Meek Mill has big plans for the coming year.
This past Christmas Day, the Philly rapper announced that he was working with Lil Baby, Lil Durk, and 21 Savage to find someone that could help them build their own platform to share music.
He let of a series of tweets about the their plans early Christmas evening:
“Me lil baby Durkio tryna get somebody in Silicon Valley to build us our own music platform we can be majority owner in! We will pay!! We need top Silicon Valley steppers please!”
He continued: “21 gone link in too we need some app options we looking for the best platform builders!!!! Tryna get started 2021”
Meek Mill, Lil Baby, 21 Savage & Lil Durk
The news comes just a day after Bloomberg revealed that Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey was once again looking to acquire the TIDAL streaming service.
“Dorsey has discussed a potential deal with Jay-Z, the rapper and music mogul who acquired Tidal for $56 million in early 2015,” said an unnamed Bloomberg source familiar with the situation.
While TIDAL has struggled to keep pace with other digital streaming platforms since its launch in 2014, it is actually the second most generous DSP when it comes to compensating the artists their businesses are built on. And even then it’s still an embarrassingly low amount. Much lower than it needs to be, at least.
Jack Dorsey
Once you get a sense of how much each company is paying per stream, it makes it easier to understand why artists like Meek Mill and Lil Baby are looking to get launch a platform of their own. They know they’re getting the shortened of the stick when it comes to profits from digital music.
According to 2020 numbers, Napster pays artists the most with $0.019 USD per stream while TIDAL is sitting at 0.01284 USD per stream. The worst is YouTube at 0.0.00069 per stream, but some other larger platforms aren’t far off from that low figure. Amazon will pay you just $0.00402 per stream, Spotify pays $0.00437 per stream, Deezer pays $0.0064 per stream, Google Play Music plays $0.00676 per stream, and, coming in third place, Apple Music pays $0.00783 per stream. Ultimately, they’re low figures that make it more challenging for an artist to make ends meet.
Hopefully a main objective of this initiative from Meek and company is to empower artists with a DSP option that actually pays creatives fairly. Meek has also provided some additional insight to their game plan and what they hope to achieve.
Meek Mill
On Boxing Day, Meek replied to a comment from a fan who welcomed the arrival of a new DSP and pointed out that Spotify was 14 years old but only available in five African countries.
“we gone start something and donate a % to the people we make money from! We waiting on production now! #culturecurrency coming full blast!!!”
He would make two additional tweets touching on the group’s plans and emphasis on maximizing potential for black wealth:
“Respectfully to Spotify too we get millions with them one of my biggest platforms I sell on! We need their help too… but we gone build something where we can maximize black wealth and we not gone fail by any means ‘we got a real backing behind us’ let’s get it”
And also offered other artists / people with money to get involved in the early stages:
“We not even trying to build the same thing as Spotify …tidal … apple we wanna build a platform/tool and connect it with those big big companies and eat and build up some billion dollar shit! If you a big rapper that sale a lot and got a lot of influence rap in for %”
We not even trying to build the same thing as Spotify …tidal … apple we wanna build a platform/tool and connect it with those big big companies and eat and build up some billion dollar shit! If you a big rapper that sale a lot snd got a lot of influence rap in for %— Meek Mill (@MeekMill) December 26, 2020
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