The Equity Nobody Shared

At Pop-Kultur in Berlin, on a panel called Regaining Control, City Slang founder Christof Ellinghaus was asked how the independent sector takes power back. He opened with a diagnosis rather than a plan:

Recorded music is kaput.

He went on: a late-stage crisis, control lost, and within five to ten years it will be mandatory to build something that actually works in the interest of artists and of the people who invest in copyrights — which, in his phrasing, means independent labels. Up against opportunistic oligarchs, monopolists, and a market that has grown around the art and makes a fortune from it.

I want to take the structural claim seriously, because there is a specific piece of history underneath it that gets repeated wrongly all the time.

The majors do not own Spotify

You hear this constantly, and it is not true. It is also less interesting than what actually happened.

When Spotify needed catalogue in order to exist at all, it could not simply buy licences — it did not have the money. So the 2008 deals paid the rightsholders partly in equity. Sony BMG took around six per cent. Universal five. Warner four. EMI two. And Merlin, the body representing the entire independent sector, got one.

Most of that is gone now. Warner sold its whole position after the 2018 listing for something in the region of half a billion dollars. Merlin sold out too. Sony offloaded about half. Today Universal and Sony each hold roughly three per cent — real money, no control.

So no, they don't own it. What matters is that they were paid in shares at the moment the terms of the entire streaming era were being written.

Two currencies, one of them shared

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth being precise about because it is the whole argument.

A record contract pays an artist a share of revenue earned from their recordings. Royalties are recording revenue, so royalties are shared. Proceeds from selling a block of shares in a technology company are not recording revenue. No standard contract has a claim on them.

Several majors did promise to pass some of it on, voluntarily, after the fact, and some money did move. But a promise made after a windfall is not the same thing as a term agreed before one. The value that artists' recorded work created landed in an asset class their contracts had never heard of.

And note who got nothing. One per cent, shared across every independent label on earth, at the exact moment the rules were set. Ellinghaus is not describing bad luck. He is describing a table he was barely seated at.

What it did to the rate

The conflict is not hypothetical. If you hold shares in the company you are negotiating with, your upside arrives through two doors. A higher per-stream rate is one. A larger, faster-growing platform whose valuation lifts your holding is the other — and unlike the first, the second does not have to be divided with anybody.

Layer the pro-rata payout on top, where the pot is split by share of total plays, and the structure favours whoever owns the most catalogue and the most volume. Which was, and is, the same handful of companies.

None of this requires anyone to have behaved corruptly. It only requires people to have acted in their own interest, which is the least surprising assumption in economics. The result is a rate that was never really argued for on the artist's behalf by a party with an undivided interest in arguing for it.

Where the money goes when it accumulates

Ellinghaus finishes with drones, and it sounds like rhetoric until you check it.

In June 2025, Daniel Ek led a €600 million round into Helsing, a European defence company building AI systems and combat drones, and became its chairman. Deerhoof, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Xiu Xiu and eventually Massive Attack pulled their catalogues in protest.

You can hold a range of views about European defence spending and still notice the structural point, which is not about weapons. Value extracted from music does not stay in music. It accumulates with whoever owns the layer above the artists, and then it goes wherever that person finds it most interesting. There is no mechanism returning it to the ecosystem it came from, because none was ever built. I made a version of this argument about what the metrics measure; this is the same problem one floor up, in the cap table rather than the dashboard.

What regaining control actually looks like

Less than the phrase suggests, and that is worth saying plainly.

It looks like selling directly. Bandcamp is still the most familiar route — you buy, the artist keeps most of it, you own the file. Its structural weakness is that it has been sold twice in recent years and nobody using it had a vote either time.

Subvert is the attempt at fixing that one specific thing. It launched in 2025 as a co-operative with roughly 22,000 founding owner-members — artists, labels, workers and listeners who own it, elect its board, and voted to charge no platform fee. AI-generated music is not permitted. Whether it survives is genuinely open. But it cannot be sold out from under the people who built it, which is a structural answer to a structural problem rather than a better app.

Our own releases sit on Bandcamp and Subvert. Streaming, where it happens, runs through Tidal, Apple and YouTube. Spotify appears nowhere on this site.

That is not a solution to anything. It is one small label-shaped decision, and it costs reach every single time. Ellinghaus is right that the fix has to be structural and that five to ten years is the honest timeframe. What individuals can do in the meantime is refuse to feed the part of the machine that was built to keep the returns.

Or, more usefully: buy the record.

Source: the Regaining Control: A Sustainable Future for Independent Artists and Labels panel at Pop-Kultur Berlin, with Christof Ellinghaus (City Slang), Sadie Thompson (Motive Unknown) and Andy Zammit; clip posted by the festival on 11 November 2025. Equity figures are from the 2008 licensing deals and the 2018 listing as reported at the time; Helsing figures from June 2025 reporting.