Given that Spotify is moving more into spoken-word content, including podcasts and audiobooks, the following case is worth watching. In December, Spotify removed hundreds of comedians’ work from its service due to a royalties dispute with Spoken Giants, a rights administration company trying to change standards around how spoken-word content gets paid. When Spotify plays comedian’s content, the comedians usually get paid by their label or distributor as well as by digital performance rights organizations. The dispute: Comedians are not compensated for writing that content or for their literary rights. (This is how payments work in the music industry: there are performance royalties and songwriting royalties.) Essentially, Spoken Giants wishes to develop a writing credit royalty system for podcasts. It strikes us as unlikely.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
