Pandora pleased with 15% rate hike for streaming music

I'm feeling all sad

maybe 2 or 3 cents going to the artist.

FX:Sound of sad violin playing, accompanied by these images

When a CD gets sold, the cost is say $10 (or eight quid in real money). The artist gets on average about $1.50 or one gold coin bearing Her Majesty's image. If we say that the album has only ten tracks, then the artist gets fifteen cents/10 pence per track. If in my ownership the album gets played only ten times, the artist is getting 1.5 cents, or a penny per play. Most of my CDs get played far, far more than ten times, so the payment per play drops by approaching an order of magnitude to something around 0.1 cent per play over the first two or three years of ownership.

So, with a CD the artists sell a pre-pack of tracks that they choose, not me (I'll ignore digital downloads, that's for spotty kids), and they get pre-paid, albeit at this imputed 0.1 cent per track. Even if the artist only gets 3 cents per streamed play, they are still choosing to offer an advanced payment + bulk buy discount of 97% to buyers of CDs.

I'd say that if musicians could do maths, they'd think that streaming services were doing them a big favour. The only way that musicians can be better off is if they believe that when a CD is bought, it simply doesn't get played more than a couple of times.

Did the programmers building the applications, the services and all the stuff to keep it up do no work? Do they not deserve to be paid? Do the infrastructure guys who worked to deliver high capacity networks deserve nothing? What about the free advertising and bandwidth the artist gets? How much of that are they factoring in? Also, there are vulture capitalists to pay off you know.

If they want more money sell directly. If they don't like the terms, don't make their stuff available via the service. The pie got bigger but they have to share. Deal with it.

By the way, years of my work was stolen and presented here: http://www.solarapparel.com/ I'm not going to whine about it. I've found where they live.

"Uh, dude! The artists fucking created the thing that is generating money and something else is making a pretty penny off of THEIR DAMN WORK. Of course they are fucking pissed! [pardon my French, else I will fart in you general direction]"

No they didn't create it. They played things other people have created to make music. Do musicians invented the guitar, built the guitars, drums, keyboard, synth programs, and so on? Do they make sure to pay Yamaha a royalty every time they press the keys on their keyboard? Did they invent the CD burning process, or manufacture their own CDs. How abut the algorithms to digitize music?

Everybody uses the work of others all of the time. Sometimes people get paid for that work, sometimes they don't. Musicians have the option of not hosting their music on these services, if the rate is considered too low. And did you miss the bit where Pandora, and Spotify, etc., don't make any money? So who exactly is profiting on all these starving artists' work? (Hint: Apple and Google.)