Eh, I kinda understand it. If they want to encourage incorporation of the tech they kinda need to offer and incentive. It’s either this or more promotion towards tracks that have it.
But if it truly is superior, won’t I as a consumer favor those recordings with spatial whatever it is by listening to them more, thereby encouraging the producers with more money because of the increased streaming over the others? Surely making such recordings a favored class where payments are concerned is just a form of double dipping?
Well I mean it isn’t like they advertise each album as being Spatial Audio. You likely aren’t gonna go out of your way to find it.
A 10% premium doesn’t sound like it would dilute royalties that much.
If half of the plays are getting paid the bonus and half are not, then you’d have 55 credits for the bonus plays and 50 for the non-bonus plays. 50/105 is 47%, so that’s still half the plays getting 47% of the credit. Or basically a 6% reduction in revenue.
If the holdouts on the tech are only 20% of the plays, then we’re looking at 20/88 split in revenue, or where the 20% non-bonus tracks will get a 18.51% of the revenue, or a loss of 7.4% of revenue they would’ve otherwise.
It’s not nothing, but it’s also not a devastating loss of revenue.