Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Every day I listen to Pandora on the way to/from work. Inevitably I will hear the same track, often more than once and skip it. I use Pandora to discover new artists related to the well known artist I entered. Obviously if Pandora keeps playing the same tracks from this artist they will have to pay them top dollar, if they play obscure and less known (cheaper per track I assume) they will make me happy and lower expenses. I blame Pandora for this problem, not the artists.
Well then what in the world am I doing wasting time writing software?!? Time to pull the old Casio out of the closet and lay down some tunes!
Better known as 318230.
it is also enabling musicians to earn a living
If you call 800 people earning more than $50k a viable industry then I have some Florida swampland to sell you. Sounds like less than 1% of all the musicians in the world are not living in their mother's basement...
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
My family runs an internet radio service and I have to do the accounting for them each month. The article is referring to the fact that royalty accounting is handled in a way which makes it specifically designed to not work on the internet.
Congress created SoundExchange corporation to make sure that "artists" get paid for internet radio use, however royalties on the net are astronomically higher than broadcast. For a commercial broadcaster, you owe SoundExchange $0.0021 for EACH SONG that EACH USER listens to. It's a royalty of $0.0021 / song*listener. This actually makes it so that your royalty costs scale completely linearly with increasing number of listeners (high variable cost, low fixed cost), which is basically the complete opposite of terrestrial broadcast where your fixed cost is your giant antenna and royalties are estimated and often fudged (high fixed cost, low variable cost). This makes economics of scale much more difficult for the commercial webcaster than the terrestrial broadcaster. With all the influence the RIAA has over Congress it would seem that this was intentional. It seems like a classic case of regulatory capture.
Note that this is IN ADDITION to annual fees that go to performing rights groups such as ASCAP and BMI. Those fees are paid annually, but they are generally lower than the SoundExchange fee.
is just like regular radio - a very, very small number make the very big bucks. A not very much larger number make the big bucks. Most make a pittance.
No, that's not it.
See, congress knows who pays their bills, so to speak. Services like Pandora eliminate the fiction that the media companies are "needed". Without the sweet employment deals offered by big industries, like big media, the congress critters see famine on the horizon.
Services like pandora threaten their livelihoods by proxy.
Expect draconian enforcement efforts to regulate them out of the market.
Pandora's problem is that they're cutting out the middlemen. Middlemen tend not to like that very much, especially given that most of the people in our economy are one kind of middleman or another. Money directly to people working? That's unamerican. That's communism. That's... well, you get the idea.
Copyright law exists principally for one reason anymore these days: Middlemen. Oh sure, they talk about the artists, but there's no such thing as an artist under copyright law anymore. They're all contractors -- and their art actually isn't art anymore, they're "works for hire". I shouldn't have to explain how RIAA fucks artists, but for those who've been living under a rock until just now, let me give you a hint: It starts with a 'c', ends with a 't', and has a lot of legal language in between that says you (the artist) brings the lube, and they bring the butt hurt. Oh, and don't bother trying to look elsewhere: It's exclusive. Just you and me baby. And it will not be over quickly. And you will not enjoy it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
That isn't how I interpereted that... more, "no, they don't share the same 3 million. They EACH get 3 million."
See for instance the "50k split between 800 artists" post.
Excellent news! This article cites real, unassailable numbers-- much of them in *dollars*. There is ample statistical basis to draw many, many well founded conclusions. These conclusions will affect many types of business, economic models, political systems, artistic expressions, and maybe even sports. I would humbly suggest that every single one of those conclusions bodes well for the careers of (stereo)typical readers of this site.
Enjoy!
Pandora's problem is their love of Apple's minimalist design philosophies.
In the early days of Pandora they'd occasionally post a blog entry about improvements to their song selection algorithms. These were always met with endless replies from people saying it just wasn't working for them. Many people wanted more options, like to choose the specific song attributes they're interested in hearing. Many others wanted to give more specific feedback than simply "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." I'd personally love a "never play the same song twice" option, as I too mainly use Pandora for music discovery. Anyway, eventually one of their blog posts acquired so many replies from people complaining about the performance of the service that they quickly posted something completely different and never again mentioned anything relevant to their service on their blog.
Anyway, from what I gathered back then when they were actually talking about things, they love the "simplicity" of Apple's design, and thus seek to imitate it. One of the core Apple designs is that customization options are a no-no because they might confuse users. Instead you choose just one way that something works, and it "just works" that way, whether it does what any particular person wants or not. Thus the advanced control over the song selection process that people want is completely out of the question. You're going to hear repeats because they assume that the average listener wants it to work like a radio station that plays their favorite music, and so that's how it's going to work, even if something a little different would work better for some users.
Also, while it's difficult to claim to know without seeing the functionality of their software, I suspect their song selection engine assigns weights to how important each musical quality is that are identical for each user. In other words, they've decided that people think that vocal styles matter a certain amount, and instrumentation matters a certain amount, and the process makes no attempt to determine how much these things matter for any particular user. Thus, if you don't judge music the same way everyone else does, Pandora doesn't seem very effective. ...and for me it isn't. I tend to listen to hundreds upon hundreds of songs before it plays one new song that I like which I haven't heard before.
As for why I think I know so much about it, back when they had their "backstage" web site, I wrote a robot to scan all of the pages (they had no robots.txt at the time) and record the half-dozen song attributes listed for each song, then applied my own song selection algorithm to the data, judging the results by listening to the 30 second samples from the web site. Despite that I only had a half-dozen attributes per song, compared to the hundreds per song that Pandora claims to have, the results from my own algorithm were on par with what I got from Pandora. I thought about writing to them and asking for access to their database, but despite throwing everything I could at the problem, I never could get results that were obviously better than their own with the limited data I had. Thus I didn't think I'd have any luck convincing them I could do any better than they were doing. (They certainly weren't open to the idea that they could improve things on their blog.)
It's really quite sad. They've invested a lot in creating an in-depth analysis of a large catalog of music, but they insist on not using that data to it's fullest potential, simply because someone likes clean and simple user interfaces without a lot of confusing options.
Sometime about two or three years ago I noticed the song selection take a distinctive turn for the worse, as any time I enter a song from any of half of my favorite artists, I end up with a station that simply will not play anything other than Christian music. Thus I hear nothing but "God," "Jesus," "Lord," and "Hallelujah" which, as an atheist, annoys me to hell. I like music with lyrics that aren't depressing, and a
Drake and Wayne, good on you.
I guess they must get paid more for the people who specifically ask not to have to hear them.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
as if it were any different in the era of cassette tapes or LPs or CDs or player piano reels?
as if it were any different in the age of patronage and wealthy benefactors in the era before mass media?
here's some news for you: 1% of artists ever made a healthy living as an artist in all of human history, right now, and for all future time periods and societies
but here is the big difference: the long tail. that's the new thing
look at the picture here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
the green part, the fat part of the tail, existed in the era of media conglomerates, say 1930-1980. so your
10 big bands made millions, and
100 made a couple hundred thousand,
and that's that. everyone else lived in their mom's basement
what pandora/ slacker/ etc/ the internet allows, what was not possible before the internet, is the yellow part in that chart: the long thin trailing part of the tail
so now, in 2010, you still have
10 bands making millions,
100 bands making hundreds of thousands. and now also possible due to the internet is:
1,000 bands making tens of thousands
10,000 bands making thousands
100,000 bands making hundreds, and
1,000,000 bands making tens of dollars
big deal? yeah, big deal: with a more fluid, smaller barrier of entry, that guy making a few hundred has enough positive feedback to maybe move up to the rarified few making hundreds of thousands. and we, the consumer, have a bigger, richer bounty to consume and appreciate and enjoy, that WE choose, not some suit in a music corporation who signs this band but that band due to random reasons that may have nothing to do with actual quality for us the consumer
and also, art is an aspirational pursuit: you do it because you love it, and this should be rewarding in and of itself. nobody does it for the money. well, maybe to get in a chick's pants, but if you do it just for the money, you're a moron, because there is no money in art, there never was. only those lucky few that create something that people find themselves demanding by hook or by chance, are lucky to live the life of a well-paid artist. it is always the exception, and always will be the exception. and really: do you want to listen to music by a guy who is doing it just for financial returns? for every REAL artist, it is about the art, and always will be. and a few get chosen to live financially happy for that. the rest starve, as it always was, as it is, and always will be
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What it also knows is that it can count on people like you to propagate cynicism and defeatism, so that nothing ever changes.