

Judge Refuses to Alter Pandora’s Payments to Songwriters - jmgrosen
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/business/media/judge-refuses-to-alter-pandoras-payments-to-songwriters.html

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aston
I'm frustrated that Pandora is fighting to pay _less_ to the people who make
the music we all love. The rates are already tiny relative to other sources of
income for song writers.

I'm frustrated that ASCAP was angling for an arbitrarily larger percentage of
revenue from Pandora based on going for nice looking numbers (2.5%
retroactively for 2013, and 3% by 2015 in according to [1]).

But mostly I'm frustrated that congress and the courts are setting numbers
when the market is perfectly capable of working this sort of thing out on its
own. Legislation of terrestrial radio makes some sense given that the airwaves
are allocated for public use. Internet radio is over pipes the government has
no control over, though, except when the bits turn into music. Oh, and only
when that music is chosen by someone other than the user. What?

[1] [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/14/ruling-on-pandora-
asc...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/14/ruling-on-pandora-ascap-
royalty-fight-is-a-draw/)

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dangrossman
Would it better if, instead of $340M/year in royalties, they got $0? Because
that's what they'll get if they raise the royalties to the point Pandora and
other streaming radio goes out of business. Pandora operated at a net loss in
2013. And in 2012. And in 2011.

People are willing to pay a certain amount for radio, whether it's in
subscription fees or putting up with a certain amount of ads per hour before
tuning out. If that amount is less than the song writers demand, then they get
nothing, because the exchange just won't happen. Pandora is fighting to pay
what the market will bear so that this exchange does continue to happen and
those writers continue to be paid for the music we all love.

~~~
bsder
> Would it better if, instead of $340M/year in royalties, they got $0?

From the point of view of many artists, yes. Especially since the artists
don't even see $34M/year out of that.

Most artists would rather that either A) their music not get distributed or B)
that they distribute the music for free rather than enabling the current
situation.

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lostcolony
If A) Why are the releasing their music at all?

If B) Why are they not opting out of ASCAP, and in general only distributing
it through channels that are free, then?

Happily, these are both options that some musicians are taking (presumably, in
the case of the former). But not 'most'. Just some. I suspect 'most' simply
want to make no effort in creating a new distribution model (I don't blame
them, that's effort that is not going into making music), but also be paid
more. But the change in technology has allowed people to want and expect to be
able to listen to music from hundreds of artists, finding new stuff they like,
and in general -explore- music more. The existing distribution model can't
cope with that and make it as black and white, successful or failure, as it
could when people either bought an entire album, or not, and there was no in
between.

What is the value of listening to a single track, on an internet radio
station, once every few weeks? "Hey, I had a million listens, I should be paid
X for that!" Should you? Would any one of those people have been willing to
pay $1 for that track? You don't know; there's ambiguity when the old
distribution model is applied to the new digital listening patterns, that was
never there when we ignored celestial radio, and only counted album sales.

