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Pandora Shares Artist Payment Figures
An anonymous reader writes "Today in a blog post, Pandora has shared some details of the fees they pay to musical artists for playing songs over their music streaming service. Over 2,000 different artists will pull in $10,000 or more in the next year, and 800 will get paid over $50,000. They provided a few specific examples as well. Grupo Bryndis, who has a sales rank on Amazon of 183,187 (in other words, who is not at all a household name), is on track to receive $114,192. A few earners are getting over $1 million annually, such as Coldplay and Adele. 'Drake and Lil Wayne are fast approaching a $3 million annual rate each.' The post segues into a broader point about the age of internet radio: 'It's hard to look at these numbers and not see that internet radio presents an incredible opportunity to build a better future for artists. Not only is it bringing tens of millions of listeners back to music, across hundreds of genres, but it is also enabling musicians to earn a living. It's also hard to look at these numbers, knowing Pandora accounts for just 6.5% of radio listening in the U.S., and not come away thinking something is wrong. ... Congress must stop the discrimination against internet radio and allow it to operate on a level playing field, under the same rules as other forms of digital radio.'"
On the other hand the class of license that a terrestrial broadcaster has puts an upper limit on the number of listeners they can have, while there is no such fundamental limit on internet radio. Furthermore, your revenues should also scale linearly with the number of listeners if you have a sane business model. So it makes sense that internet streaming royalties scale linearly, the problem is that the rate is much too high. And it wouldn't have to be if terrestrial radio lost it's Edison-era exception, and had to pay full royalties as well.
Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
Pandora's biggest issue is that they're still blocking everyone outside of the US. When they finally wake up, the entire market will already be taken by other players like Last.fm or Spotify, which is a shame because Pandora does seem like a nice service.
I think all of the channels you worked on just needed more love and attention. To get a truly great variety on a channel, they need to know a wider base of things you like and dislike on that channel.
I have used Pandora since 2005, primarily (90% of the time) listening to the same channel. I started it from four bands I liked with similar music, and then thumbed up maybe 150-200 songs and down maybe 100-1500 over the years. At this point the station is exactly what I want to listen to at work; it plays a several hundred songs I like, I have thumbed down maybe three songs in the last two years, and there's tremendous variety with little repeating. But that's literally years of effort crafting the station.
A pretty large number of other users created a station for themselves based on my station - I can or could see that on my profile page at one point. I think that it gets recommended to people in some fashion. One thing interesting I have noticed is that, while I've never paid for Pandora One, I haven't heard or seen an ad on Pandora since I think 2009. I've had a few conversations with employees over the years, mostly suggesting bands to add or asking (or complaining) about features they should add or removed. I wonder if they have flagged some accounts as "lead users" (or "problem users") or something like that, and have ads excluded from our accounts? Actually come to think of it I haven't hit the monthly 40 hour play cap in more than a year, either. Did they eliminate that for everyone?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.