14 ms·

My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89

• ngoel36 13y ago
  If your song stream convinced nobody to buy your song on iTunes or buy a ticket to your concerts, then you have bigger problems than Pandora.
  • Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    The author didn’t state that nobody buys his songs on iTunes. And just because Apple pays artists well, is that a justification for Spotify to pay peanuts? “I see you can pay your rent this month. Good, then you won’t be needing my money!”
    • redblacktree 13y ago
      His point, of course, is that Pandora should be viewed as a marketing channel, not a way to make money in itself. In the old days of Payola, this artist would have paid Pandora in order to be played on their stations. This is an improvement for the artist; he's just not seeing the big picture.
    • frossie 13y ago
      I think the point is that Pandora acts as a discovery app. It plays you something and you think "hey I like it, I'll go buy it on iTunes". Now I have no reason to believe I am representative (and in fact I would be surprised if I was), but 60% of the music I have purchased in the last couple of years has been as a follow-up to a Pandora play. Another 35% has been following a Shazam tag from a radio station, and about 5% from a movie soundtrack or something like that. Of those, Pandora is the only one that causes me to buy albums instead of solely individual tracks, which is an order of magnitude more money. So I know for a fact that N artists got money from me that they would have never gotten if not for Pandora. That doesn't help the (100-N) whose track played and I didn't buy them; but, you know, I actually didn't care enough to want to listen to them again. Or, Pandora played them while I had the computer on mute (played is not the same as listened). Now the legitimate question is, how many people are like me, as opposed to people who use Pandora without buying anything at all as a result of what they hear? I don't know the answer to that question and I suspect neither does Pandora (they have a "buy" button so they can presumably track that, but I only sometimes use it rather than just independently look for the artist on iTunes some later time).
      • solnyshok 13y ago
        this reminded me of a guy who downloaded an audio book at piratebay, enjoyed it and then searched for it on amazon, to see what other books people bought with it. then downloaded those at shady sites too. but then, he usually donates to authors of software that he uses (e.g. Libre Office). Maybe we need an easier donation model for music. one that gives 99% of the money to the author/perfotmer
        • Samuel_Michon 13y ago
          > an easier donation model for music. one that gives 99% of the money to the author/perfotmer So it’s fine for record companies and distributors to get stiffed? Hosting, payment processing, and marketing are not free.
          • nasmorn 13y ago
            Actually On pirate bay the hosting is payed for by hirls in my srea that would like to mert me.
  • corresation 13y ago
    Not every musician wants to tour (often a very expensive venture), and even those who do can't cover 100% of the globe. Further there are so many streaming options now that actual purchases are becoming somewhat of a relic. It is incredibly cheap to dictate the business models of others. Are you a software developer? How about you do that for free then and maybe you can do like training classes or something and you can make all of your money on that. I hear that's where the programming economy is going.
    • leot 13y ago
      You realize that it was technology itself, in the first place, that allowed musicians to work hard for some months, and then get paid for a lifetime from the results. You also realize that not-yet-established musicians would pay exorbitant amounts of money to merely get heard. So, excuse me if I have little sympathy for the "plight" of the recording-only musician.
      • anigbrowl 13y ago
        You have no idea what you're talking about; you're assuming everyone who ever had a recording contract made out like a bandit, based on the most successful 0.01% of recording artists.
        • leot 13y ago
          Really? How so?
          • anigbrowl 13y ago
            'technology...allowed musicians to work hard for some months, and then get paid for a lifetime from the results.' As if that were the norm.
            • kamaal 13y ago
              Its not a norm, but it is now giving many people a chance to try. If I have to compare, its synonymous with building a online presence with a blogging site. It won't earn you much and you won't buying yachts with that money. But the purpose of that blogging site is to get you some following and recognition in the community. Then you need to go on and build something awesome that sells. That is playing the bigger game. Pandora is the first step. Not the last one.
• ryangripp 13y ago
  +SiriusXM plays "commercials" on channels where clearchannel has an interest (KISS, etc.) Clear channel was an early investor in XM to insulate them from the threat of satellite radio vs FM networks (which they own a large share of) +Streaming networks like Pandora and Spotify actually pay more per stream then SiriusXM does because satellite radio pays the Terrestrial (FM/AM) radio rates. +The Math on this is confusing because a Terrestrial (FM/AM) station might pay $50 royalty to play a song but 200,000 people listened to it when it was broadcast.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• toomuchtodo 13y ago
  Music doesn't have the value it once did. End of story. Why are we dwelling on this? There isn't going to be a magic way to increase the value of music.
  • brownbat 13y ago
    It's almost as if we have more people with more leisure time who can provide more entertainment instantly to larger audiences with trivial costs. Or maybe like we have the internet competing for our entertainment attention, and it is just damn good sauce.
    • toomuchtodo 13y ago
      I would strongly agree with both.
• badclient 13y ago
  Does played mean someone listened to it in entirety? Otherwise it doesn't say much about the quality of your song. That is similar to claiming you have a million users without talking about engagement.
  • Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    The song in question is Low, by Cracker. A song that placed 64 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was also on the soundtracks of movies like The Perks of Being a Wallflower. When you hear it, you probably recognize it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYdlqjiQPAc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYdlqjiQPAc
• roc 13y ago
  > "Here’s an idea! Play two minutes of commercials and double your revenue!" If they could actually sell two minutes of commercials, I'm pretty sure they would. Expecting them to match the rates paid by massive existing media companies is essentially wishing the startups who finally got traction in this niche, back out of the picture and the entire market back to the business models and rate of technological progress that those massive existing players deem sufficiently non-threatening to their broadcast businesses. I have sympathy for the author. I really do. But the problem ought not be simplified down to "Pandora should pay what Sirius pays". (Though it makes me wonder what rates the larger tech companies are paying, now that they're making similar offerings.)
• mdm_ 13y ago
  The most shocking revelation to me in this article is that Sirius XM plays 13 minutes of commercials per hour! I could have sworn one of their big selling points was that they're commerical-free.
  • sliverstorm 13y ago
    How rude of you! They are 100% commercial free- 78.3% of the time!
  • thinkmorebetter 13y ago
    Most of their music stations are commercial-free. The news/talk/entertainment/etc stations have tons of commercials, so perhaps it just averages out to 13 minutes/channel.
• zachgersh 13y ago
  Pandora / Spotify are never going to be platforms that make musicians a living (I am happy this article is representing that fact to the rest of the public). Performing Live / Selling Merchandise and doing other physical appearances is the only way you will ever make any money and even great artists who tour still can't make enough money to keep producing their art (their following just isn't big enough).
• wheaties 13y ago
  Quick question, how much did your label take as a cut?
  • Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    It’s Virgin Records, so quick guess: a lot.
• yardie 13y ago
  And yet I'm the idiot amongst my peers because I actually buy albums. God forbid I do something as stupid as support my artists.
  • hindsightbias 13y ago
    I can rationalize a hundred reasons to steal when everyone else does it.
  • pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    If you want to support artists isn't there an argument for torrenting the music and sending them all the money.
    • yardie 13y ago
      Would you work freelance on spec and only take money from clients if they were unconditionally happy and at any price they wanted? That is the argument you are asking artists to accept.
• kirillzubovsky 13y ago
  The real question is, would anyone care to listen to your songs at all, if it wasn't for Pandora?
  • smackfu 13y ago
    How is that the real question? The post says the same song had 18,000 radio plays in the same time period. I mean, it's a pretty recognizable song, just a bit old: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYdlqjiQPAc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYdlqjiQPAc
    • corin_ 13y ago
      If you re-word it slightly to "How many of the people who listened to it through Pandora would (care to listen to your songs at all, if it wasn't for Pandora)" then it's more relevant, though not "the real question" to me. Though still kinda rudely worded.
  • gaadd33 13y ago
    Probably given the song in question hit number 64 on the billboard hot 100 and number 3 on the modern rock chart.
• ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Wow, that is so sad. One million plays is pretty crappy. Consider that there are 70M active subscribers [1] that means 1 in 7 of them may have listened to your song exactly once. And for the low price of $16.49 a million people have heard your song, where as before nobody had heard it. Now go look at your iTunes sales, how many copies of that song have you sold? 10? 100? 1000? How many of those sales occurred because people heard your song on Pandora, who won't play specific songs on command, and so they wanted to hear it again on their time? Back in the bad old payola days you would have paid much more than that just to have your song even on the freakin' radio. Because that was the cost of letting other people hear your music and come to the conclusion they wanted to buy it. [1] http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/05/pandora-reports-70m-active-users-25m-paid-subscribers-revenue-up-55.html http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/05/pandora-reports-70m-a...
  • zackbloom 13y ago
    I think you mean 1 in 70
  • jstalin 13y ago
    Not sure why people are voting you down. I'm pretty sure that it's common knowledge that artists, even in the old radio days, made their money on touring and often times ended up in the hole on album sales and radio play.
  • smackfu 13y ago
    >where as before nobody had heard it Um, this is an established band. This song is from 1993. It was pretty big at the time. That's why they still get thousands of dollars in radio revenue. That's why they aren't very impressed by the "exposure" or the $15 in payout.
    • jonknee 13y ago
      The radio exposure is many many times more listens. They would be paid similarly if they got anywhere close to the same amount of exposure on Pandora (actually a lot more, Pandora pays a ton more than a radio station).
• jared314 13y ago
  Is that the amount paid by Pandora, or the amount paid to the artist? I thought there was a lot of middle men taking percentage cuts in between Pandora and the artist. http://www.indieandunsigned.com/the-music-royalty-breakdown/ http://www.indieandunsigned.com/the-music-royalty-breakdown/
  • robotcookies 13y ago
    It's only the amount paid to the artist. Pandora actually pays 12 cents per 100 plays meaning they pay $1200 for a million plays. So the middle men are apparently taking a huge cut. If I were a musician, I'd be more concerned about that. If Pandora doubled what they pay out, that musician would still only make about $33. However, if that musician could get just 50% of what Pandora already pays out, said musician would get $600.
• confusedsquirel 13y ago
  I have seen posts like this from time to time. My question is this; Is this what the record company pays you or the service? My guess is that this is the cut after the record company gets theirs.
• psgibbs 13y ago
  What this is missing is the amount of listeners each play counts for. On Pandora/Spotify/Youtube, a 'play' is typically one listener. For these, it's mainly worth noting that Spotify is about an order of magnitude more profitable per play ($1e-4 vs $1e-5). Sirius is at ~$1/play, commercial radio is $0.07/play. For Sirius XM, the breakeven number of listeners/play for the pricing structure to be comparable to Pandora is 70K. For Commercial Radio, the breakeven number of listeners/play is 5,000. *edit: added the price/play numbers
• dvt 13y ago
  I don't mean to sound contentious.. but, uh, why is OP surprised? Music access quickly becoming a commodity. Pandora/Spotify do for music what Netflix did for movies. I mean, even Southpark did a show on this (viz. Blockbuster). I'd say that the fact that the FM station paid OP 100x more than Pandora shows how hugely the FM/AM business models have failed and how for granted so many artists took being massively rich. Guess what, there are tons of talented people out there. Software is free, and everyone can compete. I'd say that's healthy. We're no longer stuck in the dark ages of information discovery (back when if something wasn't on the radio or on TV, no one had heard of it). Also, ngoel36 said: "If your song stream convinced nobody to buy your song on iTunes or buy a ticket to your concerts, then you have bigger problems than Pandora." This times a million. So your music is apparently awesome but you can't sell t-shirts or concert tickets (concerts are, after all, where the the real money is made). "Why doesn’t Pandora get off the couch and get an actual business model instead of asking for a handout from congress and artists?" I mean, this is just laughable, given how heavily the media industry is subsidized. Case in point: http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/05/07/the-government-is-now-subsidizing-rock-roll/ http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/05/07/the-government-is-no...
  • windsurfer 13y ago
    OP is surprised because on conventional radio a single play can reach thousands of listeners earning you around a dollar. On Pandora, each play only reaches a single listener, so a million sounds like a lot.
    • Drakim 13y ago
      As pointed out elsewhere, a "play" and a "play" here are wildly different. A radio "play" can involve several thousand people, while a Pandora "play" probably involves one or two persons.
      • emn13 13y ago
        I doubt it's even that - I used to use Last.fm for this, back when they offered that service, and I used it like... a radio! I.e., you leave it running as background music, and not necessarily bother turning it on/off everytime you leave the room or go shopping.
• msg 13y ago
  FYI people, the author is David Lowery, lead singer/songwriter of Cracker. The song is "Low". I like the song and you probably did too, if you ever heard it. It was used in The Perks of Being a Wallflower last year. It does strike me that many people may be under 20 and this song might actually be older than they are. So I will assume the ignorance is genuine rather than flippant. http://www.crackersoul.com/fr_home.cfm http://www.crackersoul.com/fr_home.cfm
  • DanielStraight 13y ago
    I'm over 20, and I've never heard of the author, group, song, or movie. For another data point, I know plenty of people who had never heard of The Princess Bride, Firefly or Monty Python before me telling them. There is no level of popularity which ensures universal familiarity. You should always assume ignorance is genuine. See also: http://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/
    • Uchikoma 13y ago
      Agreed. I tell people: If my mom knows about it, it is probably famous. If not, it's a niche audience ;-)
  • Dewie 13y ago
    What? Why would you even consider that people were trying to be flippant (disrespectful?)? So what if people know or don't know the artist? Does its popularity demand some kind of instant respect for the authors argument? I'm just confused by what you are trying to achieve with this post
    • smackfu 13y ago
      Because a lot of the earlier comments seemed to think this guy was some disgruntled starving artist who had a million Pandora plays but no real success.
• dylangs1030 13y ago
  I don't mean to be heartless, but this makes sense to me. By design, people aren't supposed to ean real revenue from their music on Pandora. It's more about exposure, isn't it? I mean, the supply and demand of it doesn't work out in the artists' favor, only in Pandora's. No one can find your song or you specifically, so why would you have an opportunity to earn a lot of money? There's no demand for you or your work, just work in a certain genre that you might fulfill for a few minutes. Again, I don't mean to be harsh, but it seems like it makes sense in Pandora's case. I think it would be more reasonable to expect some benefits to exposure and fame than expect revenue. Users aren't exactly incentivized to click that (admittedly tiny) buy button under the song.
• cletus 13y ago
  Man I'm sick of hearing this particular complaint. Let's look at the numbers. 1M plays for ~$42. Sounds like not much right? Wrong. Yes AM/RM Radio paid ~$1500 but for 20,000 plays. Now ask yourself this question: how many people heard those 20,000 plays? If the rate of pay was the same ($42/1M) it would have to be 35.7M listens. Well, at 20,000 radio plays that averages 1800 people per listen. Is the likely audience higher or lower than this number? It's bound to be higher. So streaming services are in fact paying more (per listen per listener). See http://davidtouve.com/2011/12/13/uk-radio-versus-spotify-a-comparison-of-the-value-of-spins-versus-streams/ http://davidtouve.com/2011/12/13/uk-radio-versus-spotify-a-c...
  • paulsutter 13y ago
    You may be sick of hearing the complaint, but the real problem is that the complainers are misinformed. Sounds like Pandora needs to put real pressure on getting those reports revised to be clearer. It's unwise to be hated by the industry that you depend upon.
    • anigbrowl 13y ago
      I don't think so. Pandora is much more narrowly tailored to the individual listener than radio, and radio is so corrupt that is' not a good model to start from in the first place.
    • deleted 13y ago
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  • deleted 13y ago
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  • DanielStraight 13y ago
    I think part of what drives the complaint is that a song being on Spotify is much more valuable to the listener than it being on the radio. There's a spectrum of value ranging from the radio at the bottom (you are subject to the whims of the DJ on when and where you hear the song), to Pandora (you still aren't in complete control, but you have a lot of influence), to Spotify (you are in complete control as long as the song remains on Spotify), to owning the song on an album or as a DRM-free download (you are in complete control forever). I think since Spotify is so much closer to owning an album than it is to radio, many artists expect it to be closer in value to album sales than radio plays. Not saying ignorance of the proper comparison isn't happening, just that it might not be the only reason.
• lifeformed 13y ago
  These numbers are weird, I had a completely different experience. I have 440,000 plays on Spotify of songs from my album, and I've made $2420 off of that.
  • smackfu 13y ago
    Notice that the chart in the article shows that Spotify is paying 8x what Pandora is. 116k plays for $12. And that this is 40% of the songwriting payment only, since it's a member of a band.
• abtinf 13y ago
  Lets assume each AM/FM broadcast went out to 10,000 people. If we do the math, we find that it is equal to the rate of $7 per million plays: $1373.78 / (18797 * 10000) * 1000000 = $7.31 Now lets do the math for Pandora: $ 16.89 / 1159000 * 1 000 000 = $14.57 So this writer is ACTUALLY COMPLAINING that Pandora merely pays DOUBLE the royalty rate of terrestrial radio.
  • smackfu 13y ago
    You do realize you just made up that 10,000 number out of thin air?
    • abtinf 13y ago
      That's why I preface it with "lets assume" instead of "I know for a fact". These are what we call "words" and they have "meaning".
      • smackfu 13y ago
        My point is that your conclusion that they pay DOUBLE the rate is entirely based on this number that you give no justification for. If your comment started with "Lets assume each AM/FM broadcast went out to 5,000 people," then the rates would be roughly the same. So yeah, you can assume that number is true, but what's the point.
        • emn13 13y ago
          In principle you have a point, but a quick google shows that his number is entirely reasonable. I mean, I wouldn't read to much into the exact numbers here, but the scale is definitely comparable.
  • lucisferre 13y ago
    I think you mean he could be complaining that they merely pay double.
• ctdonath 13y ago
  Um...music (information) wants to be free? Why sign up for a system which provides almost no return? ETA: Sorry, the first line was a "couldn't resist", presented (badly) as just raising another popular meme and invoking discussion of the conflict thereof. The second line refers to the fact that somewhere he signed a release whereby (however obtuse, obfuscated, and nigh unto unavoidable) such financial abuse was consented to. In comparison, consider how schools are offering near-free degrees (real ones, like MIT) in retaliation to exorbitant student debt, and doctors & patients are opting out of the hideous costs of government-run healthcare by returning to cash & subscriptions (I don't mean to provoke arguments over those, just as points of comparison). Somewhere, somehow, alternatives exist where real payment is demanded and he actually would get paid (and no I don't mean "make money performing", as some music just isn't per se).
  • owenjones 13y ago
    I believe music is more than "information", when I buy an album, I'm not buying the sheet music but the recorded of someone more talented than myself performing that music. How do you apply "information wants to be free" to music like this?
    • sliverstorm 13y ago
      It's... um... information about the emotions of the artist?
    • pessimizer 13y ago
      Being written down is not what makes something information, so I'm not sure why sheet music would be any more information than recorded music.
      • sliverstorm 13y ago
        If you are going to argue: 1) Information wants to be free 2) Everything is information ... I don't think we can have a useful discussion.
• soupboy 13y ago
  For this to be a fair comparison shouldn't they compare the 1 million Pandora streams to (18797 radio plays * number of listeners each time)?
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    • jcomis 13y ago
      It's per quarter, not per month.
      • krcz 13y ago
        I thought it was a radio station named "Terrestrial" and it made number sound incredibly large to me, nevermind.
  • jedc 13y ago
    Exactly. To really be fair you need to compare the audience for each play, and for Pandora/Spotify it's just one person per play versus X (hundred/thousand) for regular radio.
    • SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
      Looks like the answer is probably "thousands" [1] of listeners per radio station. The back-of-the-envelope is that the top station will have 1% of its metro area listening at a time (metro areas as defined here [2]). Even the 100th largest metro area would typically have 5k people listening to a play of a track. If you assume 5000 people listening per play at 18797 plays, and then calculate a cost PER LISTENER (at $1373.78 royalties paid) you end up with $0.014617 royalty per 1000 "performances" of the song (counting every listener's radio as a "performance"). AND, when you multiply that back out with the number of "performances" on Pandora, you get....$16.94. Considering WAY more people probably heard the song on the radio, possibly by a factor of 5 or more, this is a HIGH estimate; actually doing the math would likely come out with a much lower equivalence, but it's the right order of magnitude. I am all about protecting artists rights to earn, and for buying music that I'm listening to. As the parallel comment by smack_fu mentions, though, this is really about the insignificance of the Pandora market size more than anything else. That and the inability of a particular blogging artist to do enough basic math to realize the royalty per performance is higher on Pandora than it is on the radio. [1] http://www.radio-media.com/song-album/articles/airplay66.html http://www.radio-media.com/song-album/articles/airplay66.htm... [2] http://www.arbitron.com/home/mm001050.asp http://www.arbitron.com/home/mm001050.asp
• paulsutter 13y ago
  Pandora and Spotify can do a lot more for bands by helping them plan tours, sell tickets to shows, and connect with fans. They could also help venues book and promote acts with known local followings. There are hundreds of thousands of people who heard that song, like that type of music, and would consider attending a show and spending real money to get in. They might buy a tshirt too. Pandora could notify listeners when the shows come up, and help bands plan their tours to towns with more fans. It could be real revenue for the bands, and for Pandora. EDIT: Doesn't even mean a UI change, could be done with ad retargeting, or any performance marketing mechanism.
  • weisser 13y ago
    It's a real problem. There is no viable funnel through which to convert Pandora streams into transactions except the "Buy" dropdown (which I'd guess very few people click on - Pandora is often playing in the background in another tab). Daisy (Beats by Dre's "Spotify") is trying to do this by partnering with Topspin and we shall see what happens - I'm excited to check it out. The fact is, all-you-can-eat streaming platforms will never scale to the amount where payouts for plays are significant if they continue with the freemium model. Artists need the ability to sell other products and experiences to those listeners. I'm, admittedly, biased towards the idea that artists need to seek new direct-to-fan revenue streams. Here's a piece I wrote on Hypebot about this: http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/01/music-subscription-services-introduce-you-to-fans-but-then-you-must-take-them-away.html http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/01/music-subscription-se...
    • TylerE 13y ago
      As a music fan, I would take anything associated with "Beats By Dre" as the exact opposite of credible and useful.
      • weisser 13y ago
        I'd agree with you except the project is helmed by Ian Rogers whose involvement is what makes it even remotely interesting to me. http://www.crunchbase.com/person/ian-rogers http://www.crunchbase.com/person/ian-rogers
• loceng 13y ago
  Is there a way to know how that increased sales of the song, assuming there was an easy and immediate way for listeners to do so?
  • danman01 13y ago
    would be interesting to compare pre-pandora days (prior to, say, amassing 100k plays for 'Low' in a quarter) to the current revenue generated for Cracker as a whole. I'm pretty sure pre streaming music days will win by a long shot. "How will musicians support all these tech startups?!" That's the question.
• sitharus 13y ago
  I've always viewed Pandora, Spotify and services like that as discovery services. They let me hear the music before parting with a more money. If I find an artist that I really like I'll buy their album or some merchandise. Given the breadth of music I get from Pandora there's no way I'd be able to afford every album of every artist I listen to on the off chance I might like them. Also you need to remember that a lot of people won't have the disposable income to buy albums, tshirts or subscribe to satellite radio, so that money from Pandora isn't going to be replaced. Yes it's not much, but there's more to it than that number alone.
  • warfangle 13y ago
    Yup. I stopped purchasing digital music goods (amazon mp3s, itunes downloads) a while ago. I subscribe to Spotify for music discovery, and resort to discogs.org to purchase vinyl of music I want to keep, to own, to cherish on my Dual 1219. I am not alone in this philosophy.
• aqme28 13y ago
  Shameless plug: I've been working on http://busker.fm http://busker.fm. It aims to be the fair way to stream music. We not only give artists 100% of album-sales, we encourage album-sales by incorporating discovery, streaming, and the purchase itself.
  • fuzzywalrus 13y ago
    Some helpful feedback: Right now the service looks pretty vanilla, but I want to check out the music. There's already a barrier: a sign up wall. Why am I going to to sign up? I don't see much motive to sign up when there's so many services that I can browse without having to login (bandcamp, soundcloud, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Last.fm, Pandora, Slacker Radio, Songza... you get the idea). Listeners should be put front and center as they are the main course, your service should appeal to the consumer so they'll actually make the platform viable for the musicians. Right now I don't know what it is I'm signing for: be it a musician or listener. It could be the greatest service ever but from the page, I cannot tell. Give demos, show me something.
  • porsupah 13y ago
    I'd agree with the commenter above - there's surely no need to be quite so coy about what you're offering. A casual visitor to the site isn't exactly going to be reeled in by an immediate requirement to hand over details, although perhaps your data says otherwise. Bonus points if purchases can be in at least CD quality, or even better. (HD storage is cheap - do we really need to be all that concerned about the relative merits of lossy audio codecs, at this point?)
• jonknee 13y ago
  It's almost like he doesn't realize Pandora is paying him much much per listener than radio is. So much so that Pandora loses money anytime someone listens to a song. That's not enough though, run even more ads, pay even more than the already higher fees.
  • anigbrowl 13y ago
    And yet people seem to think Pandora's business model is fine and it's the artist's fault. could it be that Pandora's extremely limited number of listeners-per-play means that it's not a very effective promotional tool?
• robotcookies 13y ago
  Pandora apparently pays 12 cents per 100 plays. At that rate, they are paying out $1200 for a song with a million plays. If the artist only gets about $16 (under 2%) out of that, where is the rest of that money going to?
  • emn13 13y ago
    Well, to the artist for one. He's not being payed as the artist. Before his place in line you have the copyright owner, the lead performers, background performers, and the other 60% of songwriters. Yes, that's right: he's complaining just about the size of the 40% songwriter's cut.
• weisser 13y ago
  The problem here isn't the low payout, it's the inability for bands like Cracker to "opt out" of having their music on the service.
  • Falkon1313 13y ago
    Can the copyright owner opt out or claim infringement? (I looked it up, but couldn't make heads or tails of the legalese.) If the copyright owner could opt out, then it would sound like a matter of the artist having sold their rights and not liking what the new owner's doing with them. But it doesn't sound like that's the case, and that's what's confusing. Seems hard to believe that the corporations that own most copyrights would have created (or not prevented) a law that renders it worth less.
• greenyoda 13y ago
  "For you civilians webcasting rates are “compulsory” rates. They are set by the government (crazy, right?). Further since they are compulsory royalties, artists can not “opt out” of a service like Pandora even if they think Pandora doesn’t pay them enough. The majority of songwriters have their rates set by the government, too, in the form of the ASCAP and BMI rate courts–a single judge gets to decide the fate of songwriters (technically not a “compulsory” but may as well be)." This bothers me. Why should the government regulate payments for music? Why shouldn't a musician have the option of licensing his music to radio stations but not to Pandora? We in the U.S. claim to have a system based on free enterprise, but this is very far away from that.
  • warfangle 13y ago
    Because it's not just the performing artists that would need to give copyright permission, it would also be all of the collaborating artists (lyricist, etc), and the label, and potentially the mastering house. It would be a licensing nightmare to get your song on the air - and would probably be harkened to the bad old days of payola. Read up on the history of copyright law, especially as it pertains to music.
    • greenyoda 13y ago
      But all of these entities would seem to have the common interest of maximizing their revenues from royalties. So why shouldn't they have the right to authorize one party (perhaps the label) to negotiate on their behalf? Also, it's becoming increasingly easy for musicians to digitally produce their own MP3s, so if there's no label or studio involved and the musicians wrote their own lyrics, it would seem to be even easier for them to negotiate on their own behalf.
  • macspoofing 13y ago
    Because copyright doesn't quite fit in your free enterprise world. Copyright isn't like traditional property. It needs government to define it, set limits on it and enforce it.
    • 13y ago
• emn13 13y ago
  If you do the math, this just doesn't sounds that crazy. A streamed song on a radio just isn't worth that much, and there are many, many fingers in the pie here. Especially since he gets just 40% of the rights involved, and that's not the rights for the song ownership: this is just the cut for the songwriter - not the for the performers or the song owners. I'm assuming he's getting the normal SoundExchange deal, but it's not 100% clear. Sure, it's not very much, but what exactly was he expecting?
• IzzyMurad 13y ago
  I don't get it. Many of you are saying "Pandora pays a ton more than a radio station". The song was played 1 millon times and he got $16.89. How many times the song should be played to make a significant amount then? A billion times?
  • thedufer 13y ago
    On radio, he got ~$1400 for ~19000 plays. But how many people heard those? Estimates for average listeners pretty much all fall between 1000 and 10000, which gives you .68 - 6.8 cents per 1000 listens, whereas on Pandora he got 1.5 cents per 1000 listens. The point is that he's reaching almost no one on Pandora, compared to the number of people he's reaching by radio. Of course they're paying him less.
    • IzzyMurad 13y ago
      I see. So both are paying next to nothing in comparison to the number of plays.
• lucisferre 13y ago
  Reminds me of the SouthPark "Internet Money" episode.
• autarch 13y ago
  I'm outraged that people get paid at all for this sort of thing. Why should an artist be paid repeatedly for doing one piece of work? That's madness. Artists should be paid to create art. Once it's done, why you should get paid over and over?
  • rdouble 13y ago
    You should start one of those online petitions.
  • anigbrowl 13y ago
    Artists should be paid to create art. That would be create. Unfortunately, artists actually get paid based on sales, not creativity.
• toddh 13y ago
  An interesting comparison is if Google makes 35 cents a click (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2220372/How-Google-Rakes-In-Over-100-Million-in-Search-Advertising-Daily-Infographic http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2220372/How-Google-Rake...) then they would make $350K from the same million "impressions."
  • driverdan 13y ago
    That doesn't make any sense. You're attempting to compare two completely different things.
    • anigbrowl 13y ago
      That's funny, considering people are saying that Pandora and radio are exactly the same.
• dllthomas 13y ago
  You want the government to butt out? Sure, let's get the government to butt out: http://questioncopyright.org http://questioncopyright.org
• robbiemitchell 13y ago
  If you make something and rely on others to sell it, then they do a bad job, you _also_ lack a business model.
• drcube 13y ago
  I have loved Cracker since I was a kid, and recently became a big fan of Camper Van Beethoven. So I say this with utmost respect: Why should David Lowery get paid now for work he did 20-30 years ago? Most of us are lucky to get paid for work we did in the past month, and after that we'll never get paid for that particular bit of work ever again. Imagine if I still got paid, even just a few bucks a month, for all those burgers I flipped back in the 90s? Regular people have to keep working for their paychecks. In that light it sounds a lot different to complain that work we did 20 years ago doesn't provide the steady income we once thought it would. Times change, and if you want to get paid don't rest on your laurels, keep making stuff people want.
  • babar 13y ago
    I think it is fair for people who make an enduring product to be compensated for that over their lifetime. I don't think your 20 year old burgers are still in demand, so no royalties are needed. If I wrote software to power a website (or an app) that is still in use 20 years later and people are still willing to pay to access it? Sounds reasonable to me.
  • anigbrowl 13y ago
    Imagine if I still got paid, even just a few bucks a month, for all those burgers I flipped back in the 90s? You mean the burgers made to a recipe someone else came up with, in a kitchen that they built for you? Trust me, a lot of musicians would be happy to just turn up to work 50 hours a week with a guitar or whatever in return for steady paycheck. But recorded music and radio killed off most of that market decades ago. Musicians don't get paid for all the time they spend practicing and working on writing tunes, they only get paid for sales. Comparing writing a piece of music with flipping a burger is just astoundingly ignorant.
• brownbat 13y ago
  The returns to your chosen profession will have some relationship with how many other people want to offer that service. Some people break their backs picking up smelly trash on hot summer days, don't have high school diplomas, but manage to get by. Some people bust their ass learning arcane branches of engineering or medicine and can do pretty well. You chose to spend a life making music. I love music so much I'd almost do that for gas money and staying on people's couches. Almost. I know a lot of guys who would and do. So I'm sorry you're not rich. But not that sorry.
• abalone 13y ago
  It's not apples-to-apples. The Sirius XM and radio play counts are per broadcast. Pandoras are per listener. Let's look at Sirius. Sirius has ~20M subscribers. He got paid $181.94 for 179 broadcasts, or $1.02 each. Well, he's only making more per listen if it reaches less than 0.3% of those subscribers (60K). Otherwise the Pandora model actually pays him more. Pandora: $16.89 / 1M listens = 0.0017 cents Sirius XM: $1.02 per broadcast / 60K listens = 0.0017 cents If you get more listeners on Sirius, that per-listen payout goes down. With the Pandora model it scales proportionately. He just has to keep in mind that Pandora is much smaller than radio right now and that's why the absolute payout is small. It's confusing for musicians when they see big numbers like One Million I guess. ;-)
• jccalhoun 13y ago
  So he's complaining about still getting paid for a song he released 20 years ago? Damn. Wish I had problems like that...
• logn 13y ago
  No one forced the OP to submit his music to Pandora. You have to specifically sign up to a label or pay someone like TuneCore. And software developers face the similar difficulties to musicians making money on their own, hence why we work for the Silicon Valley giants he's bashing. Also, the OP is 'Cracker'. They're signed to a subsidiary of EMI. I wonder how much money his label took.
• free652 13y ago
  So let's say XM radio have 3,000,000 listeners (24 mil total subscribers) So 179 x 3 millions = 537 millions and that's $181.94 Now Pandora played the song 1,159,000 and that's 16.89. Wow... So Pandora actually PAYS A LOT MORE. It would have paid you 3 cents if you use xm radio rates. edit: well my numbers are off, since there are many channels on xm. XM pays about the same as Pandora. I can't really get numbers how many listeners per a XM channel. But even if I take I reduce the listeners 100 times (30,000 listeners per channel), still Pandora pays 5x times more.
• codeulike 13y ago
  Too must music. Supply and demand. Musicians need to get together and sort out some quotas so that they stop flooding the market with music. not actually sure if I'm joking or not, need to think about this more
• clarky07 13y ago
  If you don't like how much money Pandora pays you, stop letting them play your songs. As noted elsewhere in this thread, their rates per listen are very similar to traditional radio. When played on the radio, thousands hear it. When played on Pandora, 1 person hears it.
• kreek 13y ago
  I have no problem with Pandora's payout they are radio without direct access to tunes. I have couple of tracks on Spotify, and although I wish they did pay me more, I don't think they're too far off either. Spotify pay me about $0.004/play. I also have a premium Spotify account @ $9.99/month. Now I probably listen to more music than most people, as I assume other premium subscribers do. Doing a back of the napkin calculation I listen to an average of 30 songs per day, so maybe 900 plays a month so you could say Spotify charge me $0.01/play. 40% payout isn't bad, maybe it should be 50% or 75%, who knows what Spotify's infrastructure costs them. Either way in the old days (> ten years ago) artists were getting no where near 40%. I've only bought two albums this year, Boards of Canada and Flying Lotus, they were both not immediately on Spotify. This is probably the best course. Release on MP3, CD, Vinyl, for the first couple of months for the hardcore fans then release to the streamers. The OP probably has his record label still taking a huge chunk of his payout. Cut out the middle man, self publish. Streaming is only going to grow, streaming profit will eventually go up. Self-plug! @spotify http://open.spotify.com/album/2ASb9HnDamAwrsJQ9gKtqp http://open.spotify.com/album/2ASb9HnDamAwrsJQ9gKtqp @soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/kreek https://soundcloud.com/kreek
• imchillyb 13y ago
  Music, cinema, and television, used to be considered performance arts. One performance, one payment. If I build a piece of furniture, or any other physical item, what right to royalties do I have? None. The greed of the music, movie, and television industries knows no bounds. I for one am sick unto death of their greed mongering.
• wnevets 13y ago
  If your song was worth more (aka you were paid more per listen) you probably wouldn't of never made it to a million listens
• nitrogen 13y ago
  I have to wonder if Pandora ever manipulates play counts. Mumford and Sons was one of Pandora's top paid artists. Though I like their music, could it be that they were being pushed into stations that were completely unrelated? Like my Dubstep station playing Little Lion Man repeatedly, even though it's not even close to the same genre?
• gesman 13y ago
  We all can set the record straight: download the album and donate directly to the artist to support great talent. Say "no" to middleman.
• marze 13y ago
  Say you buy a song on a CD or online. Spend $1 or so. Listen 5 times, that is $0.20 per. Listen 50 times, it is $0.02 per play. Pandora pay $0.000017 per play, and is lobbying to pay less. Given how much less the current fee is compared to buying a track, if anything, I'd be in favor of an increase. Why shouldn't musicians make a bit more money for their effort, something more in line with purchased music?
• tehwebguy 13y ago
  Comparing it to radio is interesting, but it seems like YouTube would be the best option. Even a super low $1.00 CPM 1m plays would make you $1,000.00
• fredsanford 13y ago
  Let me start off by saying... I play the guitar and have played in bands that did bars, parties and other affairs for money. I have not written any songs anyone would be willing to pay for, but, I have worked with folks that still get royalties from things they did in the '60s and '70s. One gentleman, who had what I'm now hearing is a garage rock hit was getting ~$1500 a month royalties in the '80s from a song I'd bet most of you never heard. What repulses me about Pandora and the like is that you cannot opt out. If something is my work product, I should be able to price it as I see fit and let the market decide if I'm an idiot or not. Here's a youtube of my friends band from ~1965. Miss you Johnny... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPr4tmJBIVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPr4tmJBIVM How many of you would be sick of this subject if it were basically robbing you of the ability to make a living?
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• aphelion 13y ago
  Dean Baker proposed "Artistic Freedom Vouchers" as a way to supplant copyright. The basic idea is that every taxpayer would get a refundable tax credit of 75-100 dollars which could be "spent" by buying creative works from anyone who registered to be a recipient. It would be a very low bar to clear, just enough to weed out the obvious scams. Anyone who received AFV money would be barred from placing their works under copyright for the next five years. It the context of our current IP law paradigm, I will admit it seems radical. Given how wasteful and repressive our current IP laws are, that seems like it would be a good thing.
• AwesomeDuck 13y ago
  I wish I could get paid for something I did 20 years ago. Maybe you should consider that the purpose of copyright law was not to provide you and your kids a revenue stream for life but rather to encourage free thought and exchange of ideas by providing a limited period of protection before a work became public domain. The original copyright term when congress passed the first copyright law was 14 years. But greedy entertainment industry attorneys have been able to pay off congress over the years and have the terms extended, until now, thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, the expiration of copyright is effectively gone. In fact nothing will enter the public domain for decades now. So maybe instead of complaining that the average Joe's of the world need to listen to more commercials or pay you more for something you did 20 years ago you could put that energy into something new. It amazes me that we can pay teachers and law enforcement people $40,000 a year and hear about how high taxes are, but then society sees no problem with someone making millions of dollars off of an album...or throwing a football around for a dozen games a year.
• lakethun 13y ago
  Be aware that this blog post only tells part of the story. See the discussion and linked blog post a couple days later. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5947584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5947584