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Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

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Re: Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

#121

Post by badclient »

whiddershins wrote: post #13
Afforess wrote: post #5

Its easy to complain about the low pandora royalties, but these artists are essentially trying to kill the golden goose. Pandora currently spends > 50% of revenue on royalties. Any increases would almost certainly lead to the end of the company. $0 is a lot less than $1,300 for 1 million plays.

Arguing that high royalties make it hard for Pandora to do business is just bullying and threatening. Obviously if sharing songs via violating copyright weren't an option, listeners would happily pay a little more for Pandora premium or endure a few more commercials. Instead, the public starts from the stance that music should basically be free, and artists are lucky to be paid anything at all. The purpose of statuto…

Virtually no one is earning a living from Pandora or Spotify, so, it isn't working.

Citation?

Re: Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

#122

Post by epa »

gohrt wrote: post #100
jcampbell1 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do that with public financial statements. When preparing financial statements, there is a process called intracompany balancing, where you pull out any revenue/expenses that were generated within the reporting entity. If that nonsense was allowed, then every company would show revenues in the billions. The finance department would pay the the HR department for HR services, the marketing department would buy…

Or they spin off sort-of-separate entities to move the profits around (Hollywood Accounting)

Not allowed. Any related parties have to be disclosed and will be removed on consolidation of financial statements. Unless both parties are totally separate entities with no relation, we are moving into fraud territory.

Re: Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

#123

Post by Retric »

sliverstorm wrote: post #90
hohead wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting analysis. Based on their cost of $0.02 cents per listener hour, I wanted to calculate how many hours per day my $36 yearly payment equates to (ignoring their operational costs): ($36 / $0.02) = 1800 hours per year 1800 hours per year = 4.93 hours per day

Sounds like the pricing structure all works together very well, then. 5 hours per day sounds like a good point which plenty of people can easily eclipse, but the majority will not, keeping the service profitable.

Licencing is hardly there only cost.

Re: Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

#124

Post by ThomPete »

dllthomas wrote: post #108
ThomPete wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to make a living is not a right, it's an opportunity. The same opportunity that made it possible for artists to record once and resell in the millions is now working against them. Where where they when the distribution companies who used to make a living from the music industry was laid off? Or the record stores? It's not a right, it's an opportunity.

What you say may be true, but it's only relevant to the question of what we do with that part of the discussion. It doesn't, by any means, mean it's not something we should be aware of.

Having lived of music myself in my younger years I am all too familiar with the discussion.

The problem is that once you start digging into it, the reality is that claiming "i wrote this song" is a much more muddled claim than you might think and so is the claims about how much one should earn and that others are stealing when pirating.

In reality 99% of the people playing music wouldn't be able to do it if it wasn't for the same technology that is now making it impossible for them to make a living.

So deal with it and find a way to make money or quit. That's really all there is to say IMO.

Re: Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

#125

Post by sliverstorm »

Retric wrote: post #123
sliverstorm wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the pricing structure all works together very well, then. 5 hours per day sounds like a good point which plenty of people can easily eclipse, but the majority will not, keeping the service profitable.

Licencing is hardly there only cost.

Yes, but they said it was 50% of revenues. I believe Pandora is profitable, so the sum of all other costs must be less. This means that the breakeven point is actually somewhere between 2.5-5 hours. 5 hours per day is not a magic number- I think 4 or 3 also sound perfectly fine, based on the usage patterns I see.

Re: Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

#126

Post by atondwal »

aston wrote: post #61
encoderer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you told them that the suppliers used a cartel model to prevent true competition in the marketplace......

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you claiming that what's stopping the average artist from selling as many records as Justin Timberlake is collusion among the major record labels?

No, he's saying that what's stopping the average artist to get a high a royalty percentage as Justin Timberlake and stopping pandora from paying radically less for the music is collusion among the major record labels.

Re: Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

#127

Post by swalkergibson »

thehme wrote: post #8

Considering that I have bought several CDs because I heard them on Pandora, I am sure everyone is getting money, but it usually is never enough. I don't know what exactly the cost of running a Pandora company means financially, but with all the upgraded, changes, improvements I expect from it, they definitely need money to pay the developers, so that we, the listener can love the music and buy the albums, which I wou…

Ideally, the artist wants you to come to their concerts. Even better, they want you to come to their concert, go to the merch table, and buy two of everything they have available for sale. In the traditional model, the vast majority of album revenue goes to the record label. The artist makes the most money from band merchandise sales (think KISS), followed closely by concerts.

If you truly want to support the artist, go to every single one of their concerts and buy three t-shirts.

Re: Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

#128

Post by spullara »

sliverstorm wrote: post #125
Retric wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Licencing is hardly there only cost.

Yes, but they said it was 50% of revenues. I believe Pandora is profitable, so the sum of all other costs must be less. This means that the breakeven point is actually somewhere between 2.5-5 hours. 5 hours per day is not a magic number- I think 4 or 3 also sound perfectly fine, based on the usage patterns I see.

Pandora is actually operating at quite a big loss:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=P&ql=1

Re: Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

#129

Post by whiddershins »

gems wrote: post #119
whiddershins wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pandora didn't advertise the product. They delivered the product. The product is the MUSIC YOU ARE LISTENING TO. The experience of listening to music. If you don't understand that, you shouldn't even participate in the conversation.

Or you could say that playing one song is an advertisement for the album or for the artist. There are many artists I wouldn't have otherwise known about if it wasn't for pandora. "If you don't understand that, you shouldn't even participate in the conversation." This is childish. "If I can't conceive of any other perspective, then you shouldn't open your mouth!!!!"

Seriously, you can SAY a Honda Fit is an advertisement for Honda cars in general. But the car is still the product. Only with music. With no other product than music, do people in our culture so consistently rationalize getting one thing for free as exposure or advertising for some hypothetical other revenue stream that will one day happen down the line.

Re: Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

#130

Post by whiddershins »

mikeash wrote: post #114
whiddershins wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing that high royalties make it hard for Pandora to do business is just bullying and threatening. Obviously if sharing songs via violating copyright weren't an option, listeners would happily pay a little more for Pandora premium or endure a few more commercials. Instead, the public starts from the stance that music should basically be free, and artists are lucky to be paid anything at all. The purpose of statuto…

If wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak. Talking about "if" something that is true weren't doesn't seem very useful to me here. Illegal music sharing is reality and shows no signs of stopping, or being stopped.

I used to believe that, but now I am not as sure.

I'm not sure most average people use bit torrent anymore. And the web is an extremely inconvenient way to try to access illegal content.

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