"Consider Pandora and Spotify, the streaming music services that are becoming ever more integrated into our daily listening habits. My BMI royalty check arrived recently, reporting songwriting earnings from the first quarter of 2012, and I was glad to see that our music is being listened to via these services. Galaxie 500's "Tugboat", for example, was played 7,800 times on Pandora that quarter, for which its three songwriters were paid a collective total of 21 cents, or seven cents each. Spotify pays better: For the 5,960 times "Tugboat" was played there, Galaxie 500's songwriters went collectively into triple digits: $1.05 (35 cents each).
To put this into perspective: Since we own our own recordings, by my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one-- one-- LP sale. (On Spotify, one LP is equivalent to 47,680 plays.)"
dentsu 2022 Media Trends
3 years ago
1 comment:
Interesting. If you compare this with the data mentioned in a New York Times article about the revenues of streaming music in the US, this means that a maximum of about 3.5% of the royalties paid to the music company (BMI) goes to the songwriter. The article in NYT mentions an estimate of 0.5 to 0.7 cents per play. This post talks about 0.0176 cents per play (I assume both are in US Dollars).
Would be interesting to know what happens to the 96.5% of these royalties paid to the record company?
The NYT article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/business/media/streaming-shakes-up-music-industrys-model-for-royalties.html
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