My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89
thetrichordist.com
thetrichordist.com
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...
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.
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.
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.
Why do you do this? You know that most of the money for an album doesn't go to the artist? Do you buy the physical CD or do you buy the song on iTunes?
The vast vast majority of people do not have thousands of dollars to spend on music.
I know that the money doesn't all go to the artists - what would you have me (or the GP) do instead, not pay for any of it?
Mail them a check. Mail them cash. Hand them cash in person. Send them bitcoins; if they're tech-savvy enough.
Like many scaling problems, that's a good problem to have: at that point, you can afford to have people working for you depositing checks, which is pretty much the inverse of the power relationship artists have with labels.
You don't know what the relationship with the label is. Some artists come in with their own label and only need distributor to reach a bigger audience (artists $$$/labels$$). Some come in completely unknown and the label has to front all the money (artists $ / label $$$$), and some are quite happy to be on a smaller label and let the label handle the business side of things.
> at that point, you can afford to have people working for you depositing checks
...and paying royalties for samples, collaborators, songwriters. Well now we have to hire a guy to handle all of this and you can either pay him/her a salary or a cut of the sales. Now we've slipped back into the label distributor problem.
Many of them do a good job handling fan mail. It sounds like a nice problem to have.
>There is a very good reason that many musicians become involved with labels, promoters, distributors, etc.
There are some good reasons for artists to outsource administrative errands, management. There's also the crappy reason that is the monopolization of the major distribution channels.
should be a link to somewhere I can buy albums for $10-15USD each.
I have been steadily moving to buying only digitally released music, but some artists and labels make this very difficult.
Doing it right are:
* Boomkat.com (reasonable FLAC surcharge)
* digital-tunes.com (same price for FLAC/MP3)
* bleep.com
* hdtracks.com (sort of, the markup is massive)
Failing are:
* Amazon, iTunes et al - ~256kbit-ish music, often mastered terribly. (Yes, I'm aware that AAC is a bit higher quality at the same bitrate)
* Beatport.com (you want me to pay how much extra for WAV?!)
* Almost every major label - I can't order lossless tracks from most of them
You know that if you spend $0, the artist gets nothing, right? Then their label drops them because they aren't profitable.
not necessarily. I'm quite happy to be shown ads while I stream that generate revenue for the artist.
I'm not even kidding. Nothing is stopping you from writing a $50 check and sending it as a donation.
If the artists don't like the deal that labels are giving them, they don't have to take it. They can build their own fan base, learn marketing, get exposure and sell their own stuff through iTunes and other places. A lot of artists are opting to do just that.
You don't know that, because you don't know what sort of music he listens to or what deals those artists have with their labels. There are certainly cases where labels fuck artists, but there are a lot of others where they deliver value. This idea of blaming all the big bad labels is little more than an excuse not to pay for music. Along the way, it's crushed lots of small independent labels that had great partnerships with their artists but get blamed for the perceived moral failings of the majors.
hey there now, sonny. I'm 51, and some of them still fit just fine, thanks. I even go to several concerts each year.
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.
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.
The days of radio-only hits are over (or close to being over).
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.
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...
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).
There is often more inovation in a space when the market participates are left to decide on their own what to do.
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.
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.
so, what you're telling me is your [i mean the royal 'you', not necessarily you you, anigbrowl] performance isn't as good as cd playback? people would rather listen to your cd than listen to you?
makes me think you should either 1) change careers or 2) get better.
see? the technology gets dumped on as a scapegoat. we all hear this. this case is no different.
the real issue? competition has moved back to the streets instead of in the promoter's office. you're still fighting to get heard. and you still have to be good. and you still have to be lucky. because these days, every tom, dick and harry can become "a musician" by putting out a cd. it's the same fight every creative industry is fighting right now. it's just that professional photographers don't really have a pandora to shake their fist at.
just be glad it's not the 16th century and the only way to earn money as a musician was to get commissions from nobility. the phrase "starving artist" exists for a reason.
m3mnoch.
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.
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...
You can buy cheap stations for between $100,000 and $500,000 these days. KYEN / 103.9 FM, is a 16,500 watt station, and if that fully covers the Denver metro based on its tower location, then it's worth a fair chunk of money (low 7 figures). My guess is the owner has had it for a long time, before FCC radio licenses were auctioned; back when you could just pay a small licensing fee and apply for it.
I've seen a couple of cases like what you're describing, where someone owns a station as a hobby essentially. If you're running a very tight ship, it doesn't take a lot to pay for basic operations.
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.
... "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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
That's all neither here nor there though, because Ian Rogers was never involved with the headphones - he was CEO of Topspin and is now running the development of the Beats music streaming platform.
I agree tying into the Beats by Dre brand is a negative for people like us, but for the demographic they are going after it will probably be better than building a brand from the ground up.
To talk about Beats being terrible - what planet are you on? Take your hipster snark elsewhere. Yes, they're primarily a fashion item. But are they dreadful headphones? No, the price just factors in their fashion status.
The sneaky thing is that when the Beats feature is turned off, the default equalizer is tuned so that bass and treble are deemphasized, to make the difference between the two even greater.
I follow someone on YouTube that did a really good review about Beats Audio. Here's the link if you're interested.
Is it exclusivity contracts with all the big venues, or something similar for labels?
I would think a startup in this space would target smaller venues that aren't under contract, and independent artists to build traction, and if the product is truly superior they would have a good chance against the incumbents.
And if LiveNation doesn't own the venue, they're probably your tour manager.
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...
Pandora has exactly one listener per track played?
1% of people listen to a popular radio station 24 hours a day?
I'd say the Pandora 1 track per customer is a safe assumption. Sure, I've known cafes and dinner parties where Pandora was streaming to multiple people at once, but I've also known lots of friends who have Pandora playing on their headphones even when their headphones aren't on their heads. Nobody I know who uses Pandora actively pauses it every time they leave their computers, so I expect it washes out in the end.
The methodology of arbitron says that if radio can be identified within audio range, you are deemed to be 'listening' to it.
Can we still claim, by this methodology, that every Pandora device has an average of one listener? Only if you claim every radio has an average of one listener by this methodology as well (which is highly doubtful) or if radio and Pandora are used significantly differently (which I don't strongly believe: as you say, it's played in cafes in place of radio).
I have to disagree: I think the vast majority of people listening to Pandora are doing it on their laptop on headphones, while many radios (today) are not being listened to by a single listener.
Regardless, the estimates I used intentionally underestimated the Arbitron radio audience numbers by an order of magnitude. Some of the larger markets go up to 150k listeners on the top station. If you're right and significantly more than 1.0 people listen to a particular Pandora stream on average, then it still have to be more than about 5-10 listeners per instance before it hits the numbers that radio is claiming. And I would be very, very surprised if the average were anywhere near that high. I think if Pandora had evidence of that, they would be able to demand more money from advertisers, for one thing.
As to the methodology of Arbitron: Not really relevant for my purposes, because I think that it's accepted by advertisers as reasonable. At some point, if the numbers were complete garbage, the advertisers would have noticed and stopped relying on them; advertisers certainly track the results of their campaigns, after all.
So when you say "Only if you claim every radio has an average of one listener by this methodology as well", I think you misunderstand the core problem, which is that the article compares stats that aren't equivalent.
The issue is in how these listens are counted. So yes, you can pretty much claim every Pandora device has an average of one listener. Users of Pandora have their own personalized streams, and every time a song is played on a person's stream, it's counted as 1 play, and is heard by 1 person.
In contrast, radio stations have one stream that many many people listen to. When a radio station broadcasts a song once it's counted as 1 play even though that song is received by X radio-receivers and heard by X people (where X is the reach that station has, for example, 150k).
The issue is the article compares plays on Pandora (where each play as counted reaches 1 listener on average) to plays on radio (where each play as counted reaches upwards of 150k listeners).
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?
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.
Is that not the whole point of Pandora? If it was the same as radio then what would be your incentive to use 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...
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.
+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.
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).
So it’s fine for record companies and distributors to get stiffed? Hosting, payment processing, and marketing are not free.
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.
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.
As if that were the norm.
If I have to compare, its synonymous with building a online presence with a blogging site. It won't earn you much and you won't buying yachts with that money. But the purpose of that blogging site is to get you some following and recognition in the community.
Then you need to go on and build something awesome that sells. That is playing the bigger game.
Pandora is the first step. Not the last one.
Making music is fun, social, and status enhancing. People are going to keep doing it, and doing it enthusiastically, whether it's possible to make money from recordings or not.
Or maybe like we have the internet competing for our entertainment attention, and it is just damn good sauce.
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.
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.)
$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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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/
I'm just confused by what you are trying to achieve with this post
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.
Read up on the history of copyright law, especially as it pertains to music.
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.
You're skirting a very deep issue. Copyright is a legal construct, whose every aspect is completely arbitrary, and comes about from a balance of competing goals. You find it perplexing that for certain copyrighted material distributed over a certain medium in a certain way, government sets a fixed price? I find it perplexing that you find it perplexing. Shouldn't you should also be asking why the copyright term is over a century long now, why there are satire and 'fair use' exceptions, why certain kinds of remixing is allowed, and others not. There are countless more strange and weird aspects to copyright, because everything about copyright is completely arbitrary.
> 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.
You may or may be allowed to restrict resale of your book. Your work is allowed to be reproduced (without compensation to you and without permission from you) in braille, for the blind. You will not be able to restrict state libraries from lending (for free) copies of your book.
As side note, this is true of all property rights; real and tangible personal property are no different than copyrights or other IP rights in this respect.
This often gets forgotten, apparently just because legal protection of real and tangible personal property rights in some form is far older than copyright.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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. ;-)
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.
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
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.
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).
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?
http://www.indieandunsigned.com/the-music-royalty-breakdown/
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.
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.
When you hear it, you probably recognize it:
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
My guess is that this is the cut after the record company gets theirs.
I mean, it's a pretty recognizable song, just a bit old: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYdlqjiQPAc
That would be create. Unfortunately, artists actually get paid based on sales, not creativity.
not actually sure if I'm joking or not, need to think about this more
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).
How do you apply "information wants to be free" to music like this?
1) Information wants to be free
2) Everything is information
... I don't think we can have a useful discussion.
I thought I detected you heading in that direction. Yes, people do try to make that argument.
Sheet music is like an instruction manual. Follow the instructions, you can make something. I consider instructions to be information. Recorded music, on the other hand, is a performance. A performance is art, while sheet music describes art?
I don't have technical definitions, this is just how I see it.
You're arguing for the existence of a soul.
Yes an MP3 is literally and pedantically information, however it also has an additional worth to me that I find rewarding to pay for. I believe people who enjoy music but use this argument to acquire it for free are deluding themselves.
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.
It's always struck me as just a way to absolve yourself of guilt for pirating music.
I think the real phrase should be "Information is just information, people want it to be free."