Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobblehead
When a terrestrial radio station plays a song, how much does an artist get in royalties?
If a single radio station with an average of 100K listeners played a song 10 times, how much would an artist receive?
If Pandora hadn't played it a million times, how would his income from that song change? Would he have sold it more? Would terrestrial radio stations have played it more? How has his income stream from this song been affected by Pandora?
He thinks what he received is too low. Most people believe their work is undervalued. But in reality, what should a 20 year old song be worth?
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Performers don't get paid anything from normal radio. The songwriter and/or rights holder makes the money off of that. The amount varies depending on a bunch of factors, but I think it's usually a few cents per play per station.
With things like Pandora (whose royalty rates are based on newer legislation, primarily the DMCA) the performer and the owner of the recording (usually the label) get the bulk of the money while the songwriter gets basically nothing. That's what Lowery is complaining about, as he even mentions that he gets a different and larger cheque for his performance on the song. So much of the law is pretty archaic and based more on when people would buy sheet music or have their songs played by an orchestra than any reality of the last 70 years. It also doesn't help that you have artists expecting the good times from the '90s to continue forever, where they'd be able to release a crappy album with 1 or 2 good songs and pull in millions because of the lack of options for consumers.
One of the bigger problems for smaller scale artists isn't even the amount of royalties they're entitled too, but rather getting them at all. Some of the larger organizations (record companies primarily) simply don't pay or severely underpay royalties and there's not a lot the artists can do about it. If a moderately successful artist thinks they're owed $50K in royalties, it's basically up to them to prove it, which can be a daunting and expensive task when you're going up against a label or radio conglomerate with scores of lawyers and accountants on staff.