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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."
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.
ah but there is a system of paying per radio play regardless, usually the fee is based on potential listeners.
not the whole world works like USA as well, in smaller countries being on permanent radio playlist basis can pay the upkeep for an artist(of course there's just so many minutes in a day, so that is going to be a handful of artists)
pandora and other radio streaming kind of personalized sites work like they do because it makes the royalties cheaper than if the user could choose to play the same song again and again.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.