Add Bette Midler to the growing list of musicians publicly expressing their displeasure with the amounts Pandora, Spotify and other digital radio and music streaming services pay artists.
On Friday, the Divine Miss M tweeted that Pandora paid her slightly more than $114 for more than 4 million song spins over a three-month period.
That would mean for each digital radio airplay she earned a rather microscopic micropayment of .00002733076 cents per track.
Over the last year a rising chorus of musicians have spoken out against what they see as streaming services’ inadequate royalty payments, which includes Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Atoms for Peace’s Nigel Godrich, David Byrne and, most recently, Steven Tyler.
Tyler was in Washington, D.C., for the National Music Publishers Association’s “Celebration of the American Songwriter” event which also honored Sen. Chuck Grassley. According to the National Journal, the Aerosmith frontman expressed his disdain for current digital royalty rates: “If the laws continue going the way they are,” he said, “[songwriters] will never be paid fairly for [their] own participation. So people, forgive me for being a little jaded about the state of copyright.”
Last week, too, Grammys president and CEO Neil Portnow wrote an op-ed in Roll Call calling for legislation to address copyright issues. Here he outlined the MusicBus initiative which he summed up as calling for “Fair market pay to all music creators across all platforms.” The music industry organization plans this year to extend its political outreach with a “Grammys in my district” day in which 22,000 members of The Recording Academy will be encouraged to “bring music to their legislators’ local offices and make the case for fairness for music creators.”
All this comes in the wake of a recent court battle between Pandora and ASCAP in which a federal rate court essentially maintained the status quo upholding the amount the digital radio service pays the performance rights organization. Sony/ATV Publishing CEO Martin Bandier called the decision “a clear defeat for songwriters” and “woefully inadequate.”
Pandora has actively complained about and sought to change what it sees as onerous royalty payments — especially in comparison to what terrestrial radio pays out. There are signs, however, that the digital radio service’s business model is starting to scale. For the fiscal year, Pandora posted revenues of $638.9 million, up 56 percent from 2012 and paid out $342.9 million in music licensing royalties, roughly 53.8 percent of its total revenue. That ratio is an improvement over 2012, when Pandora spent 60.6 percent of its revenue on licensing costs. The company, however, also posted a larger annual loss due to higher costs. Pandora lost $40.7 million in the 12 months ended Dec. 31, compared with a $35.6 million loss in 2012.
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APRIL 6, 2014 9:33AM
Images Credit:
- Bette Midler Headshot - P 2013 - JONATHAN PUSHNIK
Source : The Hollywood REPORTER
Link to original article: Bette Midler Critiques Pandora, Spotify: ‘Impossible for Songwriters to Earn a Living’
