One of the biggest bones of contention in the many ongoing battles between performers, labels and music streaming services—aside from the whole getting paid thing—is the lack of transparency on the part of the streamers. Pandora is looking to change that with AMP, a series of data visualization tools to help performers figure out who's listening.
Although Billboard chose to focus on the growth and development background for the new program (which we'll get to later), AMP's best purpose will be helping performers get paid. Pandora pays its performers per stream of a song but the issue has been—with Pandora and other services—performers and labels are unable to tell how much their works have been streamed and therefore how much they should be paid. If a check doesn't seem right, there's no way to run the numbers. Now Pandora and performers can make sure everything lines up.
The artist development capabilities are excellent as well of course. Among the helpful bits of information a performer can glean from Pandora: For one, performers can check out how many "thumbs up" a song got versus "thumbs down" in order to better determine what a potential next single should be. Even better is the concept of tour-sourcing, where performers can track data such as what regions play a band more than others. Groups such as Iron Maiden have used this information to determine where they should tour next.
Pandora, although not saying this out loud, has to hope that this feature will come back to the original conversation on royalty rates. If the service can prove that it has the potential to promote and boost business efficiency for performers, it can perhaps negotiate smaller payouts for the streams it provides.
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