How the creators of the Vault music service are fighting for justice

Famous British musician James Blake took part in the creation of the new streaming platform Vault. He talks about how one of the leading electronic artists is trying to make the distribution of funds from music on the Internet as fair as possible. Igor Gavrilov.

One of the most discussed news of February in the music world was the removal of works belonging to Universal Music Group (UMG) from the TikTok catalog (see “Kommersant” on February 7). In an open letter to Universal that preceded the withdrawal, the music major accused the popular social network of “undervaluing music and shortchanging artists and songwriters, as well as their fans.”

Conflict between such large industry players always seems like something that is happening somewhere in the financial stratosphere. It is difficult to feel the unpleasant consequences for each individual artist until he talks about them himself. As did James Blake, who posted several posts on the social network X (ex-Twitter) about the unfair distribution of funds from music played on TikTok. The first thing he brought up was the track “Godspeed,” his cover version of a Frank Ocean song. User videos for this song often indicated that they used “original sound,” but the authors were not named and therefore did not receive royalties. James Blake wrote, addressing fans, that if their idol’s song “goes viral” on TikTok, they should not be under any illusions about a sharp increase in their income.

Elaborating on this idea in his posts, James Blake noted that in response to his dissatisfaction with royalties from the use of works on TikTok, he was often told: “Don’t try to get justice, just use the situation to generate income in another way.” It was meant that it was pointless to fight such corporations, but it was possible to increase, for example, concert activity and earn more money in the field of live music. But Mr. Blake does not agree with this formulation of the question: “Musicians should be able to earn income through their music.”

The validity of this approach is rooted in the glorious times of super-sales of physical media, when musicians with successful entries in the catalog could live comfortably without giving concerts at all. Now it seems almost medieval, but James Blake is a master, an innovator, a trendsetter in modern music, respected throughout the industry, and his cry for justice is completely justified. Plus, he’s armed with numbers. According to his calculations, for one stream a musician receives from $0.003 to $0.005, depending on the platform. A million streams gives $3,000, but the label will take 50%, 15–20% will be taxes. And this despite the fact that 1 million streams is the lot of only a very small layer of content creators.

“If we want quality music, someone is going to have to pay for it,” writes Blake. “Streamers aren’t paying properly, labels want more than ever and are just sitting around waiting for you to go viral, TikTok isn’t paying , and touring becomes prohibitively expensive for most artists. The brainwashing has worked and now people think music is free.” And finally, the saddest forecast: “Model [индустрии] prepares you for AI-generated music for which the musicians are not paid anything at all.”

Usually the words of even the most critical musicians remain words. However, James Blake went further. In collaboration with the creators of the Vault platform (“cellar”, “storage”), he created a service, a subscription to which allows music lovers to receive music directly from its creators. Blake explains: “The idea behind Vault is that fans can, for a monthly fee, subscribe directly to an artist’s page to receive unreleased music and be the first to know about ticket sales and everything else.” The platform is still being finalized, but it already has a James Blake page, where by subscribing for $5 a month you can listen to four of his previously unreleased tracks.

For now, Vault looks more like a donation service than a music platform. Therefore, on social networks it has already been dubbed something like Patreon or “OnlyFans for artists.” For money comparable to the cost of a subscription to an entire streaming service with a constantly updated catalog of all the world’s music, you get exclusive tracks from one of your favorite artists. On the other hand, Vault is a story not about service, but about justice. In the world, however, there already exists a mechanism that has tried to ensure a fair distribution of funds between musicians through the creation of independent musical communities. This is the Bandcamp platform. Last year, the owners of Bandcamp sold it for $300 million to the licensing company Songtradr, after which the platform’s staff was cut by 50%. We have to admit that the most romantic industry projects like Pitchfork (see “Kommersant” on January 18) or Bandcamp in the modern world survive with difficulty and at the cost of big compromises.

Vault is not the solution to every problem. However, James Blake is stimulating an important dialogue between music creators, marketplaces and audiences. And ideas, even the craziest ones, in the end, have to be tested by someone. In this case, this is a person who very well understands the nature of creativity and the mechanisms of its delivery. In particular, the fact that most musicians are not at all inclined to advertise every second of their lives on social networks and are not world champions in SMM management. They just want to make money from their creativity, which they spend their whole lives on.