The royalties are paid to the rights owners (through organizations like ASCAP and BMI).
Whether you get paid for plays on FM as an artist, depends on if you own any rights to your music, and or what deal you've signed. The best thing you can do as an artist, is try to retain maximum ownership of your music, and make sure you get the best deal possible if you sign with a publisher.
Westergren is completely wrong about nothing going to the performers. First of all, the fact that some performers also own their music rights and are songwriters with royalty cuts, proves him wrong. Second, the cut that goes to the performer is determined by the contract they sign.
Songwriting royalities and performance royalities are two separate pieces of the pie. Just because some artists also get songwriting royalties from radio stations does not change the fact that radio stations don't pay performance royalties.
The only person who lied about this is David Lowery in the headline: "My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89, Less Than What I Make From a Single T-Shirt Sale!" because that's NOT all he gets, he also get performance royalties (which he clarifies in the blogpost, but the headline is still wrong until he qualify that he's talking about songwriting royalties).
No they're really not two different pieces of the pie.
Ultimately the rights owner determines everything, and that makes it a very simple equation.
If a performer wants paid, they can determine that by the contract they willingly sign with a publisher. It all comes back to who owns the music and who signs what royalty deals.
What are you talking about? A publisher owns the copyright to the composition. The performer (or usually her record label) owns the copyright to the recorded sound.
Sorry, I am getting confused by all the jargon being used here and in the article.
You say you pay artists but then you imply that you pay associations / labels who then pay artists based on their contract with the association / label.
Doesn't that mean that you do not pay artists in the same manner as Pandora?
(also, if you have the time, I am not exactly sure what the performer, artist etc. separation is regarding payments, could you clarify?)
Artists get paid based on their contract with publishers for radio plays. Some musicians get paid well by publishers for radio play, others get completely screwed. It depends on what deal they sign.
The fact is, and this is a fact: artists get royalty cuts from publishers based on radio play. The details of it varies from one contract to the next (eg what Madonna makes versus Joe Nobody).
Also, sometimes artists are the songwriters, that's not uncommon at all in fact. Sometimes artists have very lucrative rights ownership over their own music. That all depends on the choices they make along the way.
Radio doesn't pay artists directly (would have been wildly impractical until recently), but that's also not by choice. Radio stations don't get to choose how they license the music, that's dictated by the rights holders of the music (the publishers and companies like Sony ATV hold most of the power).
Thank you for the clarification. So going back to one of your earlier comments
>> "If major market FM stations paid the same rates as Pandora, based on audience, some would be paying thousands of dollars for every song they played. How much do they pay performers right now? Zero."
> He's using industry jargon to pretend like FM radio doesn't pay out to artists. The reality is, he's being very deceitful. (Emphasis added by RurouniJones)
But based on what you have said above he is correct. You do not pay out to artists, you pay out to associations (I understand this is not by choice and that you are basically screwed by powerful publishing cartels).
It may be a small semantic difference but you said he lost credibility and was being deceitful by saying it when he (at least to me the layman) appears to be correct.
Whether you get paid for plays on FM as an artist, depends on if you own any rights to your music, and or what deal you've signed. The best thing you can do as an artist, is try to retain maximum ownership of your music, and make sure you get the best deal possible if you sign with a publisher.
Westergren is completely wrong about nothing going to the performers. First of all, the fact that some performers also own their music rights and are songwriters with royalty cuts, proves him wrong. Second, the cut that goes to the performer is determined by the contract they sign.