Pink Floyd slams Pandora's attempts to trick artistes into supporting royalty cut

Even as Pink Floyd has made its catalogue available on music streaming service Spotify, the iconic band has taken musicians’ fight against Pandora a step forward with an op-ed piece. The article fires volleys against Pandora’s suggested 85 percent cut in digital royalties for musicians. 

Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason, members of the legendary English rock band, came together to write a piece in USA Today that showed Pink Floyd’s resolve of getting Pandora to reconsider the massive cut in pay it is suggesting. The band’s main grouse is against the unsolicited email Pandora has been sending out in order to hoodwink artistes into supporting a reduction in royalties for themselves.

Last year Pandora launched a campaign to have the Congress to impose an 85 percent pay cut on the music community, a cause 130 artistes, including Pink Floyd stood up against. Even while the bands managed to quash Pandora’s campaign last year, Pink Floyd is suspecting that the music streaming service has taken to emotional emails to garner support for itself.

Dark side of Internet Radio

The email from Pandora asks bands to be a “part of the conversation” it is having with listeners and stand for Internet Radio. The letter, writes the band, fails to mention anything about the pay cut. It simply reads, “We are all fervent advocates for the fair treatment of artists…We are also fervent supporters of internet radio and want more than anything for it to grow."

Pink Floyd writes that one could hold the letter of support a dozen times and hold it up to a funhouse mirror without realising that signing it would mean a cut to its own royalties. “We’ve heard Pandora complain it pays too much in royalties to make a profit. (Of course, we also watched Pandora raise $235 million in its IPO and double its listeners in the last two years.) But a business that exists to deliver music can’t really complain that its biggest cost is music. You don’t hear grocery stores complain they have to pay for the food they sell. Netflix pays more for movies than Pandora pays for music, but they aren’t running to Congress for a bailout. Everyone deserves the right to be paid a fair market rate for their work, regardless of what their work entails,” the band slams the service.

It isn’t like the artistes are getting paid a lot from Pandora, anyway. An Indie musician, David Lowrey says that despite his song getting played on Pandora one million times, all he received in payment from it was a paltry $16.89. That amount, he points out, is less than what he makes through sales of a single T-shirt.

Pink Floyd signs off by saying that artistes, along with the band itself, would gladly work with Pandora to end AM/FM’s radio exemption from paying any royalties but the streaming service should try not to trick them into signing confusing petitions.

Even though digitisation has become the need of the hour for the music industry, splitting money has become the bone of contention between a lot of musicians and services. While it is easy now for artistes to pull music off Pandora, it would be in the greater interests of all involved to come to a middle ground and thrash it out to find a good deal for everyone.