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Pandora Pays Artists $0.001 Per Stream, Thinks This Is "Very Fair"
journovampire writes with this story about how much artists make on Spotify. "Pandora founder Tim Westergren has claimed that the company is paying out 'very fair' sums to artists, despite its per-stream royalty weighing in at just one sixth of Spotify's. The digital personalized radio platform has previously gone on-record as saying that it pays music rights-holders approximately $0.0014 for each play of their tracks: Westergren blogged in 2013 that Pandora pays ‘around $1,370 for a million spins’. That’s around 80% smaller than Spotify’s per-stream payout, which officially stands somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084."
How much does a radio station with, say, a million listeners pay when they broadcast a song? Pandora seems to sit somewhere between radio and Spotify as a service and so I would expect the royalty rate to be somewhat more than radio and less than Spotify.
www.icecast.org and raydio.echoz.com
How much do artists get paid for each play of their track on the radio?
So, does the money actually go to the artists, or just to the publishing companies?
The amount they pay out to the artist per stream is irrelevant if you don't know how much streams, how much revenue and how much other costs they incur.
If they pay $0.1/stream to the 'rights holders' and $0.001 to the artist, then that is a contractual issue between the artist and the rights holders. If Pandora pays $1M upfront to a label company to stream their library and then additionally pays $0.001 to the artist/stream and Spotify pays nothing to a label company but pays $0.006 to the label company who then gives 1% to the artist, then which approach gets the artist more money?
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A tenth of a penny per stream, times how many people for whose Pandora channels it appears, times how many times it gets repeated on that channel over the year? I would think the artist eventually comes out on top of what they'd make off the same song being sold for 99 cents on iTunes. Key point: it's not a royalty per song; it's a royalty per listen.
I thought that Pandora didn't pay the artist anything at all, but rather paid the label who then pays the artist. So how much money does the label get?
If you can actually get on the massively limited playlist.
Becaus they repeat the same fucking songs every day even if you have 50 stations.
Trouble is, Peggy Lee's family is still making the same $0.0014 as a current hardworking artist. Does that make any sense?
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, as they say.
There's no such thing as "fairness" - it's a fairy tale concept that causes humans far too much suffering.
I would love to get $1300 for each million user sessions served by a system I designed - holy cow that would add up. I get paid for a job, and that is that. I realize that artists often sign bad business contracts (when I do, I just lose money - boo hoo).
But regardless Spotify and Pandora aren't equivalent - the songs I hear on Pandora are often ones I've never heard before. I've bought CD's based on its generated recommendations - Pandora is a promotion platform for artists. Spotify tends to be more for music on demand. It's nice that Pandora also pays the artists for the airtime - I'd imagine Pandora would survive just fine only playing for promotional value.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Trawl the used CD shops and garage sales, et al and then rip them yourself, create your own playlist and use your portable music player, no internet connection required....
Personally, I'd like to be able to get royalty payments every time somebody used one of my commercial software programs or one of my hardware devices. Think about it. You spend a few months writing a piece of software and then get paid for it for life. Quite frankly, IMHO, the entire royalty business model is broken because while the original intent may have ensured that the "artists" weren't being taken advantage of, it's gotten so out of control that these "artists" have now been brainwashing into believing that they are oh so much more important than everyone else and that their opinions on things they know nothing about are to be taken seriously.
..and I like it even less now. Tried Pandora a few years ago. Was rather annoyed with the way it worked so I ditched it. Reading this now, and knowing many producing musicians, I like it even less than I did before. The music industry has always more or less shit on artists, and apparently Pandora is no exception.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Give the artists a basic income, if they want it. Then they can free themselves from the money jungle.
Artists paid 16 times as much for Spotify than for radio
Lots of caveats (British radio, British currency, article is 18mths old, Spotify vs Radio, no label involved, one artist is both singer and songwriter + some other assumptions), Spotify pays 16 times what an artist gets from a radio play, per listener.
from http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/17/spotify-royalties-appear-to-be-awfully-high-despite-what-thom-yorke-says/
The implicit argument in this clumsily biased summary is that Pandora is paying too little. But does that hold up to scrutiny? From an economic perspective, it is an easy thing to measure. Music economics runs on artificial scarcity, copyright. So the amount of money flowing into music is not something naturally regulated by the free market, but a decision we make by adjusting the lever of copyright law. Something we've been turning up for a century now. So here's the underlying question: Are we dedicating enough of our economic resources to this industry whose cashflow is predominately artificially generated by law?
Are we spending enough, as an economy, on the production of music, or do we have a shortage of people willing to enter the music creation business? If there is not a shortage, we do not need to increase copyright cashflow. If there is a surplus -- if, as an example measure, we have too many kids neglecting their studies to pursue pipe dreams of superstardom -- we should be making copyright less strict and shifting some of our GDP into other productive industries.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
than a coder gets when their program is run.
How nice that the consensual hallucination that 'creative' works are somehow tangibly quantifiably entitled to eternal re-compensation continues to survive in the human and legal consciousness.
So I listen to Pandora about 1-2 hours per day (all of the workout time, and then some). During that time I hear perhaps 20-40 songs, for a total cost of $0.03 - $0.06. That's $1-2 per month, perhaps $10-20 per year.
Not a bad deal I guess. I'd pay them that much for ability to pick songs, of course :)
I wonder if labels let Pandora get away with such low payouts because Pandora doesn't give the user quite the same control as the premium services. Unlike Spotify, which lets users construct a playlist, Pandora randomly chooses songs similar in style to the chosen artist's songs. Its approach appears to comply with the "noninteractive" requirement of the U.S. compulsory license, not allowing the user to select individual songs, and the "performance complement" requirement, playing no more than four songs by the chosen artist in three hours.
If you don't like how much Pandora is paying the artists it hosts, then sign up for premium. Better yet, buy the damn artists album or swag.
It's almost crazy to think that the artist is able to get his/her songs to play on Spotify, Pandora AND the radio. This combined with actual sales sounds lucrative. Most of us only get paid from one place at a time.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
...considered a plus or a minus? I think that would be good starting point to consider what is fair and what is not. For example, if a song expects $1,000,000 per play and get zero plays then that song nets $0. A song netting $0.0001 per play that is played 1 time obviously out performs the song played 0 times as far as returns per songs played is concerned.
Fuck it, that makes no sense. It is the cocksuckers counting tenths of pennies per play who are keeping the rest of us from having anything nice.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
In spotify's case we know the artists get scrap because they have shit deals with their labels and the labels keep all the money. So how does this compare to Pandora?
The royalties ONLY go to the publishing holders. If the artist was smart enough to keep 100% of his publishing rights, then the artist gets 100% of the royalties.
Sounds thick. Maybe even sarcastic.
And yet, it's still better than the current leading motive for "art".
Why do artists expect to be paid at all for recordings of their music? For a very brief period in history, making money off of recordings was made possible by a coincidental combination of technology and artificial scarcity caused by the cumbersome nature of physical media. Before the advent of physical recordings, musicians had to make money by performing. After the advent of digital recordings, musicians will once again have to make money by performing. Anything else will prove to have been historically anomalous.
Making and distributing recordings will still be in artists' interest, because they will serve as a way to generate demand for performances. That is, recordings will become a form of advertising, which will be distributed for all intents and purposes for free, or even at the expense of artists.
Can we quit wringing our hands about this now? Art will survive just fine.
How about, you know, putting up a requirement that the artist actually must have produced anything of value first?
Well, gee, if it is legal for the cops to use it without a warrant, then it is legal for a civilian like me to use it. Anyone want to build me one of these gadgets?
tis a wee bit over 1/10th a penny
If the artists don't like it, they can pull their music. Why should I care what the royalties are? And if they can't pull their music because their RIAA mafia record company won't let them, then it's the record companies fault. A lot of the shock and outrage I see on slashdot seems heinously misdirected.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
While true, it's irrelevant for two reasons:
1) The radio doesn't play the songs you want on demand; and
2) The radio is effectively a way to drive album sales. Spotify is a REPLACEMENT for the album.
It used to be that it was worth it to play your songs on the radio (even at a loss) because people that liked your one song might want to hear the 10 hours you wrote--that would never be heard on the radio--and spend $10 on the album.
Now you pay Spotify $10/month for unlimited access to the entire album. To the entirety of the artist's catalogue. To the entirety of all the included artists' catalogues.
This is obviously and trivially less money than any one of those artists would make previously from you if you liked their music. Perhaps the argument could be made that more people are listening and giving a tiny amount of money to each artist, but I rather think that given the stats I've seen, this isn't even close to true.
This is much different from the time when people were pirating albums, since many fans would go out and buy an album that they downloaded because they wanted to support the artist. Now people feel that because they're paying $10 to Spotify or Rdio that they ARE supporting the artist. They're not going to pay for a subscription AND an album. That's exactly the opposite of the point of these services.
They need a new model. Streaming on its own for $10/month is clearly not enough money to go around. Spotify has infrastructure costs and has been bleeding money (I think they had a break-even or profitable quarter just recently?). Meanwhile, they also need to distribute the remainder of the already paltry $10 between a zillion artists. It makes no sense.
Performers get zero payments for songs played on the radio (http://diymusician.cdbaby.com/2014/08/didnt-know-radio-royalties/). The authors of the songs (music and lyrics) do get paid. The payments to the rights holders (authors) of the music get paid from radio at a rate which is somewhere around $0.0003 per listener (give or take about 300% - source: http://davidtouve.com/2011/12/...).
In contrast, a permanent digital download and a CD (which can be played as many times as you like) have the same one time rate of $0.096 per track. This is set by law and is called a mechanical right.
So lets see what kind of relative value we have to a CD or PDD:
One radio listener, one listen = $0.0003, iow a permanent right "breaks even" at 320 listens
For Pandora and Spotify, they have to pay the entire chain - producers, artists, authors, promoters, etc.
If we scale the total fees using an album model, with a typical album costing $9.99 and having 12 tracks, of which 30% goes to the retailer, the value of a "track" is $0.583, or about 6x the amount paid for the author on that track. (you can argue the specifics, but if you're buying tens of millions of CDs worth of songs, you'd better get pricing that it *at least* this good)
So at that 58.3c/permanent track...
One pandora listener, one listen = $0.0014, break even is at 416 listens
One spotify listener, one listen = $0.007, break even us at 83 listens.
Radio has to play that track for 1920 listens to match the total compensation paid by the two streamers.
What does online streaming look like now? Pandora is slightly below Radio in their compensation per track to everyone they pay. You might contend that Pandora "finds" new artists better due to their model instead of radio playing whatever they're given to promote, and therefore provides slightly more value. Spotify, OTOH, lets you choose just what you want - you can play Brittney Spears all day, over and over - and therefore it's more like buying a track. And if you were to hit 83 plays on a track, you'd have been better off just buying the track. 83 plays seems like a lot, but that's over an entire lifetime - actually lifetime plus 70 years in copyright.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
One of the current issues for music recording artists is that we've essentially removed the traditional method of getting paid for producing a new album. A painter hopes to initially make $'s on the first sale of a new painting. So he/she doesn't really concern him/herself with the concept of "pay per view" after the fact.
These days, most musicians either invest their own money into production and distribution of a new album, or they sign with a record label who may loan them some money as part of a contract, but it's subject to being repaid by selling enough albums to pay the loan off.
Unfortunately, music streaming services severely cut into the number of people interested in buying the album, yet the streaming is apparently barely paying the artists anything.
So how do we fix it? I'm not necessarily arguing that we need to pay more for streaming, or in turn those companies should pay the artists more of a "cut". But I'm saying there's a transition in progress away from people actually buying new music that's released, and towards an expectation of being able to listen to it, on demand, via the Internet.
If the current music situation was more equivalent to how a da Vinci type would get compensated, we'd have a system in place where anyone providing the music streaming (equivalent to "public viewing of the painting") would have to pay thousands of dollars, up front, first, to own each song. (Perhaps that would mean each service would have "exclusives" on individual songs or whole albums they purchased.)
People keep complaining about stuff like this without realizing that no one is forcing artists to list themselves on Pandora at all.
You don't have to put your music on their service. At all.
If you did put your music on their service then you agreed to whatever their rate was at that time.
END OF STORY SHUT THE FUCK UP.
If you don't like the rate now, then tell that to pandora and if they don't give you more money then either suck it up or leave.
Again... End of fucking story.
Let me put the prices in some perspective. I can go to Youtube, search any song by just about anyone, and find that song often listed by the publisher of that artist... and I can listen to that song over and over again for free.
So... Where is the money coming from that pays these artists? The ad revenue from non paying users? On a per ad basis you're talking about a tiny amount of money. And then you have to keep in mind that a user could listen to several songs between each ad. Which means that ad revenue has to be split between all those artists and that is only after Pandora has gotten enough to meet their bottom line. All things considered, the price is not unreasonable.
Does it suck that artists aren't making the record company money they used to make? Perhaps... but that's over and done with. The day of the rock god is over. Accept it.
If you want to be a professional musician these days then you have to crowd fund yourself. Set up a website, distribute exclusive content through it, do fan requests, interact with your users, and try to sustain yourself with a subscription model if you can. That... or try to sustain yourself with live performances. The record deals are gone. You're not going to buy yourself islands with your guitar unless you're very lucky.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
BUT radio plays that song to millions of devices simultaneously, whereas P & S play to a single device. If it's listens we're worried about (and that is what this is about), it would take Pandora 5.7 years for a million people to consecutively listen to that 3 minute Lady Gaga, but radio can distribute the same amount of listens in just 3 minutes.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If people weren't so set on getting Free Shit, this wouldn't be a problem.
But it seems a lot of people think they have a RIGHT to listen to music, created by others for the purpose of selling and providing an income, for FREE.
Look at all the bitching and moaning that happens on Slashdot about how shit should be free. Fuck You. Shit cost money to make and distribute and you fuckers should be paying for it.
(and given payola pushes this down to "makes money per stream", likely has an argument)
With Pandora model, each play potentially introduces artists/albums that the listener has not heard before. When the song is playing, there are purchase links on the bottom of the screen. This is different from Spotify's on demand access. Pandora is not able to charge its users same rates (or get most people to sign up for pay subscription in general) and is helping artists get sales from other channels. I think some difference in rates is reasonable. It would make more sense to compare Pandora with iTunes Radio and other similar services.
It's got bugger all to do with how many people listen,it's about what is paid to the artist for putting their song on.
Since millions will listen to the song, a million listeners share the royalty paid to the artist is the ONLY fair method to compare it to streaming services.
That you get to pick, as a listener, is not relevant to the artist.
And so many radio stations have listener choice and call in requests that your point is not all that applicable in the real world anyway.
Fuck those money-grubbing artists. Tell them to vote for a basic income, funded the same way the private sector funds itself, through money creation. Then let ppl make music because they love it, not to get paid.
Then why are they in this business? If musicians can't find another way to make money, they need to find a job that will get them some.
For many musicians, they tend to get into this as if it was the lottery. That is, they go in there expecting that they can write some songs and make an actual living off of it, with no actual evidence that they can. Some of them make it huge, but most don't.
So why are they making music? Because they want to. And why am I paying them to do what they want to do? No one pays me to play video games, even if I have a phenomenal kill ratio and a winning record.
I don't owe musicians anything. If they have a product that I need to get from them, or I want to pay them for, then fine. If I don't think their stuff is worth more than some fraction of $10 a month, then that's their problem. If musicians can't live off of that, then they need new management or a new career. That's exactly what I'd need to do if what I did brought in no money.
Sorry, your assertion still applies to software. It generates revenue (or cost reductions if used in-house) as long as it is used, so why shouldn't I or any programmer get paid for each use of software we wrote? Why shouldn't the TV repairman get paid every time an advert is put on the TV, or a pay-per-view product purchased? Without their work, the money would not have been generated!
You need a reason why music, books and movies should be done differently, and to such an extent that the power remains with the copyright holder to kill off and bury any and all copies of their older work to ensure that the competition for new work is not a factor for future revenue (see Songs of the South and Disney's activities on Fantasia et al).
Then which [group receives royalties]?
Yes
You mean the band behind 90125? Because it sounds like you're heading into a The Who's on first routine.
Tell them to vote for a basic income, funded the same way the private sector funds itself
Huh? hiring lobbyists to pay baksheesh to politicians?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It is, however, relevant to the radio-vs-pandora comparison; since spotify is about 5x pandora (summary), and spotify is 16x radio (gp), then pandora should be roughly 3x radio.
I like Pandora, and one of my greatest "web-disappointments" is not being able to use it without a proxy (Pandora is not available in my country), yet this really says a lot about how Pandora values their own music selection algorithms: you would expect a company that brags so loud about putting so much manpower and know-how in the topic to set a larger price tag on it, and give artists larger margins for each individual play of its songs. After all, Pandora never lets you pick a specific track for a specific artist and will always play what it thinks is best for you. Is this the real value the company translates to its services?
1) The radio doesn't play the songs you want on demand
Neither does Pandora....
And for not being a socialist! Ya lousy guitar playing parasite!
Because Socialism...
But it seems a lot of people think they have a RIGHT to listen to music, created by others for the purpose of selling and providing an income, for FREE
"I have a right to listen to music" makes a lot more sense than "I have a right to be paid for my hard work." Nobody has a _right_ to be paid for working. If they did, homeless people could dig ditches and fill them in all day and get paid for that because they were working really hard.
all the bitching and moaning that happens on Slashdot about how shit should be free.
Where? I don't see it anywhere.
I do see people pointing out that shit _used_ to be free: no compensation at all to the artist for radio plays in the US, compensation at 1/8th what Pandora pays in the UK.
Shit cost money to make and distribute
kinda seems like Pandora's doing the distribution in this case: promotion, discovery, transmission of the music, negotiation of deals, collection of money, all of it. iTunes and Google Music will even deal directly with artists, though most of them seem unable to figure that out. I guess you're saying we'd better make sure these new guys are paid adequately for their hard work, and aren't being squeezed too hard by the greedy record labels who keep making news cycles like TFA to build up hate toward the companies that are about to make them irrelevant?
Shit cost money to make and distribute and you fuckers should be paying for it.
It costs a lot less to make than it used to, and it costs so little to distribute it that people will do that part for free (see Bittorrent). We need a better model - one that doesn't make people criminals for listening to something in the privacy of their own home. (And, therefore, requires that privacy to be violated if it is to be enforced.)
Sure content creators need to be rewarded for their work -- but not until the end of time. Certainly not for decades and decades after they're dead. And no fucking way singing "Happy Birthday" in a restaurant should count as a public performance and result in sending a check to Warner / Chappell music (but it does). And while we're at it, fuck the perversion that copyright law has become, and fuck Big Media's teams of lawyers who'd rather exploit talent, rootkit PCs, cripple their own content with DRM, and turn people into felons and sue them into the poor house than fix their obsolete distribution models. Your tired argument is the same one that has been parroted by the RIAA and MPAA shills since the Net has existed. Yeah, let's throw the "fuckers" under the bus and give Big Media Corps the right to do whatever the fuck they want, forever!
The truth is Music Publishers want to "Kill" Pandora - They want keep a obsolete business model - this would also benefit the NAB (terrestrial radio - which is dying) http://qz.com/197344/pandora-a...
I think you're assuming that most people would have spent more than $10 a month without spotify. You can argue the dollar amount, but one album a month is probably a pretty good starting point as an average spend. Just because I can listen to thousands of albums in a month doesn't mean I would have otherwise bought thousands of albums in a month.
Artists and their corporate cronies think they should be paid every time you sing their song in the shower. Fuck them.
Last I heard Pandora has more than one user.
He's killed in a tour bus accident. Yes, she should continue to collect royalties.
Under current law, her copyright would end sooner just because he died young. Why is this desirable? A copyright term of a fixed period after first publication of a work, such as the copyright term of 28 years under the Copyright Act of 1790 or the present 20-year patent term, would have provided ample time to find other sources of income.
Before the advent of physical recordings, musicians had to make money by performing.
During this period, how did composers and songwriters make money? Perhaps modern-day musicians could become performer-songwriters and make money in an analogous way.
Define: IP Multicast
Yes, but they are not streaming that song to every listener.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
More than one...But not necessarily all.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
This is a capitalistic society. What do you expect?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Can I have a basic income, you know, if I want it? That would free me from the money jungle too.
Oh, or did you mean only highly special "artists" get to eat for free while they want for their chance to make millions of dollars and fuck groupies?
How about a model where the artists only continue to get paid if they continue to work. You know, like the rest of us? Let's call that model the "Touring and Selling T-Shirts and Actually Writing New Material" model. Couple that with a crazy strategy called "Setting Up an IRA and Actually Saving for Retirement Like Everyone Else" and they might be viable.
Of course, that assumes enough people want to see them play and buy their T-shirts that they can afford to save for requirement. If they can't, I suggest that they instead try the "Get a Real Damn Job Because No One Owes You The Right To Chase Your Dream If You Aren't Good Enough to Make A Living At It" model.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
There is a huge glut of music now. There are more songs than I could listen to in my lifetime if I listened to a new and different song every time.
Supply and demand.
Besides, we know that royalty rates were purposely set too high on internet radio in an attempt to crush it. Or at least we did when royalty rates were first being set. It was widely reported at the time.
Also prices were set when the market was tens of millions of people instead of billions of people. You need a lot less per listener to pay for sex and blow.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
A painter hopes to initially make $'s on the first sale of a new painting. [...] So how do we fix it?
Let fans crowdfund a musical group's next album.
Why should something that generates revenue over time not be paid out the same way to the creator?
After how much time should the revenue cease? For example, why should or should not the estate of William Shakespeare still receive royalties for performances and film adaptations of the play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which premiered around 1602?
Is this story sort of like the ones that told us how 'pirate downloaders' and 'the internet' were going to bankrupt the music industry and drive musicians into the poorhouse?
Let me call Kanye and Rihanna, see if maybe I could send them a donation and help them out a little bit? Those poor kids, just struggling to get by. Like the whole music industry....clearly, they're doomed.
-Styopa
This has been mentioned by others by we confusing terms when comparing Artists payments. Performing artists that is those who perform works usually created by others are compensated differently from writers and composers who create original works. Both in theory and practice society encourages originality so in general creators are rewarded more that performers. It is possible to write a single song (or novel for that matter) and live comfortably for the rest of ones life. Of course a performance can be highly original and creative as well but a single performance is unlikely to generate a lifetime's income.
This is true. When I was a kid in the 80s (teen years), I bought lots of records and CDs. By my late 20s (late 90s), that had dwindled considerably, more so in my 30s, and now that I'm in my late 40s, I basically buy no music. Maybe a song per year on average, if that much. I don't engage in filesharing.
So the $30 or $40 I spend per year on Pandora for an ad free account, which I use probably less than 10 hours per month, is comprised in part of money I would never have given the music industry in the absence of something like Pandora. Note, it isn't that Pandora caused me stop buying music -- I had already stopped more than a decade before I started listening to Pandora. For the music industry, whatever they get out of my Pandora usage should be considered pure gravy that they wouldn't have gotten if Pandora or something like it did not exist.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Now you pay Spotify $10/month for unlimited access to the entire album. To the entirety of the artist's catalogue. To the entirety of all the included artists' catalogues.
This is obviously and trivially less money than any one of those artists would make previously from you if you liked their music.
What makes you so sure there's less money here?
I remember that we used to pay about $10 per album (with the exception of certain top 40 new releases that cost twice as much that I never bought), and I used to buy about 1 album per month. If everyone who did that switched to Spotify for the entirety of their music consumption, that's exactly the same revenue going into the system as before.
It's even better now. Under the old system, if you liked an artists music you bought it once, and that was the end of the transaction. Especially for new artists with only one or two albums, that's tough. Who goes out and buys an artists' entire back catalog, anyway? Under the new system, if you like the artists music they can keep getting paid as long as you keep listening to it.
Pandora has a different model than Spotify, and comparing them is somewhat silly.
Pandora pays the standard rate, set by the government. It cannot play a specific song you request, or play an entire album. Much like traditional radio, you hear what "the DJ" decides to play. You can "choose a station" by selecting an artist or song, but you can't force it to play the song you want.
Spotify, on the other hand, deals directly with the artist, and pays more for allowing to play an album, or specific songs.
At at the end, it doesn't really matter how much they pay the label, because the artists doesn't get shit.
As a side note, the royalties, like in radio, are paid to the song writer, not the performer.
If people weren't so set on getting Free Shit, this wouldn't be a problem.
It isn't that people are set on getting "free shit" as much as it is people don't realize that advertising is they way they pay for this shit. You don't think about radio not being free because you don't write a check, although your time and purchasing dollars are both in play. From the listener point of view, you just turn the dial and there you are! But everything you buy has advertising costs built in and that's where you pay for radio and television. You just don't realize you're paying.
So Pandora, without payment, acts like a radio and with payment acts like Public Radio (tote bags, not free).
The business model is a bit strange. They are trying to break away from traditional radio. So they need legal fees for - government, music industry, independent artists. They need cash to expand and advertise themselves rapidly and they need to pay critics and coders who don't care about becoming the next Facebook or Google but want to retire this lifetime.
$3.99 / $.0014 = 3600 plays at * 5 minutes = 1 week of music I did hear TV ads run you about $1 a set of eyeballs. And if it streams constantly some people might listen to more than a week of music a month.
It does seem insane for them to be paying less than $4000 a month to artists ( their bandwidth costs are higher)
You can "broadcast" over a network using IP multicast. This is not what pandora is doing. Pandora is doing unicast.
It seems like artists think they have a RIGHT to a job making music even if there is no market demand for non-free music.
Rather than getting all pissed off at consumers for not paying you, why not get a job producing something that people are actually willing to pay for?
Either that, or make music that is so good people can't live without it, and cram it full of DRM and don't allow it to be played on the radio or pandora or spotify. You could charge huge subscription fees and make all the money you want.
Also, stop whining
Well, I mean, to a certain extent I agree. But you and I are having this conversation, which means that we've thought about it. Spotify and services like it mask the conversation from the public. They think that the artists are getting paid an amount commensurate with their skill, and roughly corresponding to the amount that the public enjoys the artist's music. If you ask someone what they think a band gets paid from a streaming service, I'm sure they'll tell you a figure that's much higher than it actually is. To an extent, it even removes the ability of people to vote with their dollars. When $10/month is being split between dozens of artists, even the person that comes out on top is poor. In the end, it may end up backfiring on the streaming services. If bands decide they can make more money doing releases on BandCamp and Spotify is undermining their album sales, maybe they'll pull out of the streaming services to sell fewer albums, but still make more money doing it.
But on a more philosophical level, I think it's sad that art is reduced to a mere calculation and balance sheet. I paid $10 for some albums and I've gotten joy out of them that can't be defined in dollar terms. In a very fundamental way, a lot of music shapes the way we interact with the world. I mean that very literally; music changes and shapes your brain as you listen to it. Emotion and music are tightly interwoven. It's a surprise when you meet someone that takes no enjoyment in music at all.
So while there's a fundamental truth to what you say, driving potential artists away from what could be a workable career doesn't really benefit us. If streaming revenues were enough to make up a decent, middle-ish class living, I don't think I'd argue with you. But these streaming revenues aren't enough to do anything other than have making music as a hobby, and really undermine important album sales. I'm sure there will be lots of artists that continue to make music and live in poverty--that's been true through the ages--but the promise of the age we live in was that MORE artists would be able to reach more people and more EASILY make a living.
No, actually, I'm not. I'm assuming that people would put that $10 towards a specific album and thus, a specific artist. If I stream dozens or hundreds of artists a month, the $10 is really diluted, so even if I spent most of my time listening to one artist, they necessarily won't have made as much money off of me as they would've if I'd bought their album.
The idea that artists have a choice in this is actually wrong. Once a sound recording is published, there are statutory licenses (and statutory license rates) for "performances" of the recording. Broadcast radio, Pandora, Spotify, etc. all have to pay the composer per performance. Digital services (basically everyone but broadcast radio) also have to pay the performer. The rates a broadcaster has to pay are set by statute or by a rate court (SDNY for the rates BMI and ASCAP can charge for performances of compositions, a three judge panel in the copyright office for performances of sound recordings).
The whole difficulty here is that, as others have said, scarcity in intellectual property is artificially created by law. Pretty much all of the legislation we have in this area is the product of various large interest groups lobbying Congress (BMI/ASCAP/SESAC pushing for composition protection and against sound recording protection, SoundExchange pushing for sound recording protection, broadcasters pushing against protection for either, and for statutory licenses, technology companies pushing for models that allow them to create new models that maximize their profits while minimizing input (read: "music license") costs.
With all this lobbying determining the actual economics of the market, we end up with laws that are often skewed to uphold particular business models without protecting anyone lacking major lobbying clout.
Radio is an ad for albums? Huh. I thought albums were ads for concerts. Heck I only $9 for a CD but I pay triple that for a concert tshirt and double THAT for the concert ticket.
If people weren't so set on getting Free Shit, this wouldn't be a problem.
But it seems a lot of people think they have a RIGHT to listen to music, created by others for the purpose of selling and providing an income, for FREE.
Look at all the bitching and moaning that happens on Slashdot about how shit should be free. Fuck You. Shit cost money to make and distribute and you fuckers should be paying for it.
Paid music is a relatively recent innovation. Back in the day, people made music for fun, without pay. Then we went through a period where the very wealthy financed music, either by paying musicians a salary to hang around with the King and play things on request, or by wealthy individuals commissioning music to be written.
The concept of the average Joe paying for music is only about as old as devices which could record and play back music. In addition, this time period almost completely overlaps with the time period in which we had free broadcast radio, where you could just pay a 1-time fee for some hardware and listen to the radio with no additional costs.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I realize this is a bit off topic. but remember when copyright was a short-term (fourteen years, with another possible fourteen-year extension) agreement between the creator and the public, in that you could monopolize your creation with many protections, but at the end of the term, you had to turn over your creation to the public?
Now, we can argue that fourteen/twenty-eight years may be a bit too short in this day and age, but the pendulum has swung way to the side of, "I want my creation to benefit me for life," and then some, in certain cases. Thanks Bono. Sonny that is, not the one of U2 fame.
And before you say, "but if we don't have these ridiculously long term extensions, no one will ever create anything for fear of losing it," just look at all of the stuff on Bandcamp, Youtube, SoundCloud, etc.
Artist income sources:
The artist gets paid per concert? Yes
Paid celebrity endorsements (advertising)? Potentially Yes
Branding of merchandise (posters, T-shirts, etc)? Yes (eg KISS)
Why do they need more money (royalty) per stream?
Then why are they in this business? If musicians can't find another way to make money, they need to find a job that will get them some.
Construction labor. That's what some of them did before they thought they were making money from royalties.
3 minute average length of song. 8 hours average of streaming per day, 30 days per month = 4800 streams per month. $5/month subscription / 4800 = 0.00104 ......
Sure they do, especially if customers are using the result of the work, a song in this case. If you drink lemonade from a lemonade stand, you need to pay for the drink. Making lemonade is no guarantee of income to the lemonade owner, but if he finds a customer, he needs to get paid.
If people want ditches dug and these homeless people do it for them, they definitely need to get paid. Likewise, if people want to listen to music, and musicians produce music and hand it over to the customers, the musicians need to get paid for they work.
Are you being disingenuous? There are plenty of posts about "greedy musicians," "basic income," "get another job," "money from concerts" etc. that are just code for we just want your music for free, find another way to make money; it's not our problem.
There are several orders of magnitude more non-concert music listeners than concert goers. Concerts are for extra income, not main income.
yea seems we are in the same age range with the same buying pattern and it has nothing to do with online or file sharing i simply quit buying hell i rarely even Liston anymore my car radio sits on news radio anymore or not on at all. the simple fact is the music world collapsed under its own inflated egos and stuck to the pimps and whores style even to this day.
well they do have to keep working if im a 1 hit wonder i will be in the poor house after my song is no longer in the top charts.
Crowdfunding albums has been done before. I'm pretty sure RadioHead tried this with a recent album, as did Nine Inch Nails. David Bowie may have done so too? (Just going by memory here ...)
In any case, I think the concern with going this route is that once the novelty of doing it wears off, you'll quickly have little more than a "race to the bottom", where artists everywhere are releasing works this way, and people won't contribute much money at all to any one project. (The early adopters of the model did well with it, primarily because people were paying them the "going rate" for albums, or more in some cases, as a show of support for trying the new business model and taking risks.)
Again, I'm not really sure what the answer is with all of this? Many, many years ago, musicians were "professionals for hire" -- LONG before it was even possible to record audio. The wealthy paid them to do live gigs at their parties and what-not, and that was pretty much the extent of how profit was made from it. Maybe we're headed back that way, where live concerts are the only practical way to profit from making music -- and anything else is simply done to market your music and get your "brand" out there?
Truthfully, I don't even know that I care? I love music and I used to even play guitar in a local band for a couple years (long time ago). Part of me thinks our society is poorer for eliminating the possibility (however faint) that some teens jamming together in a garage can aspire to become stars, making millions, if they just believe in themselves and doggedly keep practicing and playing, playing, playing. But another part of me knows that's exactly why I got out of the music scene too. The writing was on the wall that this wasn't going to be a good living for many people at all, as technology progressed and things changed. (First, we saw the decline of the radio DJ who was allowed to run his/her own show, playing whatever he/she liked. Then we saw the major labels implode (deservedly, basically). And just as the indie labels and individual entrepreneurs were picking up the pieces and going DYI -- things went to digital streaming for "all you want to listen to for $10 a month" services.
That's like saying there's a huge glut of books, because there are tons of 17th century atlases I can read!
People don't just want songs they want songs they like, and since people's tastes are hugely influenced by their peers that means *new* music. And there is not a glut of "deep house" or "90's throwback" or "shit that sounds like Nickelback" or whatever it is people are in to these days so there is more than enough demand to exceed supply.
Riddle me this... if rates are not negociated on a service by service basis between that service and the publisher then why does Pandora pay a different rate then Spotify?
Answer... they are negociated on a service to service basis between service and publisher.
Which means either your publisher signed the contract with those rates on it, or your agent signed them, or you as the artist signed them... or some combination.
And if you signed them then you agreed. If you did not sign them then you didn't give Pandora authorization to play your music and they would be breaking the law.
What is more, not all songs or artists have the same rates in many venues. Sometimes they do but only because publishers decided to sign general contracts for all their licenses with that service. However, if they chose not to do that then you'd either need to pay a different rate or you'd be forbidden to play it at all.
It all boils down to the contracts.
If you don't like the contract then don't sign. People are getting pissing with iTunes, pissy with Amazon, and pissy with Pandora.... then don't sign. If they provide your content sans a contract then it is copyright infringement.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
http://help.pandora.com/custom...
You can see they have a submission form to their system and everything that does independent authorization of every submission. And as you can see they say they say they choose to "buy" content when submitted. That means prices PER artist and PER release are individually negotiable. ... I demand a mia culpa.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Do you ever write code that is sold commercially? If so, why do you expect to be paid? There's no distribution costs aside from storing it on Akamai and paying for the bits and the pipe. You can "tour and sell t-shirts" by offering customization, installation help and other forms of support. Why should people expect the commercial software market to continue to exist. And why do people still pay for Windows when it's been selling for 15-20+ years?
They need a new model. Streaming on its own for $10/month is clearly not enough money to go around. Spotify has infrastructure costs and has been bleeding money (I think they had a break-even or profitable quarter just recently?). Meanwhile, they also need to distribute the remainder of the already paltry $10 between a zillion artists. It makes no sense.
This strikes me as highly non-obvious, do you think the average person spends more than $10/month purchasing music?
Annual US music sales are about $7bn
With the US population at 320 million that's only ~$22/year per capita, not counting Spotify's cut (and whatever portion of that already comes from streaming) that's means if no-one bought music any more only 22% of the US population would have to stream to make up the difference.
I doubt there are many people spending $120/year purchasing music long term. $10/month strikes me as a wildly lucrative prospect for the music industry.
I stole this Sig
Same with me -- I rarely listen to music while driving these days. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks. I remember as a teen riding around with my Grandpa being annoyed at him listening to AM talk radio rather than playing music. Now I'm doing essentially the same thing, just with better technology.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I agree that the conversation is hidden from us with a Spotify, but again, this is a business arrangement that I also had little say on, one way or another. If I insisted that Spotify give more to artists, then Spotify would charge me more. If I couldn't or wouldn't pay that, then Spotify could not operate, or it would pay out less.
If we believe that Spotify is actually greedy, as opposed to providing operating costs + a fair profit margin, then perhaps people can work together to provide another service that does want to pay more for art, but unless that was run with some business sense, that would fail too.
I don't really see art as something different than any other job. Many people do work that does not bring me any satisfaction, and many artists do nothing that interests me either. To do either professionally requires some sort of commitment. Both "normal" jobs and making art can require talent and often require work and resources. I'd rather be in charge of my own film studio, but even if I had ability, if I don't know how to make money at it, I'm not going to make films because I'll be starving and all my assets will be repossessed in short order.
There are musicians who are good business people, and if they have any talent, they can support themselves. Many do not have business ability, and therefore they need to rely on others. Which is fine, except when those people are not looking out for you. Perhaps instead of complaining about Spotify, we should work on simply taking up a collection for them and giving them money. Don't even bother associating it with a track you like, don't even bother with "ownership" or a license to have a copy of their recording. Just sponsor them.
I think people want the music business to be run like a Charity for Deserving Musicians With No Business Sense. If that's what you want, then don't make Spotify do it for you, cut out the middleman and just pay them as a benefactor or patron. If they start making crap, then stop supporting them.
How much would you pay for a copy of Windows 3.1? I'm no Microsoft shill -- I don't even use Windows -- but the people paying for Windows today aren't paying for something that was laid down on a disc 20 years ago. They're paying for ongoing updates, bug fixes, increased functionality, wholly different functionality, etc. etc. That Alanis Morrisette song "Isn't It Ironic" -- it's just as grammatically fucked up as it ever was despite being out there for the last 20 years.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Yes it fucking is. I've been seeing these stupid arguments on Slashdot and other "tech" blogs for the better part of two decades, and every time, every single fucking time, it is obvious that the detractors of intellectual property, copyrights, and patents, and the like flat-out feel entitled to the fruits of others' labor without compensation. That's all it's ever about. From the DVD deCSS decryption stuff to the Pirate Bay to the rates of pay for streaming, it has always and ever shall be about the Free Shit (free as in beer, yuk yuk). No matter how much a bunch of basement-dwelling nerds try to dress it up in lofty principles, when it comes down to it they simply want access to every single thing anyone has ever created, at the push of a button, for zero money. That's it. These conversations would be a lot shorter if at least a few people would come clean and just acknowledge it once in a while.
There is currently an oversupply of recorded music.
Just giving people money does nothing to increase the amount of stuff produced for consumption. In fact it reduces supply. When you give people money they use it to consume products that have already been produced while reducing their incentive to take jobs producing goods.
Totally irrelevant nitpick that has no bearing on your point:
You're leaving out a substantial period where composers sold their compositions as sheet music, and made big money on it. That era lasted longer than the recording era.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
You mean like YOU, Mr AC, who comes onto this website, for free, and bitches, harasses, and is downright hostile to the rest of us patrons, again FOR FREE. It's almost like you feel like it's your right to come here and talk shit to us all because it's free. You are the blackest kettle I have ever seen- The Pot.
Relevancy to the discussion is irrelevant to the question asked. Definitions mean little these days, but knowing ones' personal biases, morals, and political bent will speak much louder, way past 11, than what the poster actually says. I bet you're the type of guy who says that we all really should be listening to Jim's mixed-race parenting ideas over here, never mind he's been in prison for the last 20 years for murdering his kids and he was a KKK grand wizard. Nah man, his opinion is just as valid as everyone else's. *sigh*
//... Top Secret internal document, do not copy!
#define BENDTHEMOVERABARREL "Very"
#define AND " "
#define SHAFTTHEMUPTHEARSE "Fair"
const char * officialPolicyTowardsArtists = BENDTHEMOVERABARREL AND SHAFTTHEMUPTHEARSE;
//... p.s. be careful not to leak the above onto the internet
John_Chalisque
Because Profit!
Why is Snark Required?
There are also more books than I can read. That's why I use the library, used books, and books loaned from friends, wait for books to go on sale, and flat out just don't buy books that stay too expensive.
If you are highly selective perhaps you can put your self in a state where you feel you must fork over tons of money I guess.
While you have a good point on the 17th century atlases (tho I did just start a book written in the 17th century last week actually. lol. "Three musketeers" in the original 17th century french.. but that doesn't invalidate your point).
I'm talking about today.
In 2008 - there were 254 SF novels and 436 fantasy novels alone (690 books). Not to mention mystery books, best sellers, spy books, etc. I read two to six books a week and I can't keep up.
I watch 6-10 hours a week of television and I can't keep up.
More songs come out (some of it good) than I can listen to.
On top of that I'm playing my own music, creating my own stuff, spending time with the grandkids, and I'm retired but doing 5 hours a week therapeutic massage for people in serious pain (and I just started a new book on massage... and I listen to a wide selection of music to use during sessions).
There is an unbelievable glut of entertainment options right now. I rarely pay over 10% of original retail for anything. All I had to do was just fall behind (easy enough) and watch the sales.
Perhaps you've convinced yourself that you must have something and you'll pay anything for it. I've learned, that most things I felt i had to have, I didn't care a whit about 5 years later.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Irrelevant. I, and most people I know, did not spend $10 a month on CD's. We downloaded MP3s (back then this was legal 'round here)
In my specific case they went from getting $0.00 per track per time I listened to them to getting somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084 per track per time I listen to it. That's a lot more.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Shouldn't the artists be making money from touring and tour merchandise, like they did before the record labels decided to turn the album into a commodity instead an advertisement?
Who says concerts are for extra income? The record companies, not artists. Artists make the most money through concerts/live performances, as they get a more reasonable cut. Record sales only directly help the record companies - they indirectly help the artists by advertising them for when they decide to go play live.
Fuck those money-grubbing artists. Tell them to vote for a basic income, funded the same way the private sector funds itself, through money creation. Then let ppl make music because they love it, not to get paid.
Fuck those money grubbing labels. They're the ones that rape every facet of the industry and keep all the riches for themselves. Support the artists, fuck the labels.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Yes it fucking is. I've been seeing these stupid arguments on Slashdot and other "tech" blogs for the better part of two decades, and every time, every single fucking time, it is obvious that the detractors of intellectual property, copyrights, and patents, and the like flat-out feel entitled to the fruits of others' labor without compensation. That's all it's ever about. From the DVD deCSS decryption stuff to the Pirate Bay to the rates of pay for streaming, it has always and ever shall be about the Free Shit (free as in beer, yuk yuk). No matter how much a bunch of basement-dwelling nerds try to dress it up in lofty principles, when it comes down to it they simply want access to every single thing anyone has ever created, at the push of a button, for zero money. That's it. These conversations would be a lot shorter if at least a few people would come clean and just acknowledge it once in a while.
Maybe that might be the kids mentality but for most of the people I know that download stuff it's because they're unable to buy what they want. CD/DVDs out of print. Shows locked to Netflix/hulu/streaming site x in the us only, DRM, people who travel, stuff not available in your region etc etc. So it's on a distribution method (the internet) that has no reason we can't get the stuff other than they won't let us so no wonder people say well it's available for free right there so fuck you. Most people who can afford to buy what they want would if they could. Kids cant buy crap anyway that's why they gorge when they can get it for free, but make what we want easy to buy and we'll certainly fucking buy it.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
I also got really bored of music about 5+ years ago. I still have and listen to all the music I bought before that but a switched seemed to flip in my head one day and said, right you've got enough. I've bought maybe 3 albums since and only downloaded stuff I own because it was easier than digging out the cd to digitize. Never bothered with spotify et al. I do occasionally go on internet radio sites and try to find the most shouty alex jones type ranting about stuff I can but they're few and far between nowadays. There used to be station out of New York called Angry Radio which was great but they also just stopped one day.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Based on my experience with my YouTube content and monetization, YouTube also pays $0.001 ($1 per 1000 views). My channel is at nearly a million views (total, not per month), so it's not huge, but it's not trivial, either. I don't know if they pay different rates to different people / channels, though.
But we live in a capitalist society and your (and others) attitude towards artists will inevitably influence (TBH we're probably past the PONR) the entire music sector. Just as you must (if you want to be a responsible citizen, i suppose...) think about your groceries, household products (really everything!) that you purchase, so too must you think of how your purchasing affects musicians (and all the arts).
Unless of course you are excited for more Disney pop stars and less creativity/complexity in music...
I don't owe musicians anything
Just because *you* don't value your music doesn't mean that it is "their problem" as you so rudely put it. As members of a capitalist society, if we want any non-survival/necessity product to remain cared-for/value-generating then we must be diligent in providing proper valuation or risk losing it. Gov't/Corporate interests have readily shown for much of the twentieth century that valuing music (and all the entertainment industries) and musicians is an externality of lining record company execs' wallets. Musicians who try to change that are just excluded from the measly scraps leftover.
That's exactly what I'd need to do if what I did brought in no money.
Right, because the RIAA are so keen on helping musicians. This is such an out-of-touch conclusion that assumes that there is something they can do. The problem MUST be the artists are just not willing to fight for it! Right... the way Americans and the US/State governments treat unions, collective bargaining, government workers is indicative of how "that's exactly what I'd need to do" is EXACTLY what none of them can do.
But I guess everyone should just homogeneously shift into only the most efficient money-producing professions....
Sure they do, especially if customers are using the result of the work, a song in this case. If you drink lemonade from a lemonade stand, you need to pay for the drink. Making lemonade is no guarantee of income to the lemonade owner, but if he finds a customer, he needs to get paid.
Ah, the old "Unauthorized copying is theft" fallacy. No, unauthorized copying is not theft, have never been theft and won't ever be theft, no matter how much you want it to. Even SCOTUS has confirmed that in the landmark ruling Dowling vs. US, 1985.
Unauthorized copying is a violation of rights, but it is much more akin to trespassing than anything else. It's like this. Imagine there is a lake. The lake has a beach. The beach and the lake itself is public property, but all the land around it is farmlands and thus private property, so the only way to (legally) get to the beach is by air. Those darn local people though, they do not wish to hire a helicopter ride over there. They'd rather just like to walk on the outskirts of some of that private property so they can get to the lake and enjoy a nice, cozy swim in the summer heat.
These people, trespassing on the private property just in order to be able to take a dip they, in fact, are entitled to, are technicly commiting a crime - but they do not harm any land by walking over that property, and they do not disturb anyone by simply walking. Depending on where you are from, this is even legal in some countries, provided certain rules are followed.
Are these people doing something so bad that they need to serve a jail sentence or maybe even death sentence for their lawbreaking?
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
The labels set the per-play payment rate. This is not the streamer just being cheap. The labels call the shots here. In general, a "station play", where the consumer is just listening to whatever was curated or programmed to be the next song, is of lower value than an "on demand" play, where the user specifically chose a song or album of songs to hear. So depending on the type of play, the pay rate will vary. But don't think for a second that Pandora or any other streaming service has much say here. The labels call the shots, it's their music, and if you as a streaming service don't like it, tough titties, play someone else's music then. If you think these numbers are small, bitch at the labels. To be fair, the streamer has huge costs; development, infrastructure, bandwidth, staff, the whole shebang. With what little money they net from subscriptions or ad revenue goes into maintaining these things. The lion's share gets paid to the content providers. If you increase the cost of the stream, yay label, yay artist, but the cost of maintaining the business becomes higher and less sustainable. The model is by no means perfect, and the future will hopefully yield a more equitable disbursement flow, but hopefully that sheds some light. Troll away.
Your economics are feudal and obsolete. There is no production capacity shortage; there is an artificial, imposed scarcity of money. Technology means we need far fewer production workers. Take ships: when Columbus came to America how many men did he need to sail his ships? Today the new supertankers can transport many, many orders of magnitude more cargo than Columbus could carry, with a crew of 13.
So instead of producing things, we employ people to watch over the huge surpluses accumulated, and to create liquidity via sketchy financial schemes such as toxic assets.
Basic Income frees individuals to be individually creative, without having to get some dumb boss to sign off on it first.
From what I've heard, YT pays a dollar for every 1000 views.
Yes of course you should have the choice to take a Basic Income. We produce so much surplus, we can guarantee everyone a decent minimum standard of living.