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Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

theunderstatement.com

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

#61

Post by aston »

encoderer wrote: post #55
aston wrote: post #49

If I told you there was an e-commerce company without a profitable year in over a decade of existence despite federally-mandated price ceilings placed on their suppliers, you'd be incredulous. If I then added that the same company was lobbying in Washington to get the price ceiling lowered, the pitchforks would be out. But then mention it's a company selling music, and people shrug, "Oh, well music should be free any…

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?

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

#62

Post by mech4bg »

Not much has been made of the fact that skips count as plays... I wonder what proportion of plays are skips.

Does anyone have information on what a radio station pays for one play of a song, when they have an audience of, say, 100,000?

Edit: ah, I should have finished reading the original link, they make the latter point well.

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

#63

Post by winterchil »

aston wrote: post #49

If I told you there was an e-commerce company without a profitable year in over a decade of existence despite federally-mandated price ceilings placed on their suppliers, you'd be incredulous. If I then added that the same company was lobbying in Washington to get the price ceiling lowered, the pitchforks would be out. But then mention it's a company selling music, and people shrug, "Oh, well music should be free any…

Not if the price ceiling were selectively enforced against only one type of radio station. In your analogy this would be the e-commerce company has to buy twinkies from their supplier at 8x the price everyone else pays by government mandate.

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

#65

Post by jcampbell1 »

awa wrote: post #54
chiph wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of that marketing costs are from their own interstitial ads between songs? I would think the cost to them is $0, but I wouldn't be surprised if they valued it at market rates. Perhaps to keep the IRS happy.

If they show a expenditure of $40M in MArketing for pandora ads, they are probably adding that $40M to their revenue

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 millions with their own company, etc.

It is common for internal accounting books to record these intracompany expenses/revenues for record keeping. For instance a TV Show pays for ads on the same network, but before Disney reports profits publicly all of that accounting cruft must be removed.

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

#66

Post by gizmo686 »

smacktoward wrote: post #25
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…

> I don't know what exactly the cost of running a Pandora company means financially Well, Pandora is a public company, so they have to disclose all that stuff. Which means we can look it up! Transparency is awesome. According to their latest annual report ( http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9M... ), in fiscal 2012 Pandora brought in $274 million on $285 million in operational expenses. Of thos…

At risk of sounding stupid, $274-$285<$0. How does that work?

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

#67

Post by ThomPete »

205guy wrote: post #57

What I think is missing from this whole discussion is the ability to make a living. Sure the industry is opaque to outsiders, and some of the established practices are weird (radio paying only songwriters, not performers), and now it's all being disrupted. But forget about the numbers for one song. Let's say a guy like the OP of the other article works full time as a singer song-writer. He writes a few songs, perform…

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.

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

#68

Post by Guvante »

winterchil wrote: post #58
chiph wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of that marketing costs are from their own interstitial ads between songs? I would think the cost to them is $0, but I wouldn't be surprised if they valued it at market rates. Perhaps to keep the IRS happy.

This would absolutely not make the IRS happy.

So long as you count it as revenue and aren't publicly traded you are fine.

Pretty sure anyone subject to the real rules is disallowed from doing this thanks to the dot com boom/bust.

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

#70

Post by wmf »

shortformblog wrote: post #51

From the original post: "I am also paid a seperate royalty for being the performer of the song. It’s higher but also what I would regard as unsustainable. I’ll post that later this week." Footnote from this post: "He does clarify in the footnotes that $16.89 is only for 40% of the songwriting and there is a separate performance royalty, but certainly the headline & coverage could leave many with the impression that $…

Arguably songwriting is kind of a dead field anyway since in recent decades bands mostly write the songs they perform.
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