Pandora Shares Artist Payment Figures 152
An anonymous reader writes "Today in a blog post, Pandora has shared some details of the fees they pay to musical artists for playing songs over their music streaming service. Over 2,000 different artists will pull in $10,000 or more in the next year, and 800 will get paid over $50,000. They provided a few specific examples as well. Grupo Bryndis, who has a sales rank on Amazon of 183,187 (in other words, who is not at all a household name), is on track to receive $114,192. A few earners are getting over $1 million annually, such as Coldplay and Adele. 'Drake and Lil Wayne are fast approaching a $3 million annual rate each.' The post segues into a broader point about the age of internet radio: 'It's hard to look at these numbers and not see that internet radio presents an incredible opportunity to build a better future for artists. Not only is it bringing tens of millions of listeners back to music, across hundreds of genres, but it is also enabling musicians to earn a living. It's also hard to look at these numbers, knowing Pandora accounts for just 6.5% of radio listening in the U.S., and not come away thinking something is wrong. ... Congress must stop the discrimination against internet radio and allow it to operate on a level playing field, under the same rules as other forms of digital radio.'"
Re:Pandora's Problem is repetition (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Interesting)
Musicians make money by playing venues. If they get ROI from recordings they are doing well. If they make chump change on mechanical recordings, then that is a bonus. The starving artists are the ones who are not playing live.
I had a friend who could routinely make $100 an hour playing on the street. Not massive cash, but for a kid of 18, better than flipping burgers.
Re:Different royalties are just the beginning (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand the class of license that a terrestrial broadcaster has puts an upper limit on the number of listeners they can have, while there is no such fundamental limit on internet radio. Furthermore, your revenues should also scale linearly with the number of listeners if you have a sane business model. So it makes sense that internet streaming royalties scale linearly, the problem is that the rate is much too high. And it wouldn't have to be if terrestrial radio lost it's Edison-era exception, and had to pay full royalties as well.
Meanwhile... (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
Pandora's biggest issue is that they're still blocking everyone outside of the US. When they finally wake up, the entire market will already be taken by other players like Last.fm or Spotify, which is a shame because Pandora does seem like a nice service.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a friend who could routinely make $100 an hour playing on the street. Not massive cash, but for a kid of 18, better than flipping burgers.
You are seriously uninformed about the going salaries for flipping burgers. I believe $100 an hour is a rough equivalent of $200,000 a year salary
What strata of society do you live in, where such money is not massive cash?
Even if you meant "a day", that's still much more than you could ever make flipping burgers ($12.50/hour after taxes).
The fact he said "better than flipping burgers" tends to indicate that he has some idea of what wage that kind of work attracts.
BTW, $100 p/h is not a regular wage for a busker, this would be at peak foot traffic times in nightlife areas, so maybe 2 hours on 2 nights a week (8-10 PM friday and saturday nights in my city) outside of that takings would be very slow even for a good busker. So it's good for a short stint to get some extra cash but it's not a full time job.
BTW, have you ever played an instrument. 2 hours solid on a guitar would leave your fingers shredded, 4 hours you wont feel them for a week (by solid I mean practically no breaks, playing hard for 55 minutes an hour). I have a lot of respect for people who can do this.
A$400 p/w is less than minimum wage in Oz, musicians earn their money in 2 main ways. First by performing, this is a guaranteed income rather than relying on the generosity of passers by. Secondly by teaching, most guitar teachers are also performers and have been performing for years (A$60 p/h for a decent guitar teacher in my city).
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
How many people get paid when a single artist earns a royalty? Band members, management? Label? How many real people split that $150k?
Re:Pandora's Problem is repetition (Score:5, Interesting)
I think all of the channels you worked on just needed more love and attention. To get a truly great variety on a channel, they need to know a wider base of things you like and dislike on that channel.
I have used Pandora since 2005, primarily (90% of the time) listening to the same channel. I started it from four bands I liked with similar music, and then thumbed up maybe 150-200 songs and down maybe 100-1500 over the years. At this point the station is exactly what I want to listen to at work; it plays a several hundred songs I like, I have thumbed down maybe three songs in the last two years, and there's tremendous variety with little repeating. But that's literally years of effort crafting the station.
A pretty large number of other users created a station for themselves based on my station - I can or could see that on my profile page at one point. I think that it gets recommended to people in some fashion. One thing interesting I have noticed is that, while I've never paid for Pandora One, I haven't heard or seen an ad on Pandora since I think 2009. I've had a few conversations with employees over the years, mostly suggesting bands to add or asking (or complaining) about features they should add or removed. I wonder if they have flagged some accounts as "lead users" (or "problem users") or something like that, and have ads excluded from our accounts? Actually come to think of it I haven't hit the monthly 40 hour play cap in more than a year, either. Did they eliminate that for everyone?
Re:Pandora's problem (Score:4, Interesting)
You do understand that without copyright, Pandora wouldn't give a single dime to the artists, right? Pandora is a business. They're not in the habit of giving away millions of dollars when they're not legally obligated to.
Why is there always That Guy(tm) who assumes that when someone disagrees with a particular instance of something, That Guy(tm) assumes they don't like all instances of the thing, and then goes on to do a reducto ad absurdum argument. Dude, let me be clear: I'm not against copyright, I'm against the copyright system we have today. Copyright should not last 150 years plus the life of the author. It shouldn't have billion trillion dollar fines with plenty of rape in prison tacked on for trivial amounts of actual damage. The list of epic fail can be continued almost indefinately... but that doesn't mean I don't support compensating artists' for their work, it means the system as it exists today is crap.