A Piffany About Royalties and Rights

One of the guiding principles of this here Substack, Piffany, reminds me to remind us that history doesn’t so much repeat itself as much as we forget to learn from history, which leads us to get stuck in circular arguments and narrow narratives. If we want to think outside of the box, then we must consider the box itself. Sometimes we just need a bald kid to tell us there is no box. Plenty of other times, we need someone in our lives (for me, ‘twas Mr. McKinley, my high-school freshman English teacher) to learn us that “context determines meaning.”

So my friends in the comedy community have found themselves in the middle of a scrape, as several of them (dozens, even) suddenly discovered over Thanksgiving that their catalogs of stand-up albums had vanished from Spotify, the world’s dominant streaming platform for on-demand audio. Why? Because they’d aligned themselves with Spoken Giants, a collaborative launched to seek publishing royalties for them, and which asked Spotify to pay the comedians accordingly. Spotify’s response on the night before Thanksgiving? Removing most (but suspiciously not all) of the Spoken Giants clients from the platform until they settle the matter.