American rocker David Lowery - frontman and founding member of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker - has written a post on the Trichordist hitting out at Pandora, who paid him just $16.89 (less than a t-shirt sale) for receiving over 1,100,000 streams of one of his tracks.
Pandora Radio is an internet-based music streaming service similar to Spotify, which recommends users music and lets them stream based on their choices and tastes. Users can partake in a free, ad-based version, or pay a fee for an ad-free account.
It boasts a userbase of 80million seemingly happy streamers, but Texan-born musician Lowery isn’t so pleased himself as he claims that the company are underpaying him and his fellow musicians, and that they’re blaming congress and major labels for their crappy payments.
To put things into perspective, Lowery was paid $16.89 for his 40% share of the 1,159,000 plays that Cracker’s 1993 track ‘Low’ received in the last quarter. Terrestrial (or AM/FM) radio paid him $1,373.78 for less than 20,000 plays of the same track - highlighting the gulf in payments.
And, as a working musician, Lowery has taken to the web to pen a piece for the Trichordist, a website that’s against artist exploitation, to slam the company.
“Soon you will be hearing from Pandora how they need Congress to change the way royalties are calculated so that they can pay much much less to songwriters and performers. For you civilians webcasting rates are ‘compulsory’ rates. They are set by the government (crazy, right?).
“Further since they are compulsory royalties, artists can not ‘opt out’ of a service like Pandora even if they think Pandora doesn’t pay them enough. The majority of songwriters have their rates set by the government, too, in the form of the ASCAP and BMI rate courts–a single judge gets to decide the fate of songwriters (technically not a ‘compulsory’ but may as well be).
“This is already a government mandated subsidy from songwriters and artists to Silicon Valley. Pandora wants to make it even worse.”
He continued:
“Here’s an idea. Why doesn’t Pandora get off the couch and get an actual business model instead of asking for a handout from congress and artists? For instance: Right now Pandora plays one minute of commercials an hour on their free service.
“Here’s an idea! Play two minutes of commercials and double your revenue! (Sirius XM plays 13 minutes and charges a subscription). I urge all songwriters to post their royalty statements and show the world just how terrible webcasting rates are for songwriters. The revolution will not be webcast.”
We at Stereoboard support all artists and think they should get what they deserve - but what do you think? Leave us a comment with your opinion in the box below.
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