When I first started listening to what I define as “good‰” music, I would find a lot of new bands from Pandora Internet Radio. I‰’d plug in a song I liked and then some sort of computer algorithm would be employed and find me a bunch of other sick songs similar to what I was jamming to. It was great; free music with only a weird commercial every once in a while (I still remember the dreadful local car dealership ones). I didn‰’t think much of it. I didn‰’t consider how the music coming out of my perpetually tangled headphones had come to be “free.‰Û

Pandora receives the majority of its revenue from advertisements: 88%, according to Pandora Media‰’s 2011 3 ^rd Quarter Report. Half of Pandora‰’s expenses are the costs of acquiring music through licensing agreements. The way the played artists get money out of this whole thing is through royalties. Pandora‰’s current rate for royalties is $0.00130 according to the Copyright Royalty Board but Pandora is looking to lower this rate to somewhere between $0.00110 and $0.00129. The internet radio provider argues that lower royalty rates enable more music to be played, but this is not fair to the musicians. As Bette Midler tweets: 

. @Spotify and @Pandora have made it impossible for songwriters to earn a living: three months streaming on Pandora, 4,175,149 plays=$114.11.

— Bette Midler (@BetteMidler) April 4, 2014

Taylor Swift recently removed her music from Spotify completely because she felt that she was not being compensated fairly for her music.

Courtesy of WSJ.

Digital Trends, a site consisting mainly of technology reviews,  recently compared the “Big 5‰” Internet Radio services. (Pandora, Spotify, iTunes Radio, RDIO, and Beats Music). Pandora was very close to winning due to its strong ability to help users discover new music, but its library is way too small. Pandora has 1 million songs while the other four companies each boast over twenty million songs. Spotify came out on top thanks to its massive music collection and granting more control to the user with deciding what to listen to.

In the quest for “free‰” music, Bandcamp is a great contender for up-and-comers. It features a “name your price‰” option where you can just type in $0 but if feeling generous can offer some cash, well cash via Paypal that is. For local bands, every little bit helps.

Life in the 21st century revolves around convenience and immediacy. We all want things right now and right at our fingertips. It is way simpler for me to type what I want to hear into the Spotify app on my phone than for me to plug my phone into my computer, purchase and download the song. But iIt‰’s important to look at this from the perspective of the music’s creator and try to ensure that they are getting what they deserve.