The ongoing saga between pop's elite and online streaming services got another new wrinkle this week when an email from Sony/ATV CEO Martin Bandier claimed Pharrell's hit "Happy" only generated $2,700 in revenue from Pandora Radio in the first quarter of 2014.
While this would be a nice sum for lesser-known artists, Pharrell's hit was played 43 million times on the site. The math is worrysome: The song only generated roughly $60 for every one million plays.
In the email (via Consequence of Sound), Bandier said all of this is a "totally unacceptable situation and one that cannot be allowed to continue."
Plenty of artists have spoken out against Spotify (which pays between $0.006-0.0084 per stream), including Taylor Swift and Jason Aldean, but Pandora has been more of an unknown. People knew artists were getting screwed, but few had reported any actual numbers.
The Sony/ATV revelation is not "shocking" -- that'd be giving too much credit to the streaming market -- but it's one more PR blow to a string of websites that claim to be giving artists fair compensation.
Pandora came under slight fire earlier this year with a payola campaign that lessened their licensing fees while subtly promoting certain artists over others.
"They're giving a discount in exchange for airplay," Cracker frontman David Lowery told Minnesota Public Radio. "So essentially you're being advertised to without you knowing it."
The report noted that the rules are different for online "radio," as opposed to your typical AM/FM dial.
"If they were a terrestrial radio station and they were getting a discount on certain music as long as they played it more than other music, that would be considered illegal," Georgetown professor Jim Burger said.
We'll see if Sony/ATV decides to make any political moves after the Pharrell news, but they're pretty tied up at the moment.
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