We're being royalty screwed! Pandora blames price rise on musos wanting money Streaming music biz Pandora will raise the price of its One subscription service, blaming a jump in royalties it has to pay out to record labels. The company on Wednesday said that it will raise the cost of its online service from $3.99 per month to $4.99 for new users. Pandora said that current users will not be subject to …
"As we all know, the majority of the "royalties" are never seen by the artist but instead are slurped into the coffers of potentially corrupt organisations like RIAA, thence possibly to appear in the salary and perk packages of the management types in said organisations."
The RIAA has nothing whatsoever to do with the collection of royalties.
It has pretty nearly always been the case that when someone brings up the theme of artists getting cheated by record labels, it has always been in defense of some imaginary sort of right, actually a baseless feeling of entitlement, to get music and entertainment in general, for free. I have to suppose that you are doing something similar.
The theme by the way is not true. Because of the expense of recording a record and promoting it at all, coupled with the fact that most bands will never sell enough records to recoup the record label's investment, the idea that most artists get cheated is simply not true.
In fact, it is income from the more successful artists which underwrites and finances the new acts, most of which will product nothing but a loss on the balance sheet.
Now it may be the case that the more successful artists feel - and are - cheated, but they do got their start from seed money taken from other artists.
I can't speak for the cost of promoting an album, but if you're spending more than a few thousand pounds to record a band's first album, you're doing it wrong. Recording these days is extremely cheap, if you want it to be.
I'd also question whether it's true that "most bands will never sell enough records to recoup the record label's investment." Certainly, most bands will never recoup the label's investment from their royalties, but that's a very different matter from the label actually losing money.
The RIAA has everything to do with the collection of royalties in the US music business. Every year I helped our non-profit that was always on the checklist of question before our big annual event. Yes, we were skating a very, very thin grey line. Paying protection money to the RIAA kept us legally defensible on the rest of it. Even now I'm not sure we would have won if mounted a defense, but at least we could put one up.
There are plenty of factual stories about well known artists who got screwed by the record labels and went bankrupt. Try Google sometime, or DuckDuckGo if you don't like Google.
Expenses at record companies are just part of the shell game used to screw the artists. You can't charge the prices on merchandise that they do an not make money. Yet to this day even for a well known band, the best way for them to put cash in their pockets is a tour, not a record. That means the system is either broken or corrupt. If it was broken, it would have gone bankrupt a long, long time ago.
I've always paid by the year for Pandora right from when I first found them and used them on a Blackberry with it's buggy software that would reject a song when you wanted to adjust the volume back in 2006, this last couple years I barely used the service. With no buffering and Verizon, regardless of what they claimed, being rather patchy with their service it became less attractive, especially when Spotify allowed me download whole album selections and make playlists rather than having music that sometimes offered totally unrelated artists and music style to the one that their 'channel' was supposed to be related to.
Then I hear that they were taking away the yearly option with it's discount that took the annual price from $48 to $36 and they claimed it was a favor to those on the yearly plan as everyone else would pay the new price.
At the start of this month I went in and cancelled the automatic renew and deleted my credit card information -- just as well since they ignored this and tried to renew the subscription anyway -- I'll just save the $4 a month (until they push it up to $4.99 in line with those that sign up after the increase in price) and it offsets the cost of Spotify so in real terms from now on Spotify only costs me $5 a month because I am not also paying for Pandora.
Instead of complaining about greedy record companies and artists Pandora should have been improving their service and including things like buffering to allow for those times when signal is lost but instead they sat on their backsides and let Apple and Google offer equivalent services for free that match or better the free Pandora version. Let's face it, they hardly make a push outside the USA.
Used to use Pandora often until a few years ago when we got geo-blocked in the UK due to licencing issues. Never worked here since as it appears the royalty peeps would prefer no income and for us not to have access to the service.
It's always the middle men who want their cut of the wedge to be bigger that cause these problems.
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