I think since Spotify is so much closer to owning an album than it is to radio, many artists expect it to be closer in value to album sales than radio plays.
Not saying ignorance of the proper comparison isn't happening, just that it might not be the only reason.
I don't use Spotify or Google Music. I don't know what they pay to the artist. What I do know is my friends that use them have zero reason to buy a CD. I also know even the more obscure stuff shows up on there. Once they are older and have a family, they certainly don't have time to go to more than a couple of concerts a year, and they most likely are not wearing band t-shirts past 30.
The way radio worked, you heard a song once and a while, liked it, most of the artist's other songs you rarely or never heard. There was a big incentive to buy the CD.
Musicians need to have a freemium model, where you get free, unrestricted access to some songs, and then if you absolutely love the band you pay for the rest (or you can pirate it, but there are a few hoops to jump through for that one.) It has to be convenient, on demand, and a single standard. May be its lossless audio, or may be its just mastered differently. Someone who knows more about music would have to figure it out.
Despite all of this, my favorite musicians regularly release new albums. There are a few duds, but the music is good. Countless genres blended together and mutated, with virtually unlimited choices. As far as I'm concerned, this is a music renaissance.
hey there now, sonny. I'm 51, and some of them still fit just fine, thanks. I even go to several concerts each year.
Why do you do this? You know that most of the money for an album doesn't go to the artist? Do you buy the physical CD or do you buy the song on iTunes?
The vast vast majority of people do not have thousands of dollars to spend on music.
You don't know that, because you don't know what sort of music he listens to or what deals those artists have with their labels. There are certainly cases where labels fuck artists, but there are a lot of others where they deliver value. This idea of blaming all the big bad labels is little more than an excuse not to pay for music. Along the way, it's crushed lots of small independent labels that had great partnerships with their artists but get blamed for the perceived moral failings of the majors.
You know that if you spend $0, the artist gets nothing, right? Then their label drops them because they aren't profitable.
not necessarily. I'm quite happy to be shown ads while I stream that generate revenue for the artist.
I'm not even kidding. Nothing is stopping you from writing a $50 check and sending it as a donation.
If the artists don't like the deal that labels are giving them, they don't have to take it. They can build their own fan base, learn marketing, get exposure and sell their own stuff through iTunes and other places. A lot of artists are opting to do just that.
I know that the money doesn't all go to the artists - what would you have me (or the GP) do instead, not pay for any of it?
Mail them a check. Mail them cash. Hand them cash in person. Send them bitcoins; if they're tech-savvy enough.
Like many scaling problems, that's a good problem to have: at that point, you can afford to have people working for you depositing checks, which is pretty much the inverse of the power relationship artists have with labels.
You don't know what the relationship with the label is. Some artists come in with their own label and only need distributor to reach a bigger audience (artists $$$/labels$$). Some come in completely unknown and the label has to front all the money (artists $ / label $$$$), and some are quite happy to be on a smaller label and let the label handle the business side of things.
> at that point, you can afford to have people working for you depositing checks
...and paying royalties for samples, collaborators, songwriters. Well now we have to hire a guy to handle all of this and you can either pay him/her a salary or a cut of the sales. Now we've slipped back into the label distributor problem.
Many of them do a good job handling fan mail. It sounds like a nice problem to have.
>There is a very good reason that many musicians become involved with labels, promoters, distributors, etc.
There are some good reasons for artists to outsource administrative errands, management. There's also the crappy reason that is the monopolization of the major distribution channels.
should be a link to somewhere I can buy albums for $10-15USD each.
I have been steadily moving to buying only digitally released music, but some artists and labels make this very difficult.
Doing it right are:
* Boomkat.com (reasonable FLAC surcharge)
* digital-tunes.com (same price for FLAC/MP3)
* bleep.com
* hdtracks.com (sort of, the markup is massive)
Failing are:
* Amazon, iTunes et al - ~256kbit-ish music, often mastered terribly. (Yes, I'm aware that AAC is a bit higher quality at the same bitrate)
* Beatport.com (you want me to pay how much extra for WAV?!)
* Almost every major label - I can't order lossless tracks from most of them
Those 20,000 plays are worth a solid $8k to $12k in music fees. (my stations are about industry average in terms of sales; rights fees are based on a % of sales, so the fees can be dramatically higher in sum for a large metro station)
Bottom line, musicians are getting screwed across the board. The music rights companies are collecting much higher fees from the streaming services than they do for radio stations (music radio stations will typically pay 10% to 15% of their sales to music rights; depending on the bracket their sales fall into), but the point that remains the same is that the musicians are getting chump change out of the deals.
103.9 FM: http://rocktherockies.com/
I've been listening for years and the only "commercial" I ever hear is some infomercial type segment early sunday morning for a half-hour. Other than that it's non-stop mostly old or obscure Rock. I wonder if the Sunday-morning infomercial is just to set the "advertising" base?
I looked into the station once, and it seems to be run by a wealthy, reclusive guy as a hobby. Wherever he goes in the Denver area, his library reaches him. Expensive hobby...
You can buy cheap stations for between $100,000 and $500,000 these days. KYEN / 103.9 FM, is a 16,500 watt station, and if that fully covers the Denver metro based on its tower location, then it's worth a fair chunk of money (low 7 figures). My guess is the owner has had it for a long time, before FCC radio licenses were auctioned; back when you could just pay a small licensing fee and apply for it.
I've seen a couple of cases like what you're describing, where someone owns a station as a hobby essentially. If you're running a very tight ship, it doesn't take a lot to pay for basic operations.
I pay for Pandora One. It costs me $36 dollars a year. Assuming all songs are exactly 3 minutes long & I listen 24/7 for an entire year...
((42 U.S. dollars) / (1 million * 3 minutes)) * (1 year) ~= $7.36
That doesn't seem like a bad deal, 1/5 of my yearly fee going to the artist, the rest to operation and profit of Pandora.
... the thing is, I don't listen to Pandora 24/7. At best I listen a few hours a day, on average for a whole year maybe an hour a day. With that, the ratio drags down to 1/100 of my yearly fee. Once cent of every dollar I spend on a music service ends of going to the actual musicians? That sucks.
Maybe the license fees go more to groups above the artist that don't deserve it, maybe Pandora's operating expenses eat up most of the pie... I don't know who to blame for the situation, I just know it's rigged against the people actually creating the music.
And this is why pirates don't feel bad about copying music. When it is damn near impossible to consume music without 99% of the cost going to the distributors, why should anyone feel bad using distribution systems which don't charge?
Buy physical music from local shops and go to shows and buy tickets from local distributors. (I'm lucky to live in a place where I _can_ see top shelf music without paying the Ticketmaster ransom) Especially buy swag at these shows if you're really interested in your money getting to the people who deserve it. Otherwise, it seems pretty clear that any other way of 'legitimately' buying music pays nearly everything to the middle man.
Sounds like Pandora needs to put real pressure on getting those reports revised to be clearer. It's unwise to be hated by the industry that you depend upon.
It is the same problem in games with the previously distinct console markets where you can get more per game because there are less options. Now there are tons of options and it is about bigger user base at a lower per sku revenue take.
The internet based services are more open and there are more of them vying for your attention (which is good) but that you need to do more amazing things to stand out than before.
The controlled markets like radio, movie distribution, consoles (sort of -- Xbone from next gen) since they are controlled/limited and the costs are higher to get on them, they to get bigger takes. But they aren't necessarily better. Many artists, movies, games aren't seen on those or would even be possible if they were still tightly controlled and limited markets. It doesn't make it easier to succeed, it adds more competition and they end up being bigger markets but there is less exclusivity to it. In the end this is good I believe but artists that would never have been seen for instance can now actually be seen at least in access and not locked out. An artist can now get verifiable tracking counts as well as before a station might cheat them like a publisher might do in books/games since it is estimated or trusted to the publisher/stations to report correct plays.
That's pretty amazing, but I guess it's a matter of supply and demand: there's an awful lot of music (and a lot of it is awful).
1. http://a-candle-in-the-dark.blogspot.co.nz/2010/02/song-leng...
Music rights are negotiated as a % of sales, not on a per play basis. So large stations with large sales pay a fortune in music royalties. It's not a set rate.
With an average station, those 20,000 plays cost a radio station $10,000 +/- a few grand depending on the sales category they fall into with the music rights companies.
24/7 music for a year would cost around $60,000 (for said average radio station).
The days of radio-only hits are over (or close to being over).
And it's also just bullshit logic. It's the equivalent of saying that photographers should give up getting a decent commission on their photographs, and instead concentrate on selling champagne at a high mark-up at their gallery exhibits.
... "Less Than What I Make From a Single T-Shirt Sale!"
If you are good enough (and lucky enough) to get your music heard a million times, then use it as a platform to sell real, tangible things to the people that enjoy your music.
If the OP understands the difference, has a reasonable estimate on the number of listeners for broadcasts, and is reasonably good at calculation, he would find out that Pandora actually pays more.
Plus, Pandora provides more and better services to the listeners for the artists than terrestrial broadcasts. A simpel example. I am working and listening to Pandora. A nice song catches my ears. I could immediately look at the song, its album, the artists, and all other related information. Terrestrial broadcasts don't provide such a service. So Pandora is providing a deeper and more comprehensive marketing for the artists than terrestrial broadcasts, and it reaches more diverse population. That is a big benefit that the OP does not consider.
<edit> grammer
There is often more inovation in a space when the market participates are left to decide on their own what to do.
A totally "free market" in terms of intellectual property would be to totally remove copyright and other artificial IP restrictions, not one where IP owners have free reign.
As such, compulsory licensing is a way of reducing the impact of restrictions that would not have existed in the first place without government interference in the market.
1 M people within range of the average radio station /
10 radio stations per market *
5% of the time the average person spends listening to music radio
=
5000
I am not any sort of industry expert, and I could conceive of my numbers being off by a factor of 10. My point is that I don't think you can dismiss out of hand the chance that radio stations are getting fewer than 1800 pairs of ears per play.
music is not a freakin' product, people. it's a service. musicians are PERFORMERS. outside of the last 60 years or so, there was no such thing as "selling music" where you're not talking about sheet music. musicians get paid for performing.
the last 60 years has been a music bubble. welcome to the correction.
m3mnoch.
so, what you're telling me is your [i mean the royal 'you', not necessarily you you, anigbrowl] performance isn't as good as cd playback? people would rather listen to your cd than listen to you?
makes me think you should either 1) change careers or 2) get better.
see? the technology gets dumped on as a scapegoat. we all hear this. this case is no different.
the real issue? competition has moved back to the streets instead of in the promoter's office. you're still fighting to get heard. and you still have to be good. and you still have to be lucky. because these days, every tom, dick and harry can become "a musician" by putting out a cd. it's the same fight every creative industry is fighting right now. it's just that professional photographers don't really have a pandora to shake their fist at.
just be glad it's not the 16th century and the only way to earn money as a musician was to get commissions from nobility. the phrase "starving artist" exists for a reason.
m3mnoch.
Let's look at the numbers. 1M plays for ~$42. Sounds like not much right? Wrong.
Yes AM/RM Radio paid ~$1500 but for 20,000 plays. Now ask yourself this question: how many people heard those 20,000 plays? If the rate of pay was the same ($42/1M) it would have to be 35.7M listens. Well, at 20,000 radio plays that averages 1800 people per listen. Is the likely audience higher or lower than this number? It's bound to be higher. So streaming services are in fact paying more (per listen per listener).
See http://davidtouve.com/2011/12/13/uk-radio-versus-spotify-a-c...