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Comment by nfm | Hacker News Reader

> Part of Spotify’s pitch to the music industry has been that its royalties — as low as 0.6 cent per stream, according to the company — will accrue to significant levels as the service grows

> “Wake Me Up” had been played 168 million times in the United States on that service, yet yielded only $12,359 in publishing royalties, of which he kept less than $4,000.

These numbers don't remotely add up - they're off by 2 orders of magnitude. What gives?

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> Part of Spotify’s pitch to the music industry has been that its royalties — as low as 0.6 cent per stream, according to the company — will accrue to significant levels as the service grows and as people listen more and more.

> Singling out Pandora, the leading Internet radio outlet, he said that “Wake Me Up” had been played 168 million times in the United States on that service, yet yielded only $12,359 in publishing royalties, of which he kept less than $4,000.

Spotify != Pandora

The answer to your question is in the same sentence as your quotes.

The $0.006/stream is total payments for everything songwriter, label, performing - everything.

Let's say a radio station with 1m listeners plays a song 168 times. How much does the radio station pay out for those 168 plays, and how much ends up as publishing royalties, etc?

I honestly have no idea...

Been a while since music business class, but here is what I remember:

Radio stations don't pay per play. They buy a blanket license from performing rights organizations. Then those organizations listen to sample data and divvy out payments to publishers according to what their sample data says.

Artists such as Taylor Swift have to pay for that air time. Payola is alive and well. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=310606

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