UK songwriters body asks labels to share Facebook money

All three major labels and a host of indies promised to share any windfall revenue from Spotify’s direct public listing with their artists. But now British songwriters body BASCA is launching a campaign focusing on how revenues from Spotify AND Facebook will be shared with its members.

The #soldforasong campaign was launched and it shows how Facebook is a real issue for songwriters. According to BASCA:

BASCA understand that those deals involve lump sum advance payments worth many millions of pounds. There are concerns however that no pledge has been made by music publishers to equitably share any financial benefit derived from such licenses with songwriters and composers.

While Facebook does have a rights-management system under development, BASCA is worried that unidentified works will lead to "unattributable" income from the publishing deals, demanding that:

sufficient efforts are made to establish correct usage and not just to distribute monies via an ‘assumed’ market share analogy.