Two numbers that don't really belong in the same sentence: $5,000. That is the total government funding The Pack Music Co-operative has received across five years and more than twenty grant applications.$420 million. That is the projected annual direct payment to unsigned Australian artists under a proposed government-backed music streaming scheme.

The distance between those two numbers is not a 'start-up' funding gap. It is a government policy choice. It's a decision, made repeatedly and across multiple government institutions, about which parts of the music ecosystem are worth investing in.

The maths of building a musician-owned streaming platform from scratch, in the country with some of the strongest streaming consumption per capita in the world, is genuinely strange.

This blog breaks down why the numbers our government has found via its own research should be the ones making the argument for The Pack.

👉 https://www.packmusic.au/blog/howstreamingsavedlocalmusic

#MusicPolicy #ArtsFunding #IndependentMusic #ThePackMusic #AustralianMusic #MusicIndustry #MusicEconomics #StreamingRoyalties

The story goes like this. Napster destroyed the music industry. Streaming saved it. The pirates were defeated. Heroes were made.

The problem with that story is that it describes a rescue that didn't happen. Music is still very available. Listeners are still enjoying it enormously. The people who made it are still not being compensated fairly for its use. The infrastructure enabling that use is still controlled by people whose primary stake is financial rather than creative.

Napster was shut down because it provided infrastructure allowing music to be distributed without consent and without compensation. Streaming platforms are legal, listed on stock exchanges, and have terms of service. They are also platforms that pay most independent artists less than $300 a year in median income, that used recommendation algorithms to promote music they commissioned at below-standard rates, and whose AI systems were trained on recorded music without consent and without payment. To our mind... not really heroes.

New blog traces the line from Napster to Spotify to the cooperative argument for why genuine rescue looks like structural ownership, not a new middle layer with a better PR strategy.

👉 https://www.packmusic.au/blog/meet-the-new-pirates

#Streaming #MusicianRights #PlatformCapitalism #IndependentMusic #ThePackMusic #CooperativeModel #MusicEconomics #Napster #Spotify

Spotify announced it paid $11 billion to the music industry in 2025. Largest annual payout in history. Definitely not a small number. And they want us to feel like this is a win for the music industry.

And it is a win... for some. Here's who won, specifically: the big 4 major record labels, distributors, publishers, and collecting societies. Not, as some might still assume, the artists who made the music.

Bonnie Tyler's 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' hit one billion streams. Spotify sent her a commemorative plaque. It sounds like she should have made bank off the song she made famous, right? She said the money was "just about nothing." The $2.7 million that Spotify reportedly paid out went to whoever currently holds the rights - which, forty years and multiple label changes later, is not straightforwardly the artist who sang the song.

The 100,000th highest-earning artist on Spotify made $7,300 in 2025. That's in the top 0.77% of 13 million uploaders. Less than 1%, considered the top earners on the platform, earning what is not a living wage anywhere in Australia. What most of us would barely consider supplementary income.

But what artists are finally starting to realise is that this is no accident. It's not even uncommon. The structure is working exactly as it was designed. And now we know… it was never actually designed for musicians. So the question that remains is, what IS designed for musicians – and how can we show up for it?

New blog from The Pack digs into the royalty chain, the user-centric alternative, and why a high five and a commemorative plaque is doing a lot of heavy lifting.👉 https://www.packmusic.au/blog/follow-the-money

#StreamingRoyalties #IndependentMusic #MusicEconomics #ThePackMusic #PlatformCooperative #FairPay #MusicianRights

The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

https://thewalrus.ca/the-death-of-the-middle-class-musician/

#HackerNews #DeathOfTheMiddleClassMusician #MiddleClassMusicians #MusicIndustry #Challenges #InMusic #MusicEconomics