One of the most frustrating and disheartening parts of releasing music in today's digital music marketplace is when perfect strangers take it upon themselves to freely give away the music that we have worked so hard on, and paid so much to create, thus discouraging the few remaining buyers from actually properly purchasing our work. After releasing our first record in 2007, one day I set up a Google alert so that any time a website was found with "Worldwide Groove Corporation" or "Chillodesiac" in the page contents, we would get an email with a link. Little did I know that within the next week I would get dozens of email alerts directing me to blogs where people [who make a habit of doing this regularly] had uploaded our album artwork and all of the music into downloadable files so people could just help themselves to our work without even connecting with or compensating us.
How much is music worth? See our royalty statement.
If you found out that you had gotten over 72K plays in a 3 month period for music you had released 7 years ago, you'd think that was pretty good, right?
I'm going to do this from time to time just so people can see what streaming music pays the songwriters. Here is one section of our first quarter royalty statement from 2014, it covers 3 months. Based on this section of the statement, 72,098 plays paid $4.82*. That is .00006685 cents PER PLAY.
Should artists have to PAY TO PLAY?
Hi guys! I've decided I need to start a little blog section on this site for posts about life as an indie artist. I won't have a LOT of time for these posts, so they'll mostly be short. Today I am prompted by the recent discovery that Jango radio actually CHARGES THE ARTISTS MONEY to play their music. If you're an artist, you access your profile through radioairplay.com. I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to elevate their google rank.