My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89

http://thetrichordist.com/2013/06/24/my-song-got-played-on-pandora-1-million-times-and-all-i-got-was-16-89-less-than-what-i-make-from-a-single-t-shirt-sale/

by uladzislau • 13 years ago

258 236 13 years ago

thetrichordist.com

ctdonath2• 13 years ago

Um...music (information) wants to be free?

Why sign up for a system which provides almost no return?

ETA: Sorry, the first line was a "couldn't resist", presented (badly) as just raising another popular meme and invoking discussion of the conflict thereof.

The second line refers to the fact that somewhere he signed a release whereby (however obtuse, obfuscated, and nigh unto unavoidable) such financial abuse was consented to. In comparison, consider how schools are offering near-free degrees (real ones, like MIT) in retaliation to exorbitant student debt, and doctors & patients are opting out of the hideous costs of government-run healthcare by returning to cash & subscriptions (I don't mean to provoke arguments over those, just as points of comparison). Somewhere, somehow, alternatives exist where real payment is demanded and he actually would get paid (and no I don't mean "make money performing", as some music just isn't per se).

weisser5• 13 years ago

You cannot opt-out of Pandora.

TylerE3• 13 years ago

Sure you can. Don't publish through traditional channels, retain your own copyrights and masters. Sell vinyl out of the back of your van at gigs. Plenty of underground acts have paid rent that way.

taternuts• 13 years ago

Yeah - they can pretty much play anything they want and only have to pay the artist if they go through the motions to register with them. It seems like quite the racket to me.

owenjones4• 13 years ago

I believe music is more than "information", when I buy an album, I'm not buying the sheet music but the recorded of someone more talented than myself performing that music.

How do you apply "information wants to be free" to music like this?

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

It's... um... information about the emotions of the artist?

pessimizer3• 13 years ago

Being written down is not what makes something information, so I'm not sure why sheet music would be any more information than recorded music.

ctdonath2• 13 years ago

How do you apply "information wants to be free" to music like this?

How do you differentiate? An .MP3 is just another data file, trivially copied, with the added downside that government has decreed that under certain common circumstances anyone can play it while paying him less than a pittance for it. I'm not advocating this view, just noting the painful reality thereof.

tsotha• 13 years ago

He didn't. Legally Pandora can play the song and pay rates set by the government.

soupboy• 13 years ago

For this to be a fair comparison shouldn't they compare the 1 million Pandora streams to (18797 radio plays * number of listeners each time)?

jedc• 13 years ago

Exactly. To really be fair you need to compare the audience for each play, and for Pandora/Spotify it's just one person per play versus X (hundred/thousand) for regular radio.

SomeCallMeTim3• 13 years ago

Looks like the answer is probably "thousands" [1] of listeners per radio station. The back-of-the-envelope is that the top station will have 1% of its metro area listening at a time (metro areas as defined here [2]).

Even the 100th largest metro area would typically have 5k people listening to a play of a track.

If you assume 5000 people listening per play at 18797 plays, and then calculate a cost PER LISTENER (at $1373.78 royalties paid) you end up with $0.014617 royalty per 1000 "performances" of the song (counting every listener's radio as a "performance"). AND, when you multiply that back out with the number of "performances" on Pandora, you get....$16.94.

Considering WAY more people probably heard the song on the radio, possibly by a factor of 5 or more, this is a HIGH estimate; actually doing the math would likely come out with a much lower equivalence, but it's the right order of magnitude.

I am all about protecting artists rights to earn, and for buying music that I'm listening to. As the parallel comment by smack_fu mentions, though, this is really about the insignificance of the Pandora market size more than anything else. That and the inability of a particular blogging artist to do enough basic math to realize the royalty per performance is higher on Pandora than it is on the radio.

[1] http://www.radio-media.com/song-album/articles/airplay66.htm...

[2] http://www.arbitron.com/home/mm001050.asp

smackfu8• 13 years ago

More than being about fair vs. not fair, this points out that Pandora is a meaningless bit of noise in the recording industry.

anigbrowl13• 13 years ago

No, they shouldn't, because you and I can be both listening to Pandora without hearing the same song. If Pandora played the same songs to everyone, it wouldn't be as popular because people wouldn't hear the music they like.

How many more times is this bullshit argument going to be offered up by people who wouldn't be caught dead listening to the radio for this very reason?

dwaltrip2• 13 years ago

The artist is complaining that Pandora pays a low royalty rate, and to make this claim they compare to FM/AM radio and Sirius XM royalties. However one "play" on radio or Sirius is equivalent to at least several thousand "plays" on Pandora, as there are many people listening to the radio station (and hence the song) at the same time, while with Pandora it is generally only one or two people listening at a time. So what you really want to compare are the "per listener" royalty rates, which appear to be pretty similar. Say 5000 station listeners * 18797 radio plays = 94M "pandora equivalent plays". If you compare these adjusted play counts to the royalty amounts, radio only pays 30% higher, not 100 times higher.

One could make the argument that a Pandora listener should be worth more, as they are choosing to listen to the personalized Pandora station rather than more forcibly listening to whatever the radio DJ puts on. However, the whole debate is obviously not as clear as the OP wishes it to be.

paulsutter2• 13 years ago

Pandora and Spotify can do a lot more for bands by helping them plan tours, sell tickets to shows, and connect with fans. They could also help venues book and promote acts with known local followings.

There are hundreds of thousands of people who heard that song, like that type of music, and would consider attending a show and spending real money to get in. They might buy a tshirt too. Pandora could notify listeners when the shows come up, and help bands plan their tours to towns with more fans.

It could be real revenue for the bands, and for Pandora.

EDIT: Doesn't even mean a UI change, could be done with ad retargeting, or any performance marketing mechanism.

weisser5• 13 years ago

It's a real problem. There is no viable funnel through which to convert Pandora streams into transactions except the "Buy" dropdown (which I'd guess very few people click on - Pandora is often playing in the background in another tab).

Daisy (Beats by Dre's "Spotify") is trying to do this by partnering with Topspin and we shall see what happens - I'm excited to check it out.

The fact is, all-you-can-eat streaming platforms will never scale to the amount where payouts for plays are significant if they continue with the freemium model. Artists need the ability to sell other products and experiences to those listeners. I'm, admittedly, biased towards the idea that artists need to seek new direct-to-fan revenue streams.

Here's a piece I wrote on Hypebot about this: http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/01/music-subscription-se...

TylerE3• 13 years ago

As a music fan, I would take anything associated with "Beats By Dre" as the exact opposite of credible and useful.

pvnick• 13 years ago

I also think that there's a really huge opportunity here for Big Data to make a Big Impact (excuse me for being cliche). See http://beluga.grooveshark.com for a good example. Imagine the possibilities of linking music consumption data with demographics/sales/tours/etc data to optimize A&R, tour routing, merchandise design, etc. AFAIK there aren't really any strong players in this space, and it presents a fantastic opportunity for someone to make a ton of money.

jmduke• 13 years ago

Incidentally, I'd imagine the same technology, methodologies, and infrastructure used for planning and optimizing shipping routes (first by UPS/FedEx, now Amazon) would be very applicable in this arena.

jcomis• 13 years ago

except a good portion of bands and venues are under the boot of ticketmaster/livenation who will never participate in any sort of profit sharing like this.

austenallred• 13 years ago

Exactly. If you want innovation to be a real force in music, you have to kill Ticketmaster/Livenation. As I've said before, that will be close to impossible for a startup to do, and the next real opportunity will be 2015 (when a lot of contracts wear out). Regardless, an entrepreneur would have to hit a grand slam to even have a chance against TM/LN.

creativityhurts• 13 years ago

You can use Songkick[1] for that or Last.fm's Events section. On the other hand, I've see Rdio promoting shows and pre-releases on their Twitter account.

[1] http://www.songkick.com/

llamataboot2• 13 years ago

Even the relatively simple app that I installed on top of Spotify that emails me when an artist I listen to regularly is playing near me has increased my live show attendance by a factor of 4-5.

GotAnyMegadeth• 13 years ago

Which app is that? I used Last.fm to notify me at the moment, but it's not perfect.

loceng• 13 years ago

Is there a way to know how that increased sales of the song, assuming there was an easy and immediate way for listeners to do so?

danman01• 13 years ago

would be interesting to compare pre-pandora days (prior to, say, amassing 100k plays for 'Low' in a quarter) to the current revenue generated for Cracker as a whole. I'm pretty sure pre streaming music days will win by a long shot. "How will musicians support all these tech startups?!" That's the question.

ngoel36• 13 years ago

If your song stream convinced nobody to buy your song on iTunes or buy a ticket to your concerts, then you have bigger problems than Pandora.

Samuel_Michon4• 13 years ago

The author didn’t state that nobody buys his songs on iTunes. And just because Apple pays artists well, is that a justification for Spotify to pay peanuts? “I see you can pay your rent this month. Good, then you won’t be needing my money!”

redblacktree• 13 years ago

His point, of course, is that Pandora should be viewed as a marketing channel, not a way to make money in itself. In the old days of Payola, this artist would have paid Pandora in order to be played on their stations. This is an improvement for the artist; he's just not seeing the big picture.

frossie• 13 years ago

I think the point is that Pandora acts as a discovery app. It plays you something and you think "hey I like it, I'll go buy it on iTunes".

Now I have no reason to believe I am representative (and in fact I would be surprised if I was), but 60% of the music I have purchased in the last couple of years has been as a follow-up to a Pandora play. Another 35% has been following a Shazam tag from a radio station, and about 5% from a movie soundtrack or something like that. Of those, Pandora is the only one that causes me to buy albums instead of solely individual tracks, which is an order of magnitude more money.

So I know for a fact that N artists got money from me that they would have never gotten if not for Pandora. That doesn't help the (100-N) whose track played and I didn't buy them; but, you know, I actually didn't care enough to want to listen to them again. Or, Pandora played them while I had the computer on mute (played is not the same as listened).

Now the legitimate question is, how many people are like me, as opposed to people who use Pandora without buying anything at all as a result of what they hear? I don't know the answer to that question and I suspect neither does Pandora (they have a "buy" button so they can presumably track that, but I only sometimes use it rather than just independently look for the artist on iTunes some later time).

corresation• 13 years ago

Not every musician wants to tour (often a very expensive venture), and even those who do can't cover 100% of the globe. Further there are so many streaming options now that actual purchases are becoming somewhat of a relic.

It is incredibly cheap to dictate the business models of others. Are you a software developer? How about you do that for free then and maybe you can do like training classes or something and you can make all of your money on that. I hear that's where the programming economy is going.

leot3• 13 years ago

You realize that it was technology itself, in the first place, that allowed musicians to work hard for some months, and then get paid for a lifetime from the results.

You also realize that not-yet-established musicians would pay exorbitant amounts of money to merely get heard.

So, excuse me if I have little sympathy for the "plight" of the recording-only musician.

ryangripp• 13 years ago

+SiriusXM plays "commercials" on channels where clearchannel has an interest (KISS, etc.) Clear channel was an early investor in XM to insulate them from the threat of satellite radio vs FM networks (which they own a large share of)

+Streaming networks like Pandora and Spotify actually pay more per stream then SiriusXM does because satellite radio pays the Terrestrial (FM/AM) radio rates.

+The Math on this is confusing because a Terrestrial (FM/AM) station might pay $50 royalty to play a song but 200,000 people listened to it when it was broadcast.

toomuchtodo2• 13 years ago

Music doesn't have the value it once did. End of story. Why are we dwelling on this? There isn't going to be a magic way to increase the value of music.

brownbat2• 13 years ago

It's almost as if we have more people with more leisure time who can provide more entertainment instantly to larger audiences with trivial costs.

Or maybe like we have the internet competing for our entertainment attention, and it is just damn good sauce.

toomuchtodo2• 13 years ago

I would strongly agree with both.

badclient• 13 years ago

Does played mean someone listened to it in entirety? Otherwise it doesn't say much about the quality of your song. That is similar to claiming you have a million users without talking about engagement.

Samuel_Michon4• 13 years ago

The song in question is Low, by Cracker. A song that placed 64 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was also on the soundtracks of movies like The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

When you hear it, you probably recognize it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYdlqjiQPAc

roc• 13 years ago

"Here’s an idea! Play two minutes of commercials and double your revenue!"

If they could actually sell two minutes of commercials, I'm pretty sure they would.

Expecting them to match the rates paid by massive existing media companies is essentially wishing the startups who finally got traction in this niche, back out of the picture and the entire market back to the business models and rate of technological progress that those massive existing players deem sufficiently non-threatening to their broadcast businesses.

I have sympathy for the author. I really do. But the problem ought not be simplified down to "Pandora should pay what Sirius pays".

(Though it makes me wonder what rates the larger tech companies are paying, now that they're making similar offerings.)

mdm_• 13 years ago

The most shocking revelation to me in this article is that Sirius XM plays 13 minutes of commercials per hour! I could have sworn one of their big selling points was that they're commerical-free.

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

How rude of you! They are 100% commercial free- 78.3% of the time!

thinkmorebetter• 13 years ago

Most of their music stations are commercial-free. The news/talk/entertainment/etc stations have tons of commercials, so perhaps it just averages out to 13 minutes/channel.

zachgersh• 13 years ago

Pandora / Spotify are never going to be platforms that make musicians a living (I am happy this article is representing that fact to the rest of the public).

Performing Live / Selling Merchandise and doing other physical appearances is the only way you will ever make any money and even great artists who tour still can't make enough money to keep producing their art (their following just isn't big enough).

wheaties• 13 years ago

Quick question, how much did your label take as a cut?

Samuel_Michon4• 13 years ago

It’s Virgin Records, so quick guess: a lot.

yardie3• 13 years ago

And yet I'm the idiot amongst my peers because I actually buy albums. God forbid I do something as stupid as support my artists.

hindsightbias• 13 years ago

I can rationalize a hundred reasons to steal when everyone else does it.

pbhjpbhj• 13 years ago

If you want to support artists isn't there an argument for torrenting the music and sending them all the money.

yardie3• 13 years ago

Would you work freelance on spec and only take money from clients if they were unconditionally happy and at any price they wanted? That is the argument you are asking artists to accept.

kirillzubovsky• 13 years ago

The real question is, would anyone care to listen to your songs at all, if it wasn't for Pandora?

smackfu8• 13 years ago

How is that the real question? The post says the same song had 18,000 radio plays in the same time period.

I mean, it's a pretty recognizable song, just a bit old: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYdlqjiQPAc

corin_• 13 years ago

If you re-word it slightly to "How many of the people who listened to it through Pandora would (care to listen to your songs at all, if it wasn't for Pandora)" then it's more relevant, though not "the real question" to me. Though still kinda rudely worded.

gaadd33• 13 years ago

Probably given the song in question hit number 64 on the billboard hot 100 and number 3 on the modern rock chart.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Wow, that is so sad. One million plays is pretty crappy. Consider that there are 70M active subscribers [1] that means 1 in 7 of them may have listened to your song exactly once. And for the low price of $16.49 a million people have heard your song, where as before nobody had heard it.

Now go look at your iTunes sales, how many copies of that song have you sold? 10? 100? 1000? How many of those sales occurred because people heard your song on Pandora, who won't play specific songs on command, and so they wanted to hear it again on their time?

Back in the bad old payola days you would have paid much more than that just to have your song even on the freakin' radio. Because that was the cost of letting other people hear your music and come to the conclusion they wanted to buy it.

[1] http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/05/pandora-reports-70m-a...

zackbloom• 13 years ago

I think you mean 1 in 70

jstalin• 13 years ago

Not sure why people are voting you down. I'm pretty sure that it's common knowledge that artists, even in the old radio days, made their money on touring and often times ended up in the hole on album sales and radio play.

smackfu8• 13 years ago

where as before nobody had heard it

Um, this is an established band. This song is from 1993. It was pretty big at the time. That's why they still get thousands of dollars in radio revenue. That's why they aren't very impressed by the "exposure" or the $15 in payout.

jonknee2• 13 years ago

The radio exposure is many many times more listens. They would be paid similarly if they got anywhere close to the same amount of exposure on Pandora (actually a lot more, Pandora pays a ton more than a radio station).

jared314• 13 years ago

Is that the amount paid by Pandora, or the amount paid to the artist? I thought there was a lot of middle men taking percentage cuts in between Pandora and the artist.

http://www.indieandunsigned.com/the-music-royalty-breakdown/

robotcookies2• 13 years ago

It's only the amount paid to the artist. Pandora actually pays 12 cents per 100 plays meaning they pay $1200 for a million plays. So the middle men are apparently taking a huge cut. If I were a musician, I'd be more concerned about that.

If Pandora doubled what they pay out, that musician would still only make about $33. However, if that musician could get just 50% of what Pandora already pays out, said musician would get $600.

confusedsquirel• 13 years ago

I have seen posts like this from time to time. My question is this; Is this what the record company pays you or the service?

My guess is that this is the cut after the record company gets theirs.

psgibbs• 13 years ago

What this is missing is the amount of listeners each play counts for. On Pandora/Spotify/Youtube, a 'play' is typically one listener. For these, it's mainly worth noting that Spotify is about an order of magnitude more profitable per play ($1e-4 vs $1e-5).

Sirius is at ~$1/play, commercial radio is $0.07/play.

For Sirius XM, the breakeven number of listeners/play for the pricing structure to be comparable to Pandora is 70K. For Commercial Radio, the breakeven number of listeners/play is 5,000.

*edit: added the price/play numbers

dvt• 13 years ago

I don't mean to sound contentious.. but, uh, why is OP surprised? Music access quickly becoming a commodity. Pandora/Spotify do for music what Netflix did for movies. I mean, even Southpark did a show on this (viz. Blockbuster).

I'd say that the fact that the FM station paid OP 100x more than Pandora shows how hugely the FM/AM business models have failed and how for granted so many artists took being massively rich. Guess what, there are tons of talented people out there. Software is free, and everyone can compete. I'd say that's healthy. We're no longer stuck in the dark ages of information discovery (back when if something wasn't on the radio or on TV, no one had heard of it).

Also, ngoel36 said: "If your song stream convinced nobody to buy your song on iTunes or buy a ticket to your concerts, then you have bigger problems than Pandora."

This times a million. So your music is apparently awesome but you can't sell t-shirts or concert tickets (concerts are, after all, where the the real money is made).

"Why doesn’t Pandora get off the couch and get an actual business model instead of asking for a handout from congress and artists?"

I mean, this is just laughable, given how heavily the media industry is subsidized. Case in point: http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/05/07/the-government-is-no...

windsurfer• 13 years ago

OP is surprised because on conventional radio a single play can reach thousands of listeners earning you around a dollar. On Pandora, each play only reaches a single listener, so a million sounds like a lot.

Drakim• 13 years ago

As pointed out elsewhere, a "play" and a "play" here are wildly different. A radio "play" can involve several thousand people, while a Pandora "play" probably involves one or two persons.

smackfu8• 13 years ago

I'd say that the fact that the FM station paid OP 100x more than Pandora shows how hugely the FM/AM business models have failed

Failed how? They have a business model that pays the artists a reasonable amount of money, while at the same time making a profit for the radio station.

coldtea• 13 years ago

I don't mean to sound contentious.. but, uh, why is OP surprised? Music access quickly becoming a commodity.

Because people want to be in control of social life and have their say and not just leave it to blind forces (from Gods, to Father Stalin, to the Free Market, to technology).

You say "music is becoming a commodity" in the way people once said "It was the will of gods for you to die in the ripe old age of 30".

No, music is NOT becoming a commodity. Business players, regulations and what have you are MAKING music a commodity.If people want to reverse course, they always can.

msg• 13 years ago

FYI people, the author is David Lowery, lead singer/songwriter of Cracker. The song is "Low".

I like the song and you probably did too, if you ever heard it. It was used in The Perks of Being a Wallflower last year.

It does strike me that many people may be under 20 and this song might actually be older than they are. So I will assume the ignorance is genuine rather than flippant.

http://www.crackersoul.com/fr_home.cfm

DanielStraight2• 13 years ago

I'm over 20, and I've never heard of the author, group, song, or movie.

For another data point, I know plenty of people who had never heard of The Princess Bride, Firefly or Monty Python before me telling them.

There is no level of popularity which ensures universal familiarity. You should always assume ignorance is genuine. See also: http://xkcd.com/1053/

Uchikoma• 13 years ago

Agreed. I tell people: If my mom knows about it, it is probably famous. If not, it's a niche audience ;-)

Dewie• 13 years ago

What? Why would you even consider that people were trying to be flippant (disrespectful?)? So what if people know or don't know the artist? Does its popularity demand some kind of instant respect for the authors argument?

I'm just confused by what you are trying to achieve with this post

smackfu8• 13 years ago

Because a lot of the earlier comments seemed to think this guy was some disgruntled starving artist who had a million Pandora plays but no real success.

dylangs1030• 13 years ago

I don't mean to be heartless, but this makes sense to me.

By design, people aren't supposed to ean real revenue from their music on Pandora. It's more about exposure, isn't it?

I mean, the supply and demand of it doesn't work out in the artists' favor, only in Pandora's. No one can find your song or you specifically, so why would you have an opportunity to earn a lot of money? There's no demand for you or your work, just work in a certain genre that you might fulfill for a few minutes.

Again, I don't mean to be harsh, but it seems like it makes sense in Pandora's case. I think it would be more reasonable to expect some benefits to exposure and fame than expect revenue. Users aren't exactly incentivized to click that (admittedly tiny) buy button under the song.

cletus• 13 years ago

Man I'm sick of hearing this particular complaint.

Let's look at the numbers. 1M plays for ~$42. Sounds like not much right? Wrong.

Yes AM/RM Radio paid ~$1500 but for 20,000 plays. Now ask yourself this question: how many people heard those 20,000 plays? If the rate of pay was the same ($42/1M) it would have to be 35.7M listens. Well, at 20,000 radio plays that averages 1800 people per listen. Is the likely audience higher or lower than this number? It's bound to be higher. So streaming services are in fact paying more (per listen per listener).

See http://davidtouve.com/2011/12/13/uk-radio-versus-spotify-a-c...

paulsutter2• 13 years ago

You may be sick of hearing the complaint, but the real problem is that the complainers are misinformed.

Sounds like Pandora needs to put real pressure on getting those reports revised to be clearer. It's unwise to be hated by the industry that you depend upon.

anigbrowl13• 13 years ago

I don't think so. Pandora is much more narrowly tailored to the individual listener than radio, and radio is so corrupt that is' not a good model to start from in the first place.

DanielStraight2• 13 years ago

I think part of what drives the complaint is that a song being on Spotify is much more valuable to the listener than it being on the radio. There's a spectrum of value ranging from the radio at the bottom (you are subject to the whims of the DJ on when and where you hear the song), to Pandora (you still aren't in complete control, but you have a lot of influence), to Spotify (you are in complete control as long as the song remains on Spotify), to owning the song on an album or as a DRM-free download (you are in complete control forever).

I think since Spotify is so much closer to owning an album than it is to radio, many artists expect it to be closer in value to album sales than radio plays.

Not saying ignorance of the proper comparison isn't happening, just that it might not be the only reason.

AJ007• 13 years ago

When I was a kid (Napster era) I paid for nothing. The artists weren't stream-able, so there were no royalties either. Today I buy every damn song I listen to, thousands of dollars worth. When an artist I like comes out with a new CD, I buy it immediately.

I don't use Spotify or Google Music. I don't know what they pay to the artist. What I do know is my friends that use them have zero reason to buy a CD. I also know even the more obscure stuff shows up on there. Once they are older and have a family, they certainly don't have time to go to more than a couple of concerts a year, and they most likely are not wearing band t-shirts past 30.

The way radio worked, you heard a song once and a while, liked it, most of the artist's other songs you rarely or never heard. There was a big incentive to buy the CD.

Musicians need to have a freemium model, where you get free, unrestricted access to some songs, and then if you absolutely love the band you pay for the rest (or you can pirate it, but there are a few hoops to jump through for that one.) It has to be convenient, on demand, and a single standard. May be its lossless audio, or may be its just mastered differently. Someone who knows more about music would have to figure it out.

Despite all of this, my favorite musicians regularly release new albums. There are a few duds, but the music is good. Countless genres blended together and mutated, with virtually unlimited choices. As far as I'm concerned, this is a music renaissance.

mrgoldenbrown• 13 years ago

If it's on the radio I believe I can record it and play it at my leisure - as a 12 year old with a budget of $0, this is how I obtained most of my music. Has time shifting become illegal? If not, I am not at the mercy of the whims of a DJ, no more than I am at the whims of when a TV station plays episodes of Doctor Who - once it's on my DVR I have it forever.

rhizome2• 13 years ago

The conversion factor you're using is completely invented, though, extrapolated from the current rates. The fact is that internet radio provides census precision for playcounts, which (I and some others think) should make those listens more valuable. In another sense, listeners are effectively filling out a survey for each play, giving the stations more information about their listeners, but the stations are keeping all the value for themselves. Even though there's an orthogonal problem of royalty rates that the stations labor under, this setup is more of the same.

SomeCallMeTim3• 13 years ago

I did a bit more math here [1] based on Arbitron numbers for radio stations. It turns out that he IS likely being paid more per listener on Pandora.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5935672

drawkbox• 13 years ago

People do forget that the older markets were smaller, more controlled so more people were funneled through them such as radio. Services like Pandora, Spotify and even iTunes are really better in nailing down real listens and tracking much better (who knows how many true listeners there were really in the past other than Nielsen type predictions) but also there were less avenues to get content so it was more valuable to get on there.

It is the same problem in games with the previously distinct console markets where you can get more per game because there are less options. Now there are tons of options and it is about bigger user base at a lower per sku revenue take.

The internet based services are more open and there are more of them vying for your attention (which is good) but that you need to do more amazing things to stand out than before.

The controlled markets like radio, movie distribution, consoles (sort of -- Xbone from next gen) since they are controlled/limited and the costs are higher to get on them, they to get bigger takes. But they aren't necessarily better. Many artists, movies, games aren't seen on those or would even be possible if they were still tightly controlled and limited markets. It doesn't make it easier to succeed, it adds more competition and they end up being bigger markets but there is less exclusivity to it. In the end this is good I believe but artists that would never have been seen for instance can now actually be seen at least in access and not locked out. An artist can now get verifiable tracking counts as well as before a station might cheat them like a publisher might do in books/games since it is estimated or trusted to the publisher/stations to report correct plays.

colechristensen• 13 years ago

Lets look at this a different way because comparing to broadcast radio is dicey.

I pay for Pandora One. It costs me $36 dollars a year. Assuming all songs are exactly 3 minutes long & I listen 24/7 for an entire year...

((42 U.S. dollars) / (1 million * 3 minutes)) * (1 year) ~= $7.36

That doesn't seem like a bad deal, 1/5 of my yearly fee going to the artist, the rest to operation and profit of Pandora.

... the thing is, I don't listen to Pandora 24/7. At best I listen a few hours a day, on average for a whole year maybe an hour a day. With that, the ratio drags down to 1/100 of my yearly fee. Once cent of every dollar I spend on a music service ends of going to the actual musicians? That sucks.

Maybe the license fees go more to groups above the artist that don't deserve it, maybe Pandora's operating expenses eat up most of the pie... I don't know who to blame for the situation, I just know it's rigged against the people actually creating the music.

And this is why pirates don't feel bad about copying music. When it is damn near impossible to consume music without 99% of the cost going to the distributors, why should anyone feel bad using distribution systems which don't charge?

Buy physical music from local shops and go to shows and buy tickets from local distributors. (I'm lucky to live in a place where I _can_ see top shelf music without paying the Ticketmaster ransom) Especially buy swag at these shows if you're really interested in your money getting to the people who deserve it. Otherwise, it seems pretty clear that any other way of 'legitimately' buying music pays nearly everything to the middle man.

warfangle3• 13 years ago

Artists need to quit thinking of Spotify/Pandora as revenue generators and more as advertisement for 1) live peformances and 2) quality physical goods (nicely pressed vinyl, for example).

The days of radio-only hits are over (or close to being over).

peeters• 13 years ago

I reject this line of thinking completely. It leads to artists concentrating on monetizing existing art rather than creating new art. That's bad for society. Furthermore, live performances? Really? So that guy that creates an amazing piece by himself using Garage Band or whatever, but can't perform it live: he's just screwed?

And it's also just bullshit logic. It's the equivalent of saying that photographers should give up getting a decent commission on their photographs, and instead concentrate on selling champagne at a high mark-up at their gallery exhibits.

polemic• 13 years ago

Wait what? $1,500 for 20,000 plays? If the average song is 4 minutes long[1] that's 55 days of continuous music. So, a radio station that played non-stop music, 24/7 for a year is going to pay just under $10,000 total in royalties.. for a year.

That's pretty amazing, but I guess it's a matter of supply and demand: there's an awful lot of music (and a lot of it is awful).

1. http://a-candle-in-the-dark.blogspot.co.nz/2010/02/song-leng...

Anonymous238• 13 years ago

Seems about right. I don't imagine your average radio station is generating a fortune.

abtinf3• 13 years ago

Note that OP is only talking about 60% of just the writer royalties. He provides no data about other payments, like performer royalties.

adventured4• 13 years ago

That's not the case. Let's assume we're talking about an average radio station, in terms of sales.

Music rights are negotiated as a % of sales, not on a per play basis. So large stations with large sales pay a fortune in music royalties. It's not a set rate.

With an average station, those 20,000 plays cost a radio station $10,000 +/- a few grand depending on the sales category they fall into with the music rights companies.

24/7 music for a year would cost around $60,000 (for said average radio station).

jamesli2• 13 years ago

It was not played by one terrestrial station, but played by all the terrestrial stations that signed the royalty contracts with the company which represents the artists and collects the royalties. Of course, the company gets a big chunk of the royalties.

anigbrowl13• 13 years ago

Apples to oranges, and you know it.

McPants• 13 years ago

Also, radio stations only play your song for a couple seasons, an entire year if you are lucky and maybe more if you are one of the most successful bands. Pandora and similar services are always around 24/7.

timberlane• 13 years ago

I find it interesting that SV is normally in favor of capitalism and free markets, yet some seem tolerant of the government forcing content owners to license their content at a fixed price.

There is often more inovation in a space when the market participates are left to decide on their own what to do.

icebraining2• 13 years ago

Government is the one granting the licensing rights in the first place, so neither position (fixed or non-fixed price licensing) is in favor of free market capitalism.

vidarh• 13 years ago

Consider that a lot of us see the extent of current copyright restrictions as a massive overreach.

A totally "free market" in terms of intellectual property would be to totally remove copyright and other artificial IP restrictions, not one where IP owners have free reign.

As such, compulsory licensing is a way of reducing the impact of restrictions that would not have existed in the first place without government interference in the market.

m3mnoch2• 13 years ago

indeed. i am also equally sick of hearing this complaint. tho, it's for a different reason.

music is not a freakin' product, people. it's a service. musicians are PERFORMERS. outside of the last 60 years or so, there was no such thing as "selling music" where you're not talking about sheet music. musicians get paid for performing.

the last 60 years has been a music bubble. welcome to the correction.

m3mnoch.

anigbrowl13• 13 years ago

It's kinda hard to get a regular performance gig when a venue owner can simply throw on a CD or pay a few $ to a DJ. Jukeboxes massively undermined the market for jobbing musicians.

mehwoot• 13 years ago

You are using the total amount paid to songwriters for pandora ($42) but only the amount paid to him for AM/RM Radio ($1500). Your math is wrong.

adventured4• 13 years ago

I own radio stations. We pay about $0.50 per song played in music rights fees over the course of a year.

Those 20,000 plays are worth a solid $8k to $12k in music fees. (my stations are about industry average in terms of sales; rights fees are based on a % of sales, so the fees can be dramatically higher in sum for a large metro station)

Bottom line, musicians are getting screwed across the board. The music rights companies are collecting much higher fees from the streaming services than they do for radio stations (music radio stations will typically pay 10% to 15% of their sales to music rights; depending on the bracket their sales fall into), but the point that remains the same is that the musicians are getting chump change out of the deals.

jbuzbee2• 13 years ago

We've got a little-known radio station in the Denver metro area that plays non-stop music with no commercials.

103.9 FM: http://rocktherockies.com/

I've been listening for years and the only "commercial" I ever hear is some infomercial type segment early sunday morning for a half-hour. Other than that it's non-stop mostly old or obscure Rock. I wonder if the Sunday-morning infomercial is just to set the "advertising" base?

I looked into the station once, and it seems to be run by a wealthy, reclusive guy as a hobby. Wherever he goes in the Denver area, his library reaches him. Expensive hobby...

cmsmith• 13 years ago

An average radio audience of 1800 is not as low as you think.

1 M people within range of the average radio station /

10 radio stations per market *

5% of the time the average person spends listening to music radio

5000

I am not any sort of industry expert, and I could conceive of my numbers being off by a factor of 10. My point is that I don't think you can dismiss out of hand the chance that radio stations are getting fewer than 1800 pairs of ears per play.

jobu• 13 years ago

The solution to the problem is right in the blog title:

... "Less Than What I Make From a Single T-Shirt Sale!"

If you are good enough (and lucky enough) to get your music heard a million times, then use it as a platform to sell real, tangible things to the people that enjoy your music.

jamesli2• 13 years ago

Each play in Pandora is only listened by one and only one person. Each play in terrestrial broadcasts is listened by potentially thousands of people, depending on the demographics of the covering areas. So it is uni-cast vs broadcast.

If the OP understands the difference, has a reasonable estimate on the number of listeners for broadcasts, and is reasonably good at calculation, he would find out that Pandora actually pays more.

Plus, Pandora provides more and better services to the listeners for the artists than terrestrial broadcasts. A simpel example. I am working and listening to Pandora. A nice song catches my ears. I could immediately look at the song, its album, the artists, and all other related information. Terrestrial broadcasts don't provide such a service. So Pandora is providing a deeper and more comprehensive marketing for the artists than terrestrial broadcasts, and it reaches more diverse population. That is a big benefit that the OP does not consider.

<edit> grammer

chinpokomon• 13 years ago

Well some radio stations do provide information about a song with the right equipment. HD Radio has that capability, as well as RDS (radio data system) which may be found in more modern radios before HD spectrum. That said, many radio stations that broadcast an RDS signal may not actually provide correct information. Pandora, Spotify, Google All-Access, et al., certainly do a better job about informing the listener and as such I'm better informed about the music I now listen to.

lifeformed• 13 years ago

These numbers are weird, I had a completely different experience. I have 440,000 plays on Spotify of songs from my album, and I've made $2420 off of that.

smackfu8• 13 years ago

Notice that the chart in the article shows that Spotify is paying 8x what Pandora is. 116k plays for $12. And that this is 40% of the songwriting payment only, since it's a member of a band.

abtinf3• 13 years ago

Lets assume each AM/FM broadcast went out to 10,000 people. If we do the math, we find that it is equal to the rate of $7 per million plays:

$1373.78 / (18797 * 10000) * 1000000 = $7.31

Now lets do the math for Pandora:

$ 16.89 / 1159000 * 1 000 000 = $14.57

So this writer is ACTUALLY COMPLAINING that Pandora merely pays DOUBLE the royalty rate of terrestrial radio.

smackfu8• 13 years ago

You do realize you just made up that 10,000 number out of thin air?

abtinf3• 13 years ago

That's why I preface it with "lets assume" instead of "I know for a fact". These are what we call "words" and they have "meaning".

lucisferre2• 13 years ago

I think you mean he could be complaining that they merely pay double.

sitharus• 13 years ago

I've always viewed Pandora, Spotify and services like that as discovery services. They let me hear the music before parting with a more money. If I find an artist that I really like I'll buy their album or some merchandise.

Given the breadth of music I get from Pandora there's no way I'd be able to afford every album of every artist I listen to on the off chance I might like them.

Also you need to remember that a lot of people won't have the disposable income to buy albums, tshirts or subscribe to satellite radio, so that money from Pandora isn't going to be replaced.

Yes it's not much, but there's more to it than that number alone.

warfangle3• 13 years ago

Yup.

I stopped purchasing digital music goods (amazon mp3s, itunes downloads) a while ago.

I subscribe to Spotify for music discovery, and resort to discogs.org to purchase vinyl of music I want to keep, to own, to cherish on my Dual 1219.

I am not alone in this philosophy.

aqme28• 13 years ago

Shameless plug:

I've been working on http://busker.fm. It aims to be the fair way to stream music. We not only give artists 100% of album-sales, we encourage album-sales by incorporating discovery, streaming, and the purchase itself.

fuzzywalrus• 13 years ago

Some helpful feedback: Right now the service looks pretty vanilla, but I want to check out the music. There's already a barrier: a sign up wall.

Why am I going to to sign up? I don't see much motive to sign up when there's so many services that I can browse without having to login (bandcamp, soundcloud, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Last.fm, Pandora, Slacker Radio, Songza... you get the idea).

Listeners should be put front and center as they are the main course, your service should appeal to the consumer so they'll actually make the platform viable for the musicians.

Right now I don't know what it is I'm signing for: be it a musician or listener. It could be the greatest service ever but from the page, I cannot tell. Give demos, show me something.

porsupah• 13 years ago

I'd agree with the commenter above - there's surely no need to be quite so coy about what you're offering. A casual visitor to the site isn't exactly going to be reeled in by an immediate requirement to hand over details, although perhaps your data says otherwise.

Bonus points if purchases can be in at least CD quality, or even better. (HD storage is cheap - do we really need to be all that concerned about the relative merits of lossy audio codecs, at this point?)

jonknee2• 13 years ago

It's almost like he doesn't realize Pandora is paying him much much per listener than radio is. So much so that Pandora loses money anytime someone listens to a song. That's not enough though, run even more ads, pay even more than the already higher fees.

anigbrowl13• 13 years ago

And yet people seem to think Pandora's business model is fine and it's the artist's fault. could it be that Pandora's extremely limited number of listeners-per-play means that it's not a very effective promotional tool?

robotcookies2• 13 years ago

Pandora apparently pays 12 cents per 100 plays. At that rate, they are paying out $1200 for a song with a million plays. If the artist only gets about $16 (under 2%) out of that, where is the rest of that money going to?

emn135• 13 years ago

Well, to the artist for one. He's not being payed as the artist. Before his place in line you have the copyright owner, the lead performers, background performers, and the other 60% of songwriters. Yes, that's right: he's complaining just about the size of the 40% songwriter's cut.

weisser5• 13 years ago

The problem here isn't the low payout, it's the inability for bands like Cracker to "opt out" of having their music on the service.

Falkon1313• 13 years ago

Can the copyright owner opt out or claim infringement? (I looked it up, but couldn't make heads or tails of the legalese.)

If the copyright owner could opt out, then it would sound like a matter of the artist having sold their rights and not liking what the new owner's doing with them. But it doesn't sound like that's the case, and that's what's confusing.

Seems hard to believe that the corporations that own most copyrights would have created (or not prevented) a law that renders it worth less.

greenyoda3• 13 years ago

"For you civilians webcasting rates are “compulsory” rates. They are set by the government (crazy, right?). Further since they are compulsory royalties, artists can not “opt out” of a service like Pandora even if they think Pandora doesn’t pay them enough. The majority of songwriters have their rates set by the government, too, in the form of the ASCAP and BMI rate courts–a single judge gets to decide the fate of songwriters (technically not a “compulsory” but may as well be)."

This bothers me. Why should the government regulate payments for music? Why shouldn't a musician have the option of licensing his music to radio stations but not to Pandora? We in the U.S. claim to have a system based on free enterprise, but this is very far away from that.

warfangle3• 13 years ago

Because it's not just the performing artists that would need to give copyright permission, it would also be all of the collaborating artists (lyricist, etc), and the label, and potentially the mastering house. It would be a licensing nightmare to get your song on the air - and would probably be harkened to the bad old days of payola.

Read up on the history of copyright law, especially as it pertains to music.

greenyoda3• 13 years ago

But all of these entities would seem to have the common interest of maximizing their revenues from royalties. So why shouldn't they have the right to authorize one party (perhaps the label) to negotiate on their behalf?

Also, it's becoming increasingly easy for musicians to digitally produce their own MP3s, so if there's no label or studio involved and the musicians wrote their own lyrics, it would seem to be even easier for them to negotiate on their own behalf.

macspoofing2• 13 years ago

Because copyright doesn't quite fit in your free enterprise world. Copyright isn't like traditional property. It needs government to define it, set limits on it and enforce it.

greenyoda3• 13 years ago

There's copyright in many other industries - book publishing, software, etc. - but in those industries the government doesn't control how much the parties get paid. Yes, the government grants the copyright and its courts enforce it, but that's all. For example, if I write an e-book, I can determine the price I sell it for and I'm not forced to allow Amazon to sell it.

emn135• 13 years ago

If you do the math, this just doesn't sounds that crazy. A streamed song on a radio just isn't worth that much, and there are many, many fingers in the pie here. Especially since he gets just 40% of the rights involved, and that's not the rights for the song ownership: this is just the cut for the songwriter - not the for the performers or the song owners.

I'm assuming he's getting the normal SoundExchange deal, but it's not 100% clear.

Sure, it's not very much, but what exactly was he expecting?

IzzyMurad2• 13 years ago

I don't get it. Many of you are saying "Pandora pays a ton more than a radio station".

The song was played 1 millon times and he got $16.89.

How many times the song should be played to make a significant amount then? A billion times?

thedufer• 13 years ago

On radio, he got ~$1400 for ~19000 plays. But how many people heard those? Estimates for average listeners pretty much all fall between 1000 and 10000, which gives you .68 - 6.8 cents per 1000 listens, whereas on Pandora he got 1.5 cents per 1000 listens.

The point is that he's reaching almost no one on Pandora, compared to the number of people he's reaching by radio. Of course they're paying him less.

IzzyMurad2• 13 years ago

I see. So both are paying next to nothing in comparison to the number of plays.

lucisferre2• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the SouthPark "Internet Money" episode.

autarch• 13 years ago

I'm outraged that people get paid at all for this sort of thing. Why should an artist be paid repeatedly for doing one piece of work? That's madness. Artists should be paid to create art. Once it's done, why you should get paid over and over?

rdouble2• 13 years ago

You should start one of those online petitions.

anigbrowl13• 13 years ago

Artists should be paid to create art.

That would be create. Unfortunately, artists actually get paid based on sales, not creativity.

toddh• 13 years ago

An interesting comparison is if Google makes 35 cents a click (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2220372/How-Google-Rake...) then they would make $350K from the same million "impressions."

driverdan• 13 years ago

That doesn't make any sense. You're attempting to compare two completely different things.

anigbrowl13• 13 years ago

That's funny, considering people are saying that Pandora and radio are exactly the same.

dllthomas2• 13 years ago

You want the government to butt out? Sure, let's get the government to butt out: http://questioncopyright.org

robbiemitchell• 13 years ago

If you make something and rely on others to sell it, then they do a bad job, you _also_ lack a business model.

drcube• 13 years ago

I have loved Cracker since I was a kid, and recently became a big fan of Camper Van Beethoven. So I say this with utmost respect:

Why should David Lowery get paid now for work he did 20-30 years ago? Most of us are lucky to get paid for work we did in the past month, and after that we'll never get paid for that particular bit of work ever again. Imagine if I still got paid, even just a few bucks a month, for all those burgers I flipped back in the 90s? Regular people have to keep working for their paychecks.

In that light it sounds a lot different to complain that work we did 20 years ago doesn't provide the steady income we once thought it would. Times change, and if you want to get paid don't rest on your laurels, keep making stuff people want.

babar• 13 years ago

I think it is fair for people who make an enduring product to be compensated for that over their lifetime. I don't think your 20 year old burgers are still in demand, so no royalties are needed. If I wrote software to power a website (or an app) that is still in use 20 years later and people are still willing to pay to access it? Sounds reasonable to me.

anigbrowl13• 13 years ago

Imagine if I still got paid, even just a few bucks a month, for all those burgers I flipped back in the 90s?

You mean the burgers made to a recipe someone else came up with, in a kitchen that they built for you? Trust me, a lot of musicians would be happy to just turn up to work 50 hours a week with a guitar or whatever in return for steady paycheck. But recorded music and radio killed off most of that market decades ago. Musicians don't get paid for all the time they spend practicing and working on writing tunes, they only get paid for sales.

Comparing writing a piece of music with flipping a burger is just astoundingly ignorant.

brownbat2• 13 years ago

The returns to your chosen profession will have some relationship with how many other people want to offer that service. Some people break their backs picking up smelly trash on hot summer days, don't have high school diplomas, but manage to get by. Some people bust their ass learning arcane branches of engineering or medicine and can do pretty well.

You chose to spend a life making music. I love music so much I'd almost do that for gas money and staying on people's couches. Almost. I know a lot of guys who would and do.

So I'm sorry you're not rich. But not that sorry.

abalone• 13 years ago

It's not apples-to-apples. The Sirius XM and radio play counts are per broadcast. Pandoras are per listener.

Let's look at Sirius. Sirius has ~20M subscribers. He got paid $181.94 for 179 broadcasts, or $1.02 each. Well, he's only making more per listen if it reaches less than 0.3% of those subscribers (60K). Otherwise the Pandora model actually pays him more.

Pandora: $16.89 / 1M listens = 0.0017 cents

Sirius XM: $1.02 per broadcast / 60K listens = 0.0017 cents

If you get more listeners on Sirius, that per-listen payout goes down. With the Pandora model it scales proportionately.

He just has to keep in mind that Pandora is much smaller than radio right now and that's why the absolute payout is small. It's confusing for musicians when they see big numbers like One Million I guess. ;-)

jccalhoun• 13 years ago

So he's complaining about still getting paid for a song he released 20 years ago? Damn. Wish I had problems like that...

free652• 13 years ago

So let's say XM radio have 3,000,000 listeners (24 mil total subscribers) So 179 x 3 millions = 537 millions and that's $181.94

Now Pandora played the song 1,159,000 and that's 16.89.

Wow... So Pandora actually PAYS A LOT MORE. It would have paid you 3 cents if you use xm radio rates.

edit: well my numbers are off, since there are many channels on xm. XM pays about the same as Pandora. I can't really get numbers how many listeners per a XM channel.

But even if I take I reduce the listeners 100 times (30,000 listeners per channel), still Pandora pays 5x times more.

codeulike• 13 years ago

Too must music. Supply and demand. Musicians need to get together and sort out some quotas so that they stop flooding the market with music.

not actually sure if I'm joking or not, need to think about this more

clarky07• 13 years ago

If you don't like how much money Pandora pays you, stop letting them play your songs. As noted elsewhere in this thread, their rates per listen are very similar to traditional radio. When played on the radio, thousands hear it. When played on Pandora, 1 person hears it.

kreek• 13 years ago

I have no problem with Pandora's payout they are radio without direct access to tunes. I have couple of tracks on Spotify, and although I wish they did pay me more, I don't think they're too far off either. Spotify pay me about $0.004/play.

I also have a premium Spotify account @ $9.99/month. Now I probably listen to more music than most people, as I assume other premium subscribers do. Doing a back of the napkin calculation I listen to an average of 30 songs per day, so maybe 900 plays a month so you could say Spotify charge me $0.01/play. 40% payout isn't bad, maybe it should be 50% or 75%, who knows what Spotify's infrastructure costs them. Either way in the old days (> ten years ago) artists were getting no where near 40%.

I've only bought two albums this year, Boards of Canada and Flying Lotus, they were both not immediately on Spotify. This is probably the best course. Release on MP3, CD, Vinyl, for the first couple of months for the hardcore fans then release to the streamers.

The OP probably has his record label still taking a huge chunk of his payout. Cut out the middle man, self publish. Streaming is only going to grow, streaming profit will eventually go up.

Self-plug! @spotify http://open.spotify.com/album/2ASb9HnDamAwrsJQ9gKtqp @soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/kreek

imchillyb• 13 years ago

Music, cinema, and television, used to be considered performance arts. One performance, one payment.

If I build a piece of furniture, or any other physical item, what right to royalties do I have? None.

The greed of the music, movie, and television industries knows no bounds. I for one am sick unto death of their greed mongering.

logn• 13 years ago

No one forced the OP to submit his music to Pandora. You have to specifically sign up to a label or pay someone like TuneCore.

And software developers face the similar difficulties to musicians making money on their own, hence why we work for the Silicon Valley giants he's bashing.

Also, the OP is 'Cracker'. They're signed to a subsidiary of EMI. I wonder how much money his label took.

wnevets• 13 years ago

If your song was worth more (aka you were paid more per listen) you probably wouldn't of never made it to a million listens

nitrogen• 13 years ago

I have to wonder if Pandora ever manipulates play counts. Mumford and Sons was one of Pandora's top paid artists. Though I like their music, could it be that they were being pushed into stations that were completely unrelated? Like my Dubstep station playing Little Lion Man repeatedly, even though it's not even close to the same genre?

gesman• 13 years ago

We all can set the record straight: download the album and donate directly to the artist to support great talent. Say "no" to middleman.

marze• 13 years ago

Say you buy a song on a CD or online. Spend $1 or so. Listen 5 times, that is $0.20 per. Listen 50 times, it is $0.02 per play.

Pandora pay $0.000017 per play, and is lobbying to pay less. Given how much less the current fee is compared to buying a track, if anything, I'd be in favor of an increase. Why shouldn't musicians make a bit more money for their effort, something more in line with purchased music?

tehwebguy• 13 years ago

Comparing it to radio is interesting, but it seems like YouTube would be the best option. Even a super low $1.00 CPM 1m plays would make you $1,000.00

fredsanford• 13 years ago

Let me start off by saying... I play the guitar and have played in bands that did bars, parties and other affairs for money. I have not written any songs anyone would be willing to pay for, but, I have worked with folks that still get royalties from things they did in the '60s and '70s.

One gentleman, who had what I'm now hearing is a garage rock hit was getting ~$1500 a month royalties in the '80s from a song I'd bet most of you never heard.

What repulses me about Pandora and the like is that you cannot opt out. If something is my work product, I should be able to price it as I see fit and let the market decide if I'm an idiot or not.

Here's a youtube of my friends band from ~1965. Miss you Johnny... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPr4tmJBIVM

How many of you would be sick of this subject if it were basically robbing you of the ability to make a living?

aphelion• 13 years ago

Dean Baker proposed "Artistic Freedom Vouchers" as a way to supplant copyright. The basic idea is that every taxpayer would get a refundable tax credit of 75-100 dollars which could be "spent" by buying creative works from anyone who registered to be a recipient. It would be a very low bar to clear, just enough to weed out the obvious scams. Anyone who received AFV money would be barred from placing their works under copyright for the next five years.

It the context of our current IP law paradigm, I will admit it seems radical. Given how wasteful and repressive our current IP laws are, that seems like it would be a good thing.

AwesomeDuck• 13 years ago

I wish I could get paid for something I did 20 years ago. Maybe you should consider that the purpose of copyright law was not to provide you and your kids a revenue stream for life but rather to encourage free thought and exchange of ideas by providing a limited period of protection before a work became public domain. The original copyright term when congress passed the first copyright law was 14 years. But greedy entertainment industry attorneys have been able to pay off congress over the years and have the terms extended, until now, thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, the expiration of copyright is effectively gone. In fact nothing will enter the public domain for decades now.

So maybe instead of complaining that the average Joe's of the world need to listen to more commercials or pay you more for something you did 20 years ago you could put that energy into something new. It amazes me that we can pay teachers and law enforcement people $40,000 a year and hear about how high taxes are, but then society sees no problem with someone making millions of dollars off of an album...or throwing a football around for a dozen games a year.

lakethun• 13 years ago

Be aware that this blog post only tells part of the story. See the discussion and linked blog post a couple days later.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5947584

My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89

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