Pandora Pays Artists $0.001 Per Stream, Thinks This Is "Very Fair"

Posted by samzenpus on Monday February 23, 2015 @03:17AM from the getting-your-cut dept.

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."

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On demand vs. random by tepples · 2015-02-23 03:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.