As revenues from sales of traditional media have plunged, the music business has been looking for alternate ways of making money from its products, including a variety of subscription services, ad-supported streams, and blanket licenses. The focus of these efforts has largely been on how to ensure that revenue gets collected by the industry in general instead of disappearing into the black hole of piracy, but there’s a related issue that doesn’t receive as much attention: how that money gets distributed once it’s collected. In an attempt to highlight this issue, the Future of Music Coalition has released a set of principles for the compensation of musicians. Although the document focuses on money from new distribution models, it reads much more like an effort to rewrite the rules of the entire business.

The FMC calls itself a “research and advocacy organization that seeks a bright future for creators and listeners,” two groups which tend to have contentious relationships with the major record labels. Based on the document and an accompanying explanation, the FMC isn’t a big fan of the labels, either. So, for example, one of the principles calls for the ability of artists to audit the flow of cash related to their works through the record label’s coffers. In explaining this, the FMC states, “Music industry history is full of stories—anecdotal and otherwise—of misleading accounting by copyright owners.”

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