

Making Cents: the meager royalties currently paid to bands by streaming services - sharkweek
http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/

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essdee1
Worth reading for the second half of the article which argues that streaming
services are "divorced from music" and not financially helpful to musicians.

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iaw
I'd be really curious to see how the royalties from traditional radio breaks
down on a cost per person per play basis. I have no feel for where that number
would end up, but I think it would really shed light on how comparable a
payment of 0.005 cents per play per person is.

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ChemicalHarm
I'd really like to see that comparison as well. And wouldn't Pandora and
Spotify, like radio, be a channel to expose people to new music that they then
might buy? Personally, Pandora has worked this way for me multiple times--
they'll play a track that I haven't heard before and like, and I'll go to
Amazon and buy the track or sometimes the whole album.

In the days when a few radio stations were the only free mass distribution
channel, this exposure was so valuable that bands or their labels would
actually pay the radio stations substantial sums to have their songs played.
This was known as "payola," and was viewed as a crime, for reasons that are
still a bit unclear to me.

