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Making Cents – the meager royalties paid out to bands by streaming services
- shardling 13y agoI don't think the article discusses how royalties were paid for traditional radio, does it? Anyway, I've definitely discovered multiple bands through Pandora, and then bought their albums/seen them in concert/etc.
- adventured 13y agoTraditional radio pays a much lower % of sales to the licensing companies. Pandora and Spotify are being fleeced by comparison. With the shift to Internet / satellite, the licensing companies made a huge land grab on the fees. The radio business has a few large organizations that go to bat for the whole industry. They're old lobbying groups with quite a bit of leverage, having been entrenched in DC for decades, and it's one of the reasons licensing fees have remained reasonable for radio. Internet radio / streaming has no such lobbying groups (yet).
- k-mcgrady 13y agoSpotify cannot be compared with traditional radio. Of course they are going to have to pay more. Spotify is essentially giving you access to an entire record store for free. On radio you get a limited number of select songs, you don't really get to choose what's played and the songs played get a lot more exposure which I'm sure is used to justify the lower fees.
- adventured 13y agoSpotify, Pandora, Sirius, and all the rest can easily be compared to traditional radio. In the streaming market you have very few good choices, the market is serviced by a few massive companies providing a very wide selection of music. In the radio market that same concept is accomplished by over 6,000 commercial FM radio stations, with a diverse playlist. To get a different playlist, you change stations. Indeed every type of music is covered by those 6,000 stations. And of course it used to be even more diverse, in the days of the purely live DJ, before the radio business began to fade and broadcasters cut expenses by moving to networked systems like the former Westwood One. You also used to be able to call up just about any station and make a song request. I'm sure you won't like that comparison to picking a song digitally, but it's the same, and it was very archaic, but no different than some of the other technological leaps we've made in which old technology seems very embarrassingly primitive. You often had to use a phone to make those requests, and a phone was a marvel in its day. The technological difference can be compared, in regards to distribution, ease of access, etc. In that case, Spotify / Pandora win, that's obvious. It's not that you couldn't access every type of music via radio stations, it's that it was a lot less practical. Technology leaped forward and vastly improved the situation. Spotify is very easy to compare against the radio business. What they've done is consolidate the radio market down into one platform. The Internet ate the broadcaster, very simply, just like it ate old Ma Bell. I can also compare IP telephony against the old telephony system.
- shardling 13y agoI kind of disagree -- people I know use spotify in a fundamentally different way than they used radio in the past. They often put on a particular album or artist, and this interaction is much closer to how folk used a library of CDs in the past. No one used the radio that way, even if you could call up and request a particular song. In contrast, Pandora is much closer to radio in how people approach it. (You can use Spotify like that too, but at least among my friends its not the primary means of interaction.)
- onemorepassword 13y agoTo be fair, radio doesn't completely replace sales of singles and albums the way Pandora and Spotify do. You can't compare on-demand services to radio.
- shardling 13y agoPandora does not replace such sales. You cannot queue up an album or particular song to listen to. It's cultural role is very analogous to traditional radio. Spotify is very different, of course, and that's why they have a different royalty structure.
- adventured 13y agoI wasn't comparing them, I was responding to the OP. I own radio stations and I have insight into the fees paid by radio stations for licensing. And of course I can compare them.
- revelation 13y agoSome (popular) radio stations are paid to play songs. Someone must have realized that exposure is value gained, not lost..
- atechnerd 13y agoYes exactly. 5,000 plays on Spotify or Pandora is not equal to a single play on terrestrial radio. A single play on terrestrial radio probably reaches closer to 10,000 listeners, depending on how large the market is. In other words, 5,000 plays on Spotify is less than a single play on terrestrial radio.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoRecorded music's value has dropped very close to zero (even 99 cents seems too much depending on the song sometimes). Live performances will always be the profit center. Recorded music is only good for promoting a band's concerts; you can't copy the live concert experience.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- iknowno_one 13y agoAsk any musician during the pre-internet era and this would be their assessment: Recorded music will always be the profit center. Live performances are only good for promoting a band's records; it's easier to sell 1,000,000 records than it is to sell tickets for 1,000,000 seats.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jbuzbee 13y agoThis seems like a detailed rebuttal of that idea: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml Which among other data, points to a detailed breakdown from Courtney Love (2000) about how the recording industry screws the musician: http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
- anigbrowl 13y agoYou know, an analysis that's a) 13 years out of date and b) from a notoriously dysfunctional individual might not be the best statistic to rely upon.
- Avshalom 13y agono, pre internet bands still got dicked on record sales and made their bank on live performances.
- r0s 13y agoThese are token royalties, I don't see the moral difference between these services and piracy. Music discovery has always been a liability for artists, the illusion that sharing is somehow worse than this sanctioned exploitation is pure hypocrisy.
- Daishiman 13y agoIt's either sharing or not being known at all. Last week I was in a musicology conference where several professors from Oxford commented on how there's a glut of not only self-taught musicians, but universities and learning academies teaching music production courses that are saturating the market. Even as a follower of very specific sub-subgenres of music it's almost all saturated, impossible to follow the latest developments in every area. This is indicative that the value of most music nowadays is really, really low. You could spend an eternity listening to freely-published, really good new music in Soundcloud and not spend a dime.
- eurleif 13y ago>the illusion that sharing is somehow worse than this sanctioned exploitation is pure hypocrisy. Consent makes all the difference in the world.
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- ricardobeat 13y ago> Pressing 1,000 singles in 1988 gave us the earning potential of more than 13 million streams in 2012. (And people say the internet is a bonanza for young bands...) If you had 13 million streams, you would easily sell a few thousand albums. The internet is a bonanza for artists - it gives you exposure and allows worldwide sales at very low cost.
- kenko 13y agoSaying this to Damon Krukowski is a bit like attempting to teach one's grandmother to suck eggs, no? He presumably knows something about this topic.
- adventured 13y agoThere's never anything wrong with challenging a supposed authority on a subject. I don't care who the person in question is. Albert Einstein should still be challenged on his calculations. Krukowski knows what he's talking about? Good, then he has nothing to fear from a little debate.
- eropple 13y agoIf you want to "debate" it might help to come with more than assertions that don't really have much of a basis in fact.
- ricardobeat 13y agoIf there were no assumptions it wouldn't be a debate. It's just my opinion® http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/08/a-look-inside-zoe-keatings-earnings-as-an-indie-musician.html http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/08/a-look-inside-zoe-kea... $85k in sales over 5 months, 1.5 million plays on Spotify. Another thing that prompted my comment is an apparent disregard for scale in the article - 7000 plays is nothing. Kids playing acoustic guitar get 500k views on youtube every week (not a qualitative judgment, of course).
- anigbrowl 13y ago
- balbaugh 13y agoHere is a rebuttal to this article and other streaming attacks that I linked to a while back posted on music site hypebot. Worth giving it a look. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4834767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4834767
- kenko 13y agoThe observation that Spotify is in business solely to increase its own capitalization and not directly for music-related reasons ties in nicely to this post: https://itself.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/like-a-business/ https://itself.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/like-a-business/ Spotify appears to be an organization related in some way to music, but in fact its purpose is merely to turn money into more money. This is not the way many businesses in the real world actually operate, and a good thing, too, because operating that way is pretty toxic.
- blibble 13y agoisn't that exactly what every single company aims to do? the music is a means to an end, the end being making money for the shareholders...
- kzrdude 13y agoRunning a bubble of investment capital without breaking even is a broken model. Inflating a company to biggest possible size is a broken model too (the company does only become less effective with size).
- kenko 13y agoNo, as the linked post points out. Many businesses do not have the goal of simply turning money into more money. For a long time, the goal of GM was to make cars. It would be insane to open, say, a used bookstore if making money were your sole goal. But some people are really into books and want to buy and sell them, not necessarily even running their businesses in the most ruthlessly efficient way for making money. That's not what they're into. There are businesses whose goal it is to make, say, quality hand tools, or knives. There are businesses that deliberately manage how many clients they take on in order to ensure that they can turn out a quality product, even though a less good product would probably not be detectable by their clientele and would increase their profits. This is known as having pride in one's profession or in one's craftsmanship. Of course they also have to make money to stay in business. There's a famous example of a largely technological company rejecting the mantra that their purpose is to turn money into more money---Craigslist. There's also a famous if apocryphal example of an individual programmer having the kind of pride in craft that would lead to the decision not to do something that would increase profits, namely the Story of Mel. The whole shareholder thing is a stupid myth that needs to die, anyway.
- therofler 13y agoWhat model of payment would be better than the current one?
- adrr 13y agoHow much money would radio station pay per listener that heard the song? I assume its far less than pandora pays and pandora is just radio on the net.
- ianlevesque 13y agoFM radio stations don't pay this royalty at all.
- illuminate 13y agoI can't wait for the day when Clearchannel crumbles.
- scottkduncan 13y ago> But I have simply stopped looking to these business models to do anything for me financially as a musician. That's too bad, because there are opportunities. You could completely discount the revenue most artists get directly get from streaming and look at the services as the free option of the freemium model. They're getting their product to a far larger audience than they would have if there was a cost right out of the gate, and some of those free users will turn into paying ones. I know I have purchased albums (from iTunes) of artists I've discovered on Spotify. I'm positive that for Galaxie 500, some of their Spotify streams generated additional revenue in other channels.
- mscarborough 13y agoWhat does pay-per-play even mean? IRTFA, and then searched again to see if I missed something for the terms 'start', 'finish', or 'duration'. I did not. I get how crappy it is for musicians to get ahead in the world, but it would be for everyone if we could be open about what the basic unit of currency is in this economy. Most of the time for my paid Rdio account, I listen to stuff I know I already like. Sometimes I don't, and I don't listen to more than 10-30 seconds of a song. Does that count as a play? Other times I'll go find tons of stuff within the app, but it's still all within Rdio-land. Also the stuff I stream on Rdio, I already paid for much of it within iTunes, but I prefer to have everything under the same hood. First world problem, I know. Do I get a discount for everything that I bought on vinyl, cassettes, CDs, and mp3s on other formats? I play thousands of songs each month, should I be paying 1 cent each?
- ianlevesque 13y agoIf any audio is played at all it counts as a play (with SoundExchange at least).
- anigbrowl 13y agoI play thousands of songs each month, should I be paying 1 cent each? Assuming a song is 3 minutes long on average, and assuming you play 1000 songs (including maybe 1000 others that you didn't like and only listened to for a couple of seconds), that's 50 hours of musical entertainment, which at a penny a song would be $10. So yes, you should.
- mscarborough 13y agoI pay $10 to Rdio each month, and paid a lot to iTunes before that. I definitely don't listen to one sucky song for every one that I like. Sitting at a desk coding and listening to music in your free time is an easy 200 hours a month. So all your assumptions are false.
- tunesmith 13y agoI'm coming out with my first cd soon... a seven-song mini-album. I printed 300 copies as that was the smallest I could go without it becoming a CD-R instead of a redbook. They'll arrive in a couple of weeks, and I'm thinking of selling them for $10 apiece. I spent a few years writing the songs and figuring out how to record and produce them as professionally as I'm able. I spent countless hours on the project and somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 on production costs. Despite that, I know the drill - I don't really have expectations of making a lot of money on this, or even meeting my costs. But I do intend to try as hard as I can to maximize my revenue. It's amazing what kind of culture has sprung up in the selling/delivery sphere. All these companies spring up to "empower" the indie musician and they invest in all sorts of signaling to make sure we know we had better sign up for their services or else we're not taking our career seriously. Examples: CDBaby: keeps $4 of every cd sale, even though you've already spent $1-$3 per every cd you manufacture. As opposed to just setting up a paypal link or merchant account on your website, and shipping it yourself. 2.9% + $0.30 sounds a lot better than $4. (Shipping costs are additional either way and passed on to the user.) I have trouble imagining at what point I'd want to spend $3.41 per cd to save myself the effort of just sticking a mailing label to a padded envelope and dropping it in my mailbox. Bandcamp: keeps 10% (by way of keeping every 10th chunk of revenue for itself). It's based around the belief that people will pay more if it's freely available, or will tend to pay more than the "suggested" price. I haven't really dived into their studies but I just cannot believe there isn't a flaw in them. A lot of it seems based off of the logic that if it worked for Radiohead or NIN (with their already built-in audiences) then it should also work for small indie musicians. (And Radiohead and NIN have also since stepped away from the free/pay-what-you-want model.) At any rate, 2.9% + $0.30 sounds better than 10%, since I have to do fulfillment on my end either way. iTunes/digital media: $0.99 no matter what. $6.93 for a seven-song album, and you can't set your own price. If you have a major label you can apparently set your album price higher but smaller indies don't seem to have access to that privilege. Plus, if your digital album costs $6.93, then you've basically destroyed your options of selling your hard-copy. And everyone knows the common complaints about spotify and pandora. At any rate, I'm considering going through a lengthy staged release process, in an effort to measure all sorts of conversion and gather data along the way. 1) Release physical cd only, with no music previews. At this point, the few hundred people on my mailing list are already interested in the cd anyway, so we'll see how far that goes, along with recommendations to friends. Maintain a list of addresses for people who indicate they won't buy until it's released digitally. 2) Marketing music previews of each song and on an album level, through promoted Facebook posts (friends-of-friends) and advertising. The general principle here is to still not ever release the entire full-length tracks, and funnel people to buying the physical cd. 3) Release digitally to services that are not on-demand and can't be downloaded. This means Jango and Pandora. Jango also allows me to buy paid plays and get a bunch of demographic data points to see which tracks are popular with which groups. I can then use that to do more targeted ads over at facebook or maybe through google. 4) When things are really dying down physically, finally release through iTunes and bandcamp (allow full previews) and other sites where you can actually buy the tracks digitally, and see what happens with "discovery" 5) When I'm finally ready to just trash the whole project, release it on Spotify and forget about it to start working on the next cd.
- paulsutter 13y agoThe biggest acts make their money touring. Pandora should help smaller bands line up shows in towns where they are popular, and help them promote those shows to interested fans. They have the data and the consumer relationships to do it. Bands would appreciate this service far more than a meager check. And it would be much cheaper for Pandora (those song royalties eat up all their revenue). I listen to hundreds of bands on Pandora, and I'd definitely attend more shows if only I knew when they were playing locally. EDIT: Even $100 is far better than a check for cents. And such a service would increase attendance at shows. They key is that bands would _appreciate_ it, whereas they feel angered by insulting little checks.
- brianbreslin 13y agoThat should be easy for them to do. They have geo ip info, also know your tastes. Say you listen to Mumford n sons, but lumineers is coming to town, you might enjoy that show.
- tptacek 13y agoSmall acts make fuck-all touring. Members of bands who have put out multiple records on well-known indie labels routinely make $50-100 for a single show. Touring revenue is great if you're one of a few big ticket acts; it is a lie we tell ourselves to justify not paying for albums from almost all of the rest of them.
- noonespecial 13y agoApparently they make the same fuck-all when we buy the albums. "Paying" for the albums is just a lie we tell ourselves to justify handing all of the money to a middle man so we can just get our music right now without actually having to do anything about the injustice of the big fat mess the music industry became?
- tptacek 13y agoNo, that's not true, because the middle-men were actually paying the artists. But, nice try.
- notatoad 13y ago"make something, price it for more than it costs to manufacture, and sell it if you can... Pandora and Spotify are not selling goods; they are selling access" except that's always what the record industry has been selling. at least Pandora and Spotify are honest about what they are. If i bought your vinyl record, do i actually own that or is really just a proxy for personal usage license? Can I play that record at my wedding, or in my office, or at a party with more than some arbitrary number of people? Intellectual property is not a physical good. The recording industry has coasted along for the last 50 years or so on this strange phenomenon that allowed their IP to be sold as though it were a physical product while at the same time getting IP protections in addition to the revenue of a physical good, and they've made a ton of money doing so - more money than they ever should have. Now the gravy train is ending. Getting paid per-play rather means that artists are finally seeing how people actually value their music. You can't use law to make your music more valuable. If you want to earn more then make more music, or go on tour, or put some effort into selling your music for soundtracks and the like. The rates spotify pays represent the actual value to the consumer - they aren't making a profit, and if spotify were any more than what it currently costs, i wouldn't pay for it. You might think your song is worth more than $10/mo in streaming royalties, but you might also be wrong.
- anigbrowl 13y agoif spotify were any more than what it currently costs, i wouldn't pay for it That doesn't mean much, without the context of what you would do instead. Listen to CDs? Stop purchasing music? Torrent it?
- tptacek 13y agoSo then you presumably believe that Matt Inman at The Oatmeal was wrong to be upset at Funnyjunk for appropriating his comics; after all, he had no right to claim them as his own property. And, of course, what you're saying about the market valuing music is that the market values music at zero; the price of music on streaming services is simply the premium people pay over free pirated tracks in order to have a nice user interface.
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- radley 13y agoThey had < 10k plays in 3 months. That's not album sales nor requests; that's just number of times their music played via a bot-stream. That's so low it's practically irrelevant. They sound like someone who started a blog a decade ago, stopped after a few years, only updated it twice since, and are upset their AdWords income is low.
- plorkyeran 13y agoThe article seems to go out of its way to avoid mentioning that this is residual income from 3 albums made over twenty years ago that weren't huge successes in the first place. Why would anyone expect to be making any meaningful amount of money from them at this point?
- max13 13y agoThe artist's share of income from record sales and radio play has been next to nothing throughout the history of the record industry. Any experienced artist will tell you the real money comes from live shows and merch (which can still be pressed discs). This is why file-sharing only hurts the labels, not the artists. The artists actually get more exposure without losing much royalty income from the illegal downloads, which actually help promote the band and draw bigger live crowds to gigs where they can actually make some money.
- tptacek 13y agoThis isn't true. Artists could make a middle-class living off record sales, augmented somewhat by touring and merchandise, during the major-label days. It's true that they made very little on royalties from album sales --- but that was often because they'd been advanced more money than they could ever expect to recoup. That's a business model common to all of publishing (music and books and otherwise), and it offered artists a predictable income stream in exchange for selling more of the upside to labels. The closer you look at record labels, the more they look like venture capitalists. (If you wanted to make a pointed critique of venture capitalists, I suppose you could also invoke the comparison in the other direction.)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tunesmith 13y agoThis isn't true, it's more an amalgamation of half-truths and repeated statements from other people. The first sentence is only (occasionally) true in the cases of artists signed to big-label contracts - very out of date in today's day and age, where most indie musicians don't even consider trying to get signed to a label. Meanwhile, the labels DID get money from record sales. Piracy hurt labels and not artists because piracy hurt record sales, which went towards the labels' bottom lines and not the artists. But in a world where the record sales actually go to the artists' bottom lines, piracy does hurt the physical sales of the artists. The real money does not come from live shows and merch. This is generally debunked elsewhere.
- atechnerd 13y agoI always thought that the benefit of services like Spotify and Pandora was to get a band's music to people that wouldn't ordinarily be exposed to it. This in turn would prompt listeners to go buy the band's music on iTunes or Amazon. Good music is really hard to find. I search around iTunes all the time and come up with nothing. So ANYTIME I hear a song that I like I buy it within the same day (usually the whole album). For bands that aren't seeing this sort of conversion on sites like Spotify and Pandora, this might tell you something about the demand for your brand of music.
- hobbes78 13y agoIt's unfair to compare streaming one song to selling an album. A CD enables me to hear a track an infinite number of times, with Hi-Fi quality, in my car, living room or on the go. With a €3.49 Spotify subscription, one play is heard on the PC, requiring an Internet connection and not in top quality (only 160 kbps). The article seems to compare the rent of an apartment to buying a two-floor house...
- anigbrowl 13y agoyou're right, but... Since we own our own recordings, by my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one-- one-- LP sale. A two-story house is not worth 300k times more than the monthly rent on a small apartment. 300 times yes, 3000 times make. Not 300,000 times.
- anigbrowl 13y agoSince then I've noticed a correction on the article which suggests the multiple should be 3000, rather than 300,000.
- mark_h 13y agoZoe Keating is always worth-while reading about this, including being open about where her royalties come from. For eg (this was the post that got represented as "pay me in data"): http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/35737991443/what-i-want-from-internet-radio http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/35737991443/what-i-want-fr... (there's a spreadsheet with the breakdown in there) That one got featured in the NYT, prompting a couple of follow-ups: http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/41955905309/a-blog-about-an-email-about-a-blog-about-a-news-article http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/41955905309/a-blog-about-a... http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/42057406771/where-does-the-filthy-lucre-come-from http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/42057406771/where-does-the... (I loved the internet-expertise implied by Several people advised me to consider touring as a revenue stream since “that is where artists make most of their money”.!) More pertinently though: "Live performance is usually my revenue stream with the highest expense ratio: flights, hotel rooms, commissions, crew, advertising, etc…"
- Spendar89 13y agoI think a relevant issue that is the direct result of spotify/pandora/itunes is that we no longer consume albums, but rather individual tracks. Artists used to (and many still do) value producing a collection of songs that when listened sequentially meant something much more than listening to each song individually. Therefore, albums should theoretically be worth significantly more than the sum of the value of each individual track, but today's services have essentially destroyed this model. Don't get me wrong, there are obvious benefits of being able to consume only the tracks you like most, and I understand that we can still choose to listen to albums in their entirety, but the vast majority of people do not. A serious consequence of this is that consumers value music and the music industry as a whole significantly less than they once did. I also think there is an opportunity within the music-tech space to recreate the album-listening experience in an elegant way.
- ianlevesque 13y agoThere's a lot wrong with the article, but the biggest problem is conflating owning an album with listening to a radio stream on Pandora. You can't play Pandora on demand, and the upside for the artist is primarily exposure - not pennies for the audio bits being played. Pandora and similar services all provide links to online sources to buy the tracks you are hearing, and people commonly use these.
- dunk010 13y agoThe streaming services don't make money either. In fact, Spotify makes a loss. A substantial loss. An eye-watering loss [1]. And so does anybody else who tries to get into this business. The trail is becoming littered with the corpses of plucky companies who've tried to make a buck in this business. Why is that? Quite simply, the music business is a cartel. It used to be the Big Six; now there's just three. Three companies who own the rights to most of the last half a century's worth of popular music. Here's the problem with Spotify's business model: they don't own what they're selling. The labels do. And so if Spotify makes a profit then the major labels can just renegotiate their contracts within a year (they typically have break clauses), and gobble up all those extra earnings. You see the music business is a /nightmarish/ labyrinth of copyright legislation, so to even start playing in this game you need a staff lawyer (or three). There's recording rights, which you have to pay to one arm of the label. Then there's publishing rights, which you have to pay to a completely different arm of the label (or, if you're unlucky, a different label - like with the erstwhile EMI's catalogue), and that's just to play some radio. If you want to do on-demand streaming, of the type that Spotify provides, then you have to pay mechanical reproduction royalties. Whaaa? I hear you say. Well, it takes a while for the law to catch up with these things so they've just repurposed the laws that were already there. Would you believe, you even have a different bunch of people to pay if you want to reproduce the lyrics. Now, take all that and multiply it by the number of countries you want to stream in, because you're gonna need to strike deal with a different branch of each label in each country. It's insanity. The one beacon of light is the much maligned DMCA act, which (aside for enabling content owners to persecute twelve year old children) allows those wanting to stream music in a radio-like fashion to just pay a central collections agency a fixed rate. That simplifies the business significantly - no more negotiation and complex contracts, and no more need to have such detailed reporting (less staff, less code). The only thing is that it's applicable only in the US, as there's no EU equivalent (or anywhere else, for that matter). And it doesn't cover on-demand streaming. But it's a start. Music startups really need to push for an overhaul of the copyright laws because the landscape has fundamentally changed and what exists currently is both arcane and archaic. We need a complete legislative metamorphosis, lest the major labels continue to move their contractual blessing between startups - ideally, of course, shortly after a tasty IPO - which all resembles the classic pump-and-dump scam. I hope it happens. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/10/spotify-is-having-a-good-2012-revenues-could-reach-500m-as-it-expands-the-digital-music-market/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/10/spotify-is-having-a-good-20...
- WalterBright 13y agoI was in Australia last year, and in walking around downtown Brisbane I noticed a two person band playing on a street corner. There was quite a crowd around them, and their music was good. They had a suitcase open in front of them, with what looked like a couple hundred bucks in it, a stack of CDs, and a sign that said the CDs were $15 each. It's likely they 'salted' the suitcase with cash, but even so, it looked like they made some decent cash for a couple hours work. I bought one, and really enjoy it. The band is PLUDO, btw.