Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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?
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!
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
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.
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?
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.
If you want fucking songs, there's always youporn and redtube although I wouldn't exactly call the audio "songs".
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
Yes, but they are not streaming that song to every listener.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
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.
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.
Then artists should look to make money on the tour that follows their new album, and be done with it. Instead of paying a 100-man crew and bringing in 10 trucks of custom sound and lighting equipment, then splitting the take 6 ways with the other band members, how about writing music that can be played on a rested grass lawn with minimal overhead and a four-piece band? And if that still doesn't work, how about just doing this on the weekends while you have another job during the week?
Nobody has a right to earn a living doing something. A subset of craftsmen we call "artists" have forgotten this.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
You can do that like everyone else. Invest your income.
Why should your children be paid for work you did? No other type of profession gets that, why are "artists" special?
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.