If you have been following streaming Internet radio at all, you have no undoubtedly heard of Pandora. Pandora is a music service that attempts to allow users to discovery new music. Pandora is ad-supported, but does offer a paid service called Pandora One. The Pandora One service costs $36 a year, or $3.99 per month. Pandora One is ad-free and does provide a higher quality stream.
There has been some controversy regarding Pandora and how much it pays in term of royalties. There have been claims that Pandora is only paying artists $16.89 for 1 Million plays. Pandora has stated that this is completely untrue on their blog. Their entire post is available here.
TheUnderstatement blog has also debunked this $16.89 figure. Their entire debunking can be read here.
Pandora is attributing the falsities to a campaign by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to try and have artists pull their items from Pandora and to retain their old business models, instead of moving forward.
Both of these are quality reads. If you use any streaming music service, includes the upcoming iTunes Radio, it behoves you to read about how royalties are actually paid to artists.
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