Pandora and Artist Payments

[Sam I Am]

Interesting indeed.

The following is a blog post by Pandora.

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Pandora and Artist Payments

Have you heard of Donnie McClurkin, French Montana or Grupo Bryndis? If you haven't you're not alone. They are artists whose sales ranks on Amazon are 4,752, 17,000 and 183,187, respectively. These are all working artists who live well outside the mainstream - no steady rotation on broadcast radio, no high profile opening slots on major tours, no front page placement in online retail. What they also have in common is a steady income from Pandora. In the next twelve months Pandora is on track to pay performance fees of $100,228, $138,567 and $114,192, respectively, for the music we play to their large and fast-growing audiences on Pandora.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For over two thousand artists Pandora will pay over $10,000 dollars each over the next 12 months (including one of my favorites, the late jazz pianist Oscar Peterson), and for more than 800 we'll pay over $50,000, more than the income of the average American household. For top earners like Coldplay, Adele, Wiz Khalifa, Jason Aldean and others Pandora is already paying over $1 million each. Drake and Lil Wayne are fast approaching a $3 million annual rate each.

Complete Blog Post

[arglebargle]

When I was researching the payment models of the music industry, I came to the conclusion that if you directly sent most musicians a dime for every song you downloaded, they'd make more money than they do in the present corrupt, archaic royalty system.

The existing system is designed to make the nonproductive middlemen fat.


It is, at least, nice to see alternatives starting to show up around the edges.