro-rata. All the subscription money goes into one pot, and the pot is split by share of streams. Every stream is the same size slice.

“Artist-centric” means some streams count for more. But the pot does not grow because a stream got a boost.

A bigger slice for one group is a smaller slice for everyone outside it.

We have already seen the first version. In September 2023 Universal and Deezer announced a model where, as Music Week reported, “professional artists” — at least 1,000 streams a month from at least 500 unique listeners — get a double boost.

And on Spotify, a track has to reach 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months to earn anything at all. Spotify's own help page says the money from tracks under that line is “reallocated by streamshare to increase the payments going to eligible tracks.” That is not a forecast. It is how the pot is split today.

Who counts as a real artist

Grainge also said “real artists drive the value of the platforms,” and that they “deserve to be more highly compensated.” Nobody is going to argue for AI spam farms. But look at what the first version actually measured: not who made a song, but how many people played it.

A threshold cannot tell a bedroom producer with 400 listeners from a spam account with 400 listeners. Both sit under the line.

Spotify said on the 20th of October that tracks likely to be AI-generated are ten times more likely to fall below its 1,000-stream threshold. Read that the other way round. The line sorts by volume. If you are small, you are sorted with the spam, whoever you are.

The honest part

Most of this is not decided. Grainge did not say what the new structure is. No service has announced a change because of this call. Universal says it will share more with its full-year results.

Universal negotiates for Universal. But the services set the rules for everyone in the pot. That is how a 1,000-stream rule applies to you when you never signed with anyone.

And there is a fair point on the other side. If the spam genuinely leaves the pot, the money it was taking goes back to the people who are left, and that could include you. Whether that outweighs a new line depends on where the line is drawn, and nobody has published where it will be.

Three things to do this week

1. Open Spotify for Artists and look at every song's streams over the last 12 months. Mark each one under 1,000. On Spotify, those earn nothing today.
2. Stop splitting your own count. Spotify counts each recording separately: a sped-up version, a re-upload, or a re-release under a new ISRC each starts again at zero.
3. Build one income line no pool rule can touch: a direct sale, a paid download, or a list of people you can email on release day.

Where droplr fits

I built droplr.fm on my own, for that third one: a pre-save that collects an email address, not just a follow; a download gate that asks for the address directly; and, on the free plan, you can see every address you have collected.

Exporting the list starts at A$12 a month, and the whole list downloads on any plan if you close your account. The honest catch: droplr's links do not outlive droplr. The list does. That is the point.