Why the music industry is trying
This is a very long article that goes into detail explaining court rulings and laws, but once you skip past all that mumbo jumbo, it is interesting to see how unfairly Pandora has been treated compared to industry owned music broadcasters, like Spotify.
The article also tells of the industry greed....which is nothing we didn't already know.
This is a very long article that goes into detail explaining court rulings and laws, but once you skip past all that mumbo jumbo, it is interesting to see how unfairly Pandora has been treated compared to industry owned music broadcasters, like Spotify.
The article also tells of the industry greed....which is nothing we didn't already know.
Pandora already pays out more than half of its revenue in royalties. It’s just that most of this money (49% of its revenue) goes to record companies and recording artists, not publishers and songwriters. It’s almost the exact opposite situation to the paradigm that exists in terrestrial radio—where publishers get 1.7% of revenues and record companies get nothing. One argument is that the royalty situation should be sorted out between the publishing and recording companies, which, as we discussed earlier, are often divisions of the same parent corporations.
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“We are disappointed to see a handful of powerful music companies fixate on a single innovator that already pays more than any other form of radio,” a Pandora spokesman says in an email. “Why single out Pandora when terrestrial broadcasters—with several times the combined revenue of Pandora—have never been required to pay performing artists a penny and offer songwriters a lower percentage of revenue?”