It's not a new thing for artists to be asked by live performance venues to "pay to play", which is terrible. You PAY for the "privilege" to play music for a live audience. To what gain? So they'll buy your CD!? Not since 2008. So they'll pay to download your music? Not super likely. So they might stream it? See my BMI statement above. To get more twitter followers? Try writing "400 new twitter followers" on your electric bill and see how far that goes. So they'll buy your T-shirt? What kind of business is this? What is the commodity here? Based on this business model, it seems that listeners' attention is the commodity and the artists are the customers. How did we get so far off track?

So, Jango charges the artist $.03 per play for their song, but "internet" only pays the artist $.00000365 per play. *

It's bad enough that the pay to play mentality has become so accepted in live venues, we cannot let this cancerous soul sucking mentality spread to radio.

Because the last time I checked, you cannot buy groceries with "good exposure".

*[Note: BMI pays songwriter and publisher royalties. I cannot tell you what the "artist" [non-songwriter] royalty rate is because those royalties are paid by Sound Exchange, and their royalty statements never tell us exactly how many plays they are paying us for. Just the dollar amount. Zero transparency. But that's a whole other issue.]

**[For full disclosure, I didn't want to put this in the middle of the post because it's not essential to the main point and not everyone wants a lesson in how royalties work, but this statement only shows one side of the royalties. With BMI [and all performing rights organizations], royalties actually are in a 200% total. Publishers get 100% and songwriters get 100%. This statement is only showing one of those sides. So, since we happen to own our own publishing, we actually get all 200%, so you can actually double that $.00000365, but that doesn't really change the message. It's still super low, and it's still less than 25% of what we made in 2009. And people are still moving more toward streaming than downloading. And it still doesn't justify the pay to play mentality. Also, getting all 200% is not everyone's reality. Many artists are co-writing, and many don't own their publishing. So many people will only get half of that $.00000365 per play.]

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MORE: It's not just music that is devalued. All forms of creative work. Check this out.