Posts by Chris Thornett

Don't shed any tears for Pandora

Corporate welfare? No this about common sense

Nice of you to call me a hero, Anonymous Coward. That's very sweet of you, but I'm merely highlighting the unfair status quo. You're absolutely right the world doesn't owe Pandora a living, but the royalty bodies do need to assess the maturity of Internet radio and come up with royalty figures that reflect it.

It also sounds like you think 2.434p is how much Pandora is making per listener per hour, it's not, it's how much the royalty bodies want to charge per hour per listener, before they make any money.

And as I've already said, Anonymous Coward, this situation covers all 'customised radio stations' or 'interactive webcasting services', who want to run a legitimate company that ensures that artists are paid the royalties due to them and not just Pandora. The company is being referenced, because it's one of the most popular and it's the one announcing its departure from the UK.

@Paul, I'm sure this situation may well force Pandora and other services to reassess their advertising methods and figure out ways to eek out more pennies from punters. Meanwhile, though it's not looking good for artists, particularly those without major label contracts. Internet radio is a wild west, most of the remaining services either don't seem that bothered about paying royalties or have done individual deals with the major labels to get limited access to their artists.

I'm not sure what the Alliance and PPL expect to gain from this, except to make less money for their clients in this particular niche.

Paul, I also appreciate your position in wanting to get the best deal for your artists, but I'd speculate that without getting an agreement from the PPL and Alliance, Pandora hasn't really been in a position to 'mop up' the remaining aggregators like State51.

The petition hit 1,100 signatures this morning. Not bad considering people have to give their address, but not enough to draw the required mainstream media attention.

Not the end, but a reflection of the problem

No, this is a wider issue of UK internet radio fees, which is why the petition is entitled 'Save net radio UK'. Pandora's gross revenue figures aren't the end of the story, but they clearly reflect how absurd this situation is. If you compare them to commercial radio figures the rates are still excessive.

James Cridland from the Beeb (not the Beeb's opinion on the subject though) sums it up pretty well here:

- The entire commercial radio industry in the UK, after 35 years experience and with 31 million weekly listeners, far outstripping even Google’s online reach, makes 2.57p per listener, per hour.

- For online radio, the UK music industry want rates that are 2.434p per listener, per hour.

You know, I'm starting to think Gary Jule's 'Mad world' would be a great theme tune for the campaign...

Yes, not a business at these royalty rates

I'm not entirely sure why you're pointing the finger at me personally, Anonymous Coward, but sure, I'd pay a few quid for Pandora. That's not the point. It's a radio service. Do you pay a subscription to listen to normal radio? In fact, the service that MCPS/PRS based it's calculation on couldn't make it work!

It's also not 1p per viewer hour anyway, it's 2.43p per hour per stream.

I'll be sticking up the full calculations on the Facebook group for people to mull over and I'll be doing a write-up for work, but the per track cost of paying both the MCPS/PRS and PPL EQUATES TO BETWEEN 80% - 94% OF GROSS REVENUE.

Hopefully that's clear enough for most people.

So actually your title of 'Maybe it's not a business?' is true in a way. Pandora and other music services that want to pay UK royalty fees can't afford to operate legitimately in the UK, because the Alliance and PPL charge too much... so go sign the petition. ;)

Opinion yes, factual no

I appreciate that you just wrote this to be controversial and generate more hits and comments for the Reg, but aside from being your own opinion, it's not actually correct.

The PPL has only just set the royalty rate for Pandora's kind of service (what they call 'customised radio stations'). In fact, if you check their website you'll see that the PPL says it will announce a figure in 2007. Aside from being slow to update their own site, they've been incredibly slow in deciding what to charge until this year. Pandora have been 'in talks' with the PPL for quite some time now and the hope was that they'd come out with a figure Pandora could work with.

The rate they've decided to go with is, apparently, £0.0773p per song per stream (waiting for confirmation as it's stunningly high). Since Pandora has an estimated 200,000 users listening to 14 songs an hour that racks up to some gut-wrenching figures, considering most people have it on in the background for hours at a time.

And, I haven't even mentioned what the MCPS-PRS wanted here...

For those of us who haven't become entirely jaded and cynical hacks there's a petition running at the No.10 website (I won't put a link, but search for 'savenetradioUK' and a Facebook group called 'UK Pandora users - save Pandora' is logging developments.

Nice angle though, I'm sure it's racking up the impressions. ;)