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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

#91

Post by tunesmith »

ThomPete wrote: post #67
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.

This is simplistic. Major labels still have the relationships which allow them to dictate favorable terms to these services that supposedly are so great for indies. These favorable terms mean that the services need onerous terms from the indies in order to break even. This effectively means the indies are subsidizing the major labels. That dynamic needs to change before we can argue that this meets some level of fairness.

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

#92

Post by sliverstorm »

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…

Arguing that high royalties make it hard for Pandora to do business is just bullying and threatening.

Oh? If Pandora already spends half its revenues on the music, how is observing that doubling (for example) royalties would cause music costs to eclipse revenues, bullying and threatening? It sounds like Pandora is the one that should feel threatened.

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

#93

Post by ImprovedSilence »

route66 wrote: post #83
wmf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know what channel you are listening to, but in general there have always been musicians (and bands) writing their own music as there were have always been musicians performing songs composed by others with lyrics written by others. Songwriting is about as dead as cooking.

From what I've seen, it depends on what you listen to. Pop, country, and R%B are largely written and produced by someone other than the performer (hence, they are called "acts"). Most rock/inde/actual "bands" will do their own writing 90% percent of the time.

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

#94

Post by badclient »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #84
hexis wrote: post #71

On some days, I wish companies like Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio would just voluntarily shut down. If the music industry thinks streaming companies are ripping them off, the music industry is welcome to build their own streaming business and show everyone how it's done. Musicians were complaining about royalties and payment long before the internet was invented and they'll be complaining long after we're all gone. Keep…

I don't think the music industry has a problem with streaming (Pink Floyd who started this renewed debate yesterday just got added to Spotify). The problem is that Pandora wants royalties cut - because their business model doesn't work. If they can't afford to distribute the product they need to raise prices or shut down. They can't make the producer look like the bad guy. Trying to get the producer to lower prices b…

Try to make the distributor pay you disproportionate to what consumers are willing to pay for your product(music) is fucking ridiculous.

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

#95

Post by klodolph »

x0x0 wrote: post #45
klodolph wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon pays a 70% royalty for ebooks that were published directly by the author. Is it unfair for this royalty to be so large? (I realize that this is more complicated than "70%", see https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O... ) I think it's a sign of efficiency that a large portion of the money goes to content creators. Content creation will get cheaper as technology improves, sure, but in field…

On what basis do you believe as content distribution technology improves, the percentage given to content creators will increase? This is in direct contrast to historical examples such as monopolies and amazon clearly wants to become a near-monopoly; further, even if the percentage increases, if the absolute amounts fall the content creators still end up worse off. See eg recent articles on HN about the economics of…

Go read that article again. That article talks about how content creators needed a ~10% profit margin to survive. The introduction of DVDs meant that half of that profit moved into long-term DVD sales, so studios decreased short-term margins and made bets on long term gains. When digital distribution took profits from DVDs, content creators were suddenly running at ~5% margins because the long-term bet had flopped. Or, in summary, we are in the middle of a market correction.

I don't know much about the movie business, and I'm not sure about my predictions. But I wouldn't want to draw conclusions by narrowing my focus to big-budget Hollywood movies with traditional distribution models, especially if the newer content distribution technologies are disrupting that model.

I also wasn't trying to make a statement about absolute amounts.

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

#96

Post by 205guy »

ThomPete wrote: post #67
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.

My point was we're trying to judge the merit of an entire system by one tiny facet. What's a fair amount of money for this guy to get if it's not X? What if I was a QA tester and I complained on my blog that my dev team was unfairly closing the bugs I open as invalid, thus depriving me of my bug-based bonus? Seems crummy, but maybe that just how the industry goes and I'm still living comfortably.

Obviously, there is no "right" to earn a living in the legal sense of a right. But it seems moral to say that if someone puts in average work, and they're average talent, they should make an average living out of some industry that is still in demand.

You raise an interesting point about the producers and salespeople of the industry. Why shouldn't they have a "right" to make an average living as well. Indeed, but they could also follow the technology, eg from "curating" a record store to "curating" a recommendations website. Or, since they also have more portable jobs, they could produce or sell other products or talents.

The musician, on the other hand, is stuck. If musicians can't live from their music, even if they are in demand, will stop making music for us consumers.

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

#97

Post by adrr »

dllthomas wrote: post #33
gravitronic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FM radio pays royalties.

Per the article, FM radio pays royalties to the songwriter but not the performers.

Its reverse. Record industry pays to have their songs played on the air there's even term for it, payola.

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

#98

Post by crocowhile »

chockablock wrote: post #80
crocowhile wrote: post #75

I don't quite get the point of this. The original article already said what it had to be said: For frame of reference compare Sirius XM paid me $181.00 Terrestrial (FM/AM) radio US paid me $1,522.00 All the artist cares about is how much it gets at the end of the day.

Please actually read TFA: artists get performance royalties from pandora, but not from terrestrial radio, but these were not included in the $16.89. Also, terrestrial radio plays likely reached many many more listeners than pandora did.

Satellite pays performance royalties. The fact the terrestrial is listen by more people is actually a plus for the artist, I think (more happy listener = more potential CD buyers)

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

#99

Post by Dylan16807 »

aston wrote: post #76
winterchil wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why's the price matter? Any store that buys merchandise it can't sell at a profit is making a basic business mistake. Separately, to your point about unfairness, I suspect that both radio and internet streaming prices are lower than what the market would set if the government didn't intervene.

Remember, copyright exists for the public good. Would radio still exist if it paid significantly more than current internet prices instead of less? Would that be preferable to the current situation?

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

#100

Post by gohrt »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #65
awa wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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