168 million plays = 12,359.00USD on Pandora

With Taylor Swift pulling her discography from Spotify this week, now songwriter Aloe Blacc reveals he received less than 4000USD in royalties (1/3 songwriting credit of the 12K) from Pandora for a song he co-wrote with AVICII - after it was streamed 168 million times!

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/aloe-blacc-pay-songwriters/

What do you think is fair compensation for streaming/playback royalties?

Your topic name says 12'359.00 but you write 4000 in your post.

whichever one it is isn't nearly enough. half of that should go to the artists, at least.

1/3 the songwriting credit, fixed

Personally I think it should be on a sliding scale - more plays == more money. Since the point of his article was to illustrate that their creative work has value, it follows the more valuable it is, the more it should be worth.

and yet last I read, pandora was in the hole something like $44 million, lol

I'm interested in comparing the revenue (to artists) in the old broadcast radio vs the payments given on the big e-radio programs now (pandora, spotify, youtube, grooveshark, last, etc).. anyone got any links or info on this? i googled but didn't find much.

...and aren't most of these royalty rates federally mandated (in the US anyway)? i think a few of them (spotify for example) set their own private royalty terms, but pandora just uses the royalty that is lawfully imposed on them. (i could be remembering that wrong though, plz correct me if you know more about this thx!)

Major record labels have always shafted the artist, the streaming services are just continuing the time honored tradition. What is the breakdown for having stuff on bandcamp? How much of the pie do they take?

found a few decent posts about this:

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/07/getting-sensible-about-pandora-royalties.html

^ end of this article has some interesting (controversial?) thoughts on why more artists = less money

(but the reason I wanted to link it is to shed some light on how pandora pays out and to help answer my own question about terrestrial radio payments)

http://theunderstatement.com/post/53867665082/pandora-pays-far-more-than-16-dollars

^ another closer look at some pandora royalties math and again a good short segment on terrestrial radio royalties

  On 11/7/2014 at 9:19 PM, Joyrex said:

1/3 the songwriting credit, fixed

Personally I think it should be on a sliding scale - more plays == more money. Since the point of his article was to illustrate that their creative work has value, it follows the more valuable it is, the more it should be worth.

absolutely. it should be treated just like sales. selling 1,000,000 albums will make you more than selling 1000.

1,000,000 streams should be more valuable than 1000.

modern record companies can not and refuse to adapt to the current market. therefore they should just fail. it makes no sense.

  On 11/7/2014 at 9:43 PM, luke viia said:

and yet last I read, pandora was in the hole something like $44 million, lol

 

This makes me think there might be tax evasive activities taking place where the actual profits these companies make are funneled through a twilight zone such that they become non-existent and end up in the pockets of a happy few.

And if that was the case, these discussions about people not having respect for artists or business models for selling music with some new scheme are completely irrelevant.

It is incredibly bad what artists receive from these streaming services. If only people actually bought music.

Bit of an update on this - TIME magazine used Spotify's own payout amounts (0.006 -0.0084 cents per stream) to calculate what the top earning songs of October 2014 would be paying out to the top 20 artists:

http://time.com/3590670/spotify-calculator/

Poor Taylor Swift must be suffering with that 280K - 390K potential payout for October 2014 alone...

It's weird to think that a moderately-known independent solo artist could potentially pocket as much as/more than a signed international mainstream act, simply because sales/royalties from the latter get shared around to an army of producers, songwriters, executives, etc. and depending on what service the indie artist is using as a distribution platform, they'd be getting 100% (excluding the store's cut, of course)

But still, it sucks how the streaming payout in general is so little. Spotify must be raking in the moolah with premium susbscriptions and advertising. I listened to the new Pink Floyd album on there last week, and there must have been around 8 adverts throughout my entire listen. It's bullshit. They need to give artists more money as an incentive for people to share their music.

I have to admit that digital music sales are a lot more reasonable, though. I released a track onto iTunes and Amazon a couple of years back and made 50 quid from it. I had to pay a small fee to get my track online, but that resulted in me earning every penny once iTunes/Amazon took their cut, so I don't have any problem with that.

  On 11/7/2014 at 9:47 PM, azatoth said:

Major record labels have always shafted the artist, the streaming services are just continuing the time honored tradition. What is the breakdown for having stuff on bandcamp? How much of the pie do they take?

If I remember correctly, Bandcamp takes a 15% cut of sales until you've made $5000, where the cut then drops to 10%.