License to stream? A study of how rights-holders have responded to music streaming services in Norway

Abstract

This article rewinds a decade to reconstruct the arrival of streaming services and their impact on the music industry. It focuses on copyright holders and their experience with reaching out and getting paid via streaming, charting developments in the relationship between licensor and licensee such as the rise of direct licensing. The study is based on interviews with labels, publishers, collecting societies and interest organisations for composers and performers in Norway, where streaming caught on early. It finds that streaming services, with Spotify out in front, have led majors and indies to wage a war over rights and global market shares, while the ability of collecting societies to hang on to their bargaining cards now depends on the way in which on-demand access to music is legally defined. This article also concludes that, so far, these struggles have been easier on the composers than on the performers of music.