Re:Pandora and Royalties
by rurounijones on Thursday June 27, 2013 @08:35PM
(#5955565)
Thank you for the clarification. So going back to one of your earlier comments
>> "If major market FM stations paid the same rates as Pandora, based on audience, some would be paying thousands of dollars for every song they played. How much do they pay performers right now? Zero."
> He's using industry jargon to pretend like FM radio doesn't pay out to artists. The reality is, he's being very deceitful. (Emphasis added by RurouniJones)
But based on what you have said above he is correct. You do not pay out to artists, you pay out to associations (I understand this is not by choice and that you are basically screwed by powerful publishing cartels).
It may be a small semantic difference but you said he lost credibility and was being deceitful by saying it when he (at least to me the layman) appears to be correct.
The fact is, and this is a fact: artists get royalty cuts from publishers based on radio play. The details of it varies from one contract to the next (eg what Madonna makes versus Joe Nobody).
Also, sometimes artists are the songwriters, that's not uncommon at all in fact. Sometimes artists have very lucrative rights ownership over their own music. That all depends on the choices they make along the way.
Radio doesn't pay artists directly (would have been wildly impractical until recently), but that's also not by choice. Radio stations don't get to choose how they license the music, that's dictated by the rights holders of the music (the publishers and companies like Sony ATV hold most of the power).