Campus News

Swimming against the streaming

David Lowery, a lecturer for the Music Business Certificate Program at the Terry College of Business, has become one of the leading voices pushing for musicians’ rights on the Internet.
The New York Times recently ran a story documenting Lowery’s efforts to raise awareness about websites that reprint song lyrics without permission and make money through the advertisements.
Lowery also appeared in an article from Salon.com in which he talked about trends in the music business on the Internet, including streaming sites such as Spotify and Pandora.
Lowery has been a critic of these music services because of how musicians get paid for the use of their songs.
When asked if musicians are likely to get fed up and take their music off those sites, Lowery said, “I don’t know if artists will pull them en masse off of these streaming sites, but these streaming sites are based on kind of a weird concept: that every song is of the same value. In a normal economy, specialty products often cost more than mainstream products.”