7 ms·

Pandora and Royalties

294 points by kevincrane 13y ago

jcampbell1 13y ago
This is a terrible blog post. Why post such a stupid and long-winded defense when the facts are on your side? Pandora pays the music business far more than traditional radio per listener. The RIAA wants two things: 1) No direct payments to artists 2) Set a high rate with Pandora as a benchmark because in FM and CDs are dead when thinking more than a few years into the future. While I completely think Pandora is right, the RIAA is playing their hand well, and Tim Westergren just shit the bed with this stupid posting. I have no idea why Tim felt the need for all the bullshit: > Pandora is a company founded by artists to help artists. You mean "that helps artists"? > an email from me asking artists if they would show their support ... We did not play these conversations out in the media You send an email to hundreds of thousands of people, and think it is private? Pandora needs a new PR person. When the facts are on your side, there is no need to spew bullshit.
- kposehn 13y ago
  When the facts are on your side, and the other side is spewing epic levels of bullshit, you often need to clear the air.
tunesmith 13y ago
I'm tired of comparing Pandora's one million listeners to a radio that reaches one million listeners. I don't even know which way that argument cuts - both, I imagine - but it's just a confusing comparison since they're entirely different things.
Samuel_Michon 13y ago
I think that, in order to understand ‘spins’ on Pandora, we must also know how many times a purchased track (iTunes, CD, etc) is played over its lifetime, on average. In my iTunes library, I can see how many times I’ve played a song. There are some that I’ve played hundreds of times, and there are some that I’ve never played. For all those songs, I paid about the same amount. If I’d have to guess, I’d say, on average, I’ll play each track 10 times. That means I pay about $0.10 per ‘iTunes spin’, of which more than 60% goes to the creators. Compare that to a Pandora spin, which they say pays $0.00137 (one-tenth of a cent).
- quesera 13y ago
  Well, it seems proper to me that there's a high premium on explicitly chosen products vs algorithmically-recommended ones. Pandora lets you pick an artist but not a specific song, and it's rare for any artist's entire output to be in their library. But sometimes I wish there was a way to reward artists with long standing personal value to me. The $15.99 CD I purchased in 1987 doesn't feel like adequate tribute for the thousands of times I've chosen to listen to the songs. It might balance out (from the consumer perspective) with all the crap I've bought and listened to once only -- but in many ways that is all the more galling.
- pstuart 13y ago
  Apples and oranges. Nice try.
  - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    Why? I understand that Pandora wants to be compared to terrestrial radio, I just don’t buy into it, as users can manipulate the stations to their liking. If you have a Pandora subscription, why would you still buy CDs or digital tracks? Pandora costs $36 per year for unlimited streaming; I currently spend way more to purchase a few dozens tracks per year.
    - thaumasiotes 13y ago
      > If you have a Pandora subscription, why would you still buy CDs or digital tracks? This question might make sense for Spotify (disclaimer: I have never used Spotify, and don't really know how it works), but it makes no sense for Pandora. You'd buy the tracks so you can listen to them on demand, more than twice a day. Maybe even twice in a row! I have a pandora channel on which one song that I particularly like rarely plays, even though it's thumbed up. I'd be happy to buy the track, except it's only available through iTunes.
    - dubcanada 13y ago
      Good question... why did you buy your cd? Why not just signup for Pandora? I really fail to see your logic? Buying a CD (which is a dying industry, which can be seen by the number of CD selling companies going out of business) has nothing to do with pandora. Pandora is an internet radio, end of story. It streams music over the internet, your radio streams music over the fm/am waves. Buying a CD is more expensive, because it's suppose to become yours, while you may personally listen to it 10 times, that is not a problem for the CD seller. You paid $20 to buy their songs, you can listen to those songs millions of times over 15 years and play them in front of your friends, or at a house party. Or you can listen to it 1 time. But you don't pay for the number of plays, because it could and can be unlimited. You could play that CD 24/7 for 10 years if you want. That is what you are paying for. Oh and if you think artists get 60% you should go talk to one. While some indie artists may get that. Anyone who sells a fairly nice amount of CD's makes next to nothing on CD sales, some even lose money. I'm not sure how accurate it is but http://www.theroot.com/views/how-much-do-you-musicians-really-make?GT1=38002 http://www.theroot.com/views/how-much-do-you-musicians-reall... is an example (there are probably more out there)
blhack 13y ago
Is it 2004 again? why are we having the same argument? Pandora is a radio station. comparing it to something like buying a song is totally absurd.
- muppetman 13y ago
  I don't think he's arguing they're a radio station at all, in fact quite the opposite. A radio station reaches X thousands of people per play. A Pandora play reaches an individual.
- nano111 13y ago
  you must have read something else
vinceguidry 13y ago
Just now I thought I'd try Pandora out. Went over to their website expecting to have to sign up or download something. Nope, they let me pick an artist and just started pumping the tunes out. Awesome! After a few songs I start getting interested in one of them, so I click a link to show more info about the artist. Music cuts out abruptly and I'm put in front of a sign-up page. I spent ten seconds trying to figure out how to get the music back on before signing up. Discovered I can't do this, so I closed the browser tab and fired up iTunes. The experience was so annoying I actually had to write a comment about it.
- blhack 13y ago
  Yeah, this new Pandora thing better figure out how to get some users or they are doomed!
  - vinceguidry 13y ago
    I'd actually be really curious to see what their metrics are on that particular policy. Sometimes the most annoying things turn out to be the most effective.
- tylermac1 13y ago
  I didn't know creating a basic account was that big of turn off for people. Just keep a throwaway email for services like this. It's not that big of a deal.
  - vinceguidry 13y ago
    It's not, I actually had come prepared to make one. It's the heavy-handedness that put me off. I was grooving pretty good to a song, wanted to interact more with the product, then all of a sudden the party stopped and I'm asked for my papers and justification for being there. Uhh, no thanks, man, I'll just try somewhere else.
    - radiusq 13y ago
      They stopped you right in the middle of a song?
chris_mahan 13y ago
tl;dr. What did he say?
adventured 13y ago
This ruined any credibility that blog post had for me: "If major market FM stations paid the same rates as Pandora, based on audience, some would be paying thousands of dollars for every song they played. How much do they pay performers right now? Zero." He's using industry jargon to pretend like FM radio doesn't pay out to artists. The reality is, he's being very deceitful. I own a group of radio stations. We've paid out more to music rights than we've generated in profit over the last two decades. If the artists want a different form of royalty representation, such as direct royalties from radio stations (instead of getting a small downstream cut from the licensing companies), they need to abandon the labels and the status quo. Radio stations didn't arrange this formula, and I'd personally vote in favor of abolishing it tomorrow if I could. I'd rather the artists get 100% of the fees we pay for music rights.
- earbitscom 13y ago
  He said "performers". If your radio station pays performers, you need to fire your accountant.
  - adventured 13y ago
    Yeah he said performers, and that's exactly the part he's attempting to be deceitful about (as I said, he's using industry jargon to pretend that FM stations don't pay out to artists). He intentionally blends that right into the conversation about how much radio stations pay for playing songs, and what a play is worth. Blatant case of Westergren being scummy in attempting to pave over Pandora's own sins.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - coreyja 13y ago
      No he isn't being deceitful at all! He explicitly says that he is talking about the performance fee and not the song writer fee. He is very clear to distinguish them in his post. Yes he blends them into the conversation about how much radio stations pay, and what a play is worth, because it is relevant to the discussion! Performers deserve to get paid for performing their songs as well as the writers.
earbitscom 13y ago
Our entire company (www.earbits.com) is built on the premise that more value can be created for artists out of streaming radio by using it as a fan acquisition tool and marketing platform for the artists and labels than by using it to sell commercials and ads. Without a doubt, the per-stream value created by the ad supported model is a relative joke, but despite my desire for artists to get more value out of streaming and the fact that Pandora is my competitor for listener usage, I continue to side with Pandora on most of these issues. There is no reason why iHeartRadio should pay less than them because it's owned by Clear Channel. There is no reason they should keep paying ASCAP the same percentage of their revenue for royalties after someone as big as Sony ATV pulls their catalog from ASCAP representation. The Internet Radio Fairness Act was not about necessarily reducing royalties, but ensuring that all companies streaming digitally pay the same percentage of revenue. It makes absolutely no sense to me that everyone is focused on Pandora trying to reduce their rates to the same level as their competitors, instead of focusing on the fact that those competitors already pay less. Compulsory rates that work for these companies are the best opportunity for independent artists to participate in this market. If you force these companies to secure direct deals with labels because the compulsory rates are not equitable, you will get what just happened with iTunes Radio. They will forge sweetheart deals with the major labels and treat indies like a nice-to-have group of second class citizens. The artist community should be working harder to increase royalties paid by the companies already enjoying massive discounts. The artist community should be interested in making their music as easy to license as possible, a la compulsory licenses. If you make the rates unsustainable, and even worse, push the revenues through label accounting departments, artists will be left in the cold and have most of their share kept by labels. Pandora has definitely gone about this in a way that hasn't worked in terms of PR, but it is unfathomable to me that all of a sudden everybody on earth forgets that the person on the other side of this issue is the RIAA. Nothing the RIAA has ever done was good for consumers or artists. Why on earth would it be now? Pandora pays more royalties than any other type of radio broadcaster. It's time to make other companies pay more, while finding a rate and system that works for everybody and doesn't require direct licensing. Any other situation does not bode well for artists.
- jcampbell1 13y ago
  > Our entire company (www.earbits.com) is built on the premise ... that pay to play is okay. I agree with your company's business model. The rest of your comment is informed, but you should lead with less bullshit lingo.
tunesmith 13y ago
Responding as I read: Yep, Pandora is pretty cool, and the genome projects is really cool, I'm looking forward to finding out what it says about my own songs, and I'm hopeful that my songs will be recommended to people who will have a real affinity to the songs. I personally like Pandora (as a concept) much more than Spotify, because in Pandora if they want to hear my music again, they have to actually go find the cd and buy it. In Spotify, I'm basically screwed. Onward... to paraphrase, "We don't want to cut royalties by 85%, we want to GROW total payments to artists!" is a bunch of doublespeak. Growing total payments is not the opposite of cutting royalties. He could have every intention of "growing the pie" to make up for the smaller pie slice, but if his starry-eyed intentions to grow the pie don't pan out, it still means a cut for the artists. Guess what, a really great way to "grow total payments" is increase the pie while keeping the pie slices the same, or increasing them. Purely as an aside, performance royalties confuse me. I paid between $50 and $300 to my session musicians on my EP and considered it work-for-hire. I'm assuming that means I don't have register them as session musicians at soundscan, but I really have no freaking clue. I don't even know how to get hold of half those musicians now. Anyway, organizations like pandora like to confuse discussions by bringing in performance royalties - for instance, an artist might have a complaint that is specifically limited to the inequity of the songwriter royalties. Responding with "you are forgetting about the performance royalties!" is completely irrelevant. The law is that digital radio pays performance royalties (through soundscan) in addition to songwriter royalties, and (US) radio only pays songwriter royalties. That's not the artists' fault! If an artist has a beef about songwriter royalties, hitting them over the head about how unfair it is that they also have to pay performance royalties is intellectually dishonest.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jmduke 13y ago
  I personally like Pandora (as a concept) much more than Spotify, because in Pandora if they want to hear my music again, they have to actually go find the cd and buy it. In Spotify, I'm basically screwed. I think Pandora needs to work on their point of sale here. I buy a lot of music, but if I like a song Pandora I'm more inclined to prop it open on a tab on Youtube than I am to go through the hassle of opening iTunes to download/purchase it. Currently, the quickest route is via Amazon MP3, but even that isn't perfect (especially because most of the stuff I'm inclined to purchase isn't on Amazon/iTunes.) I guess what I'm trying to say is that one-click purchasing on Pandora would be wonderful.
proland 13y ago
How long until they fix their security so it isn't trivially easy to download an mp3 of every song that gets played?
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  Don't hold your breath. You can record whatever an internet browser is playing (or any other application, basically) using third party programs. There isn't a defense against this on Pandora's end.
  - logn 13y ago
    But when you record an MP3 and then compress it again to MP3 you've then doubly compressed it with a lossy format. Besides, I personally feel like, if someone wants to go to the trouble to record a song streaming from Pandora, who can really feel threatened? If you've experienced buying and shopping for music legally, it's a pretty nice experience. You can browse everything and it's nicely organized. You can get full album art and correct ID3 tags. You can choose the explicit versions of albums. Pirating music really isn't that nice of an experience. And if you really want to support an artist, just buy some merch or go to a show. And for independent bands, the Pandora plays and especially album sales is real money (if you sell an album for $10 online, the band makes something like 50%). It actually feels nice to pay for things especially when it's obvious that as a whole, these talented people make almost no money on average. But more than being altruistic, it's just nice to be a part of modern culture and follow bands, much like people follow sports. Getting some new album and reading reviews and going to their shows is really just a lot of fun.
  - proland 13y ago
    I'm not talking about recording anything off your sound mix. It's significantly easier than that. As in right click and save easy.
    - coreyja 13y ago
      Umm I could be wrong, but I don't think that is possible. If it is, how would you go about doing it? I just spend about 30 seconds right clicking on random stuff while pandora was playing and never sound a save that would let me save the MP3.
tomasien 13y ago
I love this. Artists complain about Pandora, and that's fine, but they don't understand how much worse radio stations WITHOUT A DOUBT are for artists in terms of payments. I've had songs on the radio to 10's of thousands of people at least 100 times, neither I nor anyone involved has seen a dime. On Pandora, we've seen about a dime BUT that's at least what we were due.
- tomasien 13y ago
  Btw - should artists get more royalties? My answer is no. There's no royalty scale I know of at which a band that isn't able to make a ton of money other places could make even a LIVING on royalties. Artists are much better of building a tribe and having the tribe support them with clothing (shockingly easy to sell for a band that can move an audience emotionally), physical music, and donations (Kickstarter, passing the hat, etc.). I understand the concept of being screwed, but it's just wrong. There's no business model where someone like Pandora could pay artists a meaningful amount (10x-1000x more depending on your definition of meaningful) and still grow to any scale that matters. So take the distribution and capitalize!
brittohalloran 13y ago
Biggest takeaway from all of this back and forth, don't become a musician.
- GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
  * don't become a musician for the money.
ericdykstra 13y ago
You want to make sure artists are paid a fair amount for how much you listen to them? Use last.fm or another service to record what artists you listen to and how much, and cut a check to them directly for 1 cent, 10 cents, or whatever you think is fair on a per-song basis every 6 months. Whether you listen to music on Spotify, Google Music, or you torrent all your music, this is a more personal way to show the artists you listen to how much you appreciate them, and it circumvents the RIAA and all the other terrible things in between you and the artist.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

294 points by kevincrane 13y ago

This is a terrible blog post. Why post such a stupid and long-winded defense when the facts are on your side? Pandora pays the music business far more than traditional radio per listener. The RIAA wants two things: 1) No direct payments to artists 2) Set a high rate with Pandora as a benchmark because in FM and CDs are dead when thinking more than a few years into the future. While I completely think Pandora is right, the RIAA is playing their hand well, and Tim Westergren just shit the bed with this stupid posting. I have no idea why Tim felt the need for all the bullshit: > Pandora is a company founded by artists to help artists. You mean "that helps artists"? > an email from me asking artists if they would show their support ... We did not play these conversations out in the media You send an email to hundreds of thousands of people, and think it is private? Pandora needs a new PR person. When the facts are on your side, there is no need to spew bullshit.

kposehn 13y ago
When the facts are on your side, and the other side is spewing epic levels of bullshit, you often need to clear the air.

tunesmith 13y ago

I'm tired of comparing Pandora's one million listeners to a radio that reaches one million listeners. I don't even know which way that argument cuts - both, I imagine - but it's just a confusing comparison since they're entirely different things.

Samuel_Michon 13y ago

I think that, in order to understand ‘spins’ on Pandora, we must also know how many times a purchased track (iTunes, CD, etc) is played over its lifetime, on average. In my iTunes library, I can see how many times I’ve played a song. There are some that I’ve played hundreds of times, and there are some that I’ve never played. For all those songs, I paid about the same amount. If I’d have to guess, I’d say, on average, I’ll play each track 10 times. That means I pay about $0.10 per ‘iTunes spin’, of which more than 60% goes to the creators. Compare that to a Pandora spin, which they say pays $0.00137 (one-tenth of a cent).

quesera 13y ago
Well, it seems proper to me that there's a high premium on explicitly chosen products vs algorithmically-recommended ones. Pandora lets you pick an artist but not a specific song, and it's rare for any artist's entire output to be in their library. But sometimes I wish there was a way to reward artists with long standing personal value to me. The $15.99 CD I purchased in 1987 doesn't feel like adequate tribute for the thousands of times I've chosen to listen to the songs. It might balance out (from the consumer perspective) with all the crap I've bought and listened to once only -- but in many ways that is all the more galling.
pstuart 13y ago
Apples and oranges. Nice try.
- Samuel_Michon 13y ago
  Why? I understand that Pandora wants to be compared to terrestrial radio, I just don’t buy into it, as users can manipulate the stations to their liking. If you have a Pandora subscription, why would you still buy CDs or digital tracks? Pandora costs $36 per year for unlimited streaming; I currently spend way more to purchase a few dozens tracks per year.
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    > If you have a Pandora subscription, why would you still buy CDs or digital tracks? This question might make sense for Spotify (disclaimer: I have never used Spotify, and don't really know how it works), but it makes no sense for Pandora. You'd buy the tracks so you can listen to them on demand, more than twice a day. Maybe even twice in a row! I have a pandora channel on which one song that I particularly like rarely plays, even though it's thumbed up. I'd be happy to buy the track, except it's only available through iTunes.
  - dubcanada 13y ago
    Good question... why did you buy your cd? Why not just signup for Pandora? I really fail to see your logic? Buying a CD (which is a dying industry, which can be seen by the number of CD selling companies going out of business) has nothing to do with pandora. Pandora is an internet radio, end of story. It streams music over the internet, your radio streams music over the fm/am waves. Buying a CD is more expensive, because it's suppose to become yours, while you may personally listen to it 10 times, that is not a problem for the CD seller. You paid $20 to buy their songs, you can listen to those songs millions of times over 15 years and play them in front of your friends, or at a house party. Or you can listen to it 1 time. But you don't pay for the number of plays, because it could and can be unlimited. You could play that CD 24/7 for 10 years if you want. That is what you are paying for. Oh and if you think artists get 60% you should go talk to one. While some indie artists may get that. Anyone who sells a fairly nice amount of CD's makes next to nothing on CD sales, some even lose money. I'm not sure how accurate it is but http://www.theroot.com/views/how-much-do-you-musicians-really-make?GT1=38002 http://www.theroot.com/views/how-much-do-you-musicians-reall... is an example (there are probably more out there)

blhack 13y ago

Is it 2004 again? why are we having the same argument? Pandora is a radio station. comparing it to something like buying a song is totally absurd.

muppetman 13y ago
I don't think he's arguing they're a radio station at all, in fact quite the opposite. A radio station reaches X thousands of people per play. A Pandora play reaches an individual.
nano111 13y ago
you must have read something else

vinceguidry 13y ago

Just now I thought I'd try Pandora out. Went over to their website expecting to have to sign up or download something. Nope, they let me pick an artist and just started pumping the tunes out. Awesome! After a few songs I start getting interested in one of them, so I click a link to show more info about the artist. Music cuts out abruptly and I'm put in front of a sign-up page. I spent ten seconds trying to figure out how to get the music back on before signing up. Discovered I can't do this, so I closed the browser tab and fired up iTunes. The experience was so annoying I actually had to write a comment about it.

blhack 13y ago
Yeah, this new Pandora thing better figure out how to get some users or they are doomed!
- vinceguidry 13y ago
  I'd actually be really curious to see what their metrics are on that particular policy. Sometimes the most annoying things turn out to be the most effective.
tylermac1 13y ago
I didn't know creating a basic account was that big of turn off for people. Just keep a throwaway email for services like this. It's not that big of a deal.
- vinceguidry 13y ago
  It's not, I actually had come prepared to make one. It's the heavy-handedness that put me off. I was grooving pretty good to a song, wanted to interact more with the product, then all of a sudden the party stopped and I'm asked for my papers and justification for being there. Uhh, no thanks, man, I'll just try somewhere else.
  - radiusq 13y ago
    They stopped you right in the middle of a song?

chris_mahan 13y ago

tl;dr. What did he say?

adventured 13y ago

This ruined any credibility that blog post had for me: "If major market FM stations paid the same rates as Pandora, based on audience, some would be paying thousands of dollars for every song they played. How much do they pay performers right now? Zero." He's using industry jargon to pretend like FM radio doesn't pay out to artists. The reality is, he's being very deceitful. I own a group of radio stations. We've paid out more to music rights than we've generated in profit over the last two decades. If the artists want a different form of royalty representation, such as direct royalties from radio stations (instead of getting a small downstream cut from the licensing companies), they need to abandon the labels and the status quo. Radio stations didn't arrange this formula, and I'd personally vote in favor of abolishing it tomorrow if I could. I'd rather the artists get 100% of the fees we pay for music rights.

earbitscom 13y ago
He said "performers". If your radio station pays performers, you need to fire your accountant.
- adventured 13y ago
  Yeah he said performers, and that's exactly the part he's attempting to be deceitful about (as I said, he's using industry jargon to pretend that FM stations don't pay out to artists). He intentionally blends that right into the conversation about how much radio stations pay for playing songs, and what a play is worth. Blatant case of Westergren being scummy in attempting to pave over Pandora's own sins.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - coreyja 13y ago
    No he isn't being deceitful at all! He explicitly says that he is talking about the performance fee and not the song writer fee. He is very clear to distinguish them in his post. Yes he blends them into the conversation about how much radio stations pay, and what a play is worth, because it is relevant to the discussion! Performers deserve to get paid for performing their songs as well as the writers.

earbitscom 13y ago

Our entire company (www.earbits.com) is built on the premise that more value can be created for artists out of streaming radio by using it as a fan acquisition tool and marketing platform for the artists and labels than by using it to sell commercials and ads. Without a doubt, the per-stream value created by the ad supported model is a relative joke, but despite my desire for artists to get more value out of streaming and the fact that Pandora is my competitor for listener usage, I continue to side with Pandora on most of these issues. There is no reason why iHeartRadio should pay less than them because it's owned by Clear Channel. There is no reason they should keep paying ASCAP the same percentage of their revenue for royalties after someone as big as Sony ATV pulls their catalog from ASCAP representation. The Internet Radio Fairness Act was not about necessarily reducing royalties, but ensuring that all companies streaming digitally pay the same percentage of revenue. It makes absolutely no sense to me that everyone is focused on Pandora trying to reduce their rates to the same level as their competitors, instead of focusing on the fact that those competitors already pay less. Compulsory rates that work for these companies are the best opportunity for independent artists to participate in this market. If you force these companies to secure direct deals with labels because the compulsory rates are not equitable, you will get what just happened with iTunes Radio. They will forge sweetheart deals with the major labels and treat indies like a nice-to-have group of second class citizens. The artist community should be working harder to increase royalties paid by the companies already enjoying massive discounts. The artist community should be interested in making their music as easy to license as possible, a la compulsory licenses. If you make the rates unsustainable, and even worse, push the revenues through label accounting departments, artists will be left in the cold and have most of their share kept by labels. Pandora has definitely gone about this in a way that hasn't worked in terms of PR, but it is unfathomable to me that all of a sudden everybody on earth forgets that the person on the other side of this issue is the RIAA. Nothing the RIAA has ever done was good for consumers or artists. Why on earth would it be now? Pandora pays more royalties than any other type of radio broadcaster. It's time to make other companies pay more, while finding a rate and system that works for everybody and doesn't require direct licensing. Any other situation does not bode well for artists.

jcampbell1 13y ago
> Our entire company (www.earbits.com) is built on the premise ... that pay to play is okay. I agree with your company's business model. The rest of your comment is informed, but you should lead with less bullshit lingo.

tunesmith 13y ago

Responding as I read: Yep, Pandora is pretty cool, and the genome projects is really cool, I'm looking forward to finding out what it says about my own songs, and I'm hopeful that my songs will be recommended to people who will have a real affinity to the songs. I personally like Pandora (as a concept) much more than Spotify, because in Pandora if they want to hear my music again, they have to actually go find the cd and buy it. In Spotify, I'm basically screwed. Onward... to paraphrase, "We don't want to cut royalties by 85%, we want to GROW total payments to artists!" is a bunch of doublespeak. Growing total payments is not the opposite of cutting royalties. He could have every intention of "growing the pie" to make up for the smaller pie slice, but if his starry-eyed intentions to grow the pie don't pan out, it still means a cut for the artists. Guess what, a really great way to "grow total payments" is increase the pie while keeping the pie slices the same, or increasing them. Purely as an aside, performance royalties confuse me. I paid between $50 and $300 to my session musicians on my EP and considered it work-for-hire. I'm assuming that means I don't have register them as session musicians at soundscan, but I really have no freaking clue. I don't even know how to get hold of half those musicians now. Anyway, organizations like pandora like to confuse discussions by bringing in performance royalties - for instance, an artist might have a complaint that is specifically limited to the inequity of the songwriter royalties. Responding with "you are forgetting about the performance royalties!" is completely irrelevant. The law is that digital radio pays performance royalties (through soundscan) in addition to songwriter royalties, and (US) radio only pays songwriter royalties. That's not the artists' fault! If an artist has a beef about songwriter royalties, hitting them over the head about how unfair it is that they also have to pay performance royalties is intellectually dishonest.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jmduke 13y ago
I personally like Pandora (as a concept) much more than Spotify, because in Pandora if they want to hear my music again, they have to actually go find the cd and buy it. In Spotify, I'm basically screwed. I think Pandora needs to work on their point of sale here. I buy a lot of music, but if I like a song Pandora I'm more inclined to prop it open on a tab on Youtube than I am to go through the hassle of opening iTunes to download/purchase it. Currently, the quickest route is via Amazon MP3, but even that isn't perfect (especially because most of the stuff I'm inclined to purchase isn't on Amazon/iTunes.) I guess what I'm trying to say is that one-click purchasing on Pandora would be wonderful.

proland 13y ago

How long until they fix their security so it isn't trivially easy to download an mp3 of every song that gets played?

dylangs1030 13y ago
Don't hold your breath. You can record whatever an internet browser is playing (or any other application, basically) using third party programs. There isn't a defense against this on Pandora's end.
- logn 13y ago
  But when you record an MP3 and then compress it again to MP3 you've then doubly compressed it with a lossy format. Besides, I personally feel like, if someone wants to go to the trouble to record a song streaming from Pandora, who can really feel threatened? If you've experienced buying and shopping for music legally, it's a pretty nice experience. You can browse everything and it's nicely organized. You can get full album art and correct ID3 tags. You can choose the explicit versions of albums. Pirating music really isn't that nice of an experience. And if you really want to support an artist, just buy some merch or go to a show. And for independent bands, the Pandora plays and especially album sales is real money (if you sell an album for $10 online, the band makes something like 50%). It actually feels nice to pay for things especially when it's obvious that as a whole, these talented people make almost no money on average. But more than being altruistic, it's just nice to be a part of modern culture and follow bands, much like people follow sports. Getting some new album and reading reviews and going to their shows is really just a lot of fun.
- proland 13y ago
  I'm not talking about recording anything off your sound mix. It's significantly easier than that. As in right click and save easy.
  - coreyja 13y ago
    Umm I could be wrong, but I don't think that is possible. If it is, how would you go about doing it? I just spend about 30 seconds right clicking on random stuff while pandora was playing and never sound a save that would let me save the MP3.

tomasien 13y ago

I love this. Artists complain about Pandora, and that's fine, but they don't understand how much worse radio stations WITHOUT A DOUBT are for artists in terms of payments. I've had songs on the radio to 10's of thousands of people at least 100 times, neither I nor anyone involved has seen a dime. On Pandora, we've seen about a dime BUT that's at least what we were due.

tomasien 13y ago
Btw - should artists get more royalties? My answer is no. There's no royalty scale I know of at which a band that isn't able to make a ton of money other places could make even a LIVING on royalties. Artists are much better of building a tribe and having the tribe support them with clothing (shockingly easy to sell for a band that can move an audience emotionally), physical music, and donations (Kickstarter, passing the hat, etc.). I understand the concept of being screwed, but it's just wrong. There's no business model where someone like Pandora could pay artists a meaningful amount (10x-1000x more depending on your definition of meaningful) and still grow to any scale that matters. So take the distribution and capitalize!

brittohalloran 13y ago

Biggest takeaway from all of this back and forth, don't become a musician.

GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
* don't become a musician for the money.

ericdykstra 13y ago

You want to make sure artists are paid a fair amount for how much you listen to them? Use last.fm or another service to record what artists you listen to and how much, and cut a check to them directly for 1 cent, 10 cents, or whatever you think is fair on a per-song basis every 6 months. Whether you listen to music on Spotify, Google Music, or you torrent all your music, this is a more personal way to show the artists you listen to how much you appreciate them, and it circumvents the RIAA and all the other terrible things in between you and the artist.

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