RIAA

According to a guest columnist in Audio4cast today, nearly 50% of the over half a billion dollars SoundExchange collected from services last year came solely from Pandora!

SoundExchange is the music industry body that collects and distributes royalties for the digital use of copyright sound recordings. When services like webcasters, satellite radio (SiriusXM), cable radio (Music Choice), and business establishment services (DMX) perform copyright sound recordings, they pay SoundExchange, which then distributes money to copyright owners (labels) and performers.

SoundExchange last week released its 2012 financial report (here), revealing it had collected $502.2 million total from services last year (up 35% from 2011's $372.2 million). Digital media attorney Angus MacDonald compared the SoundExchange report with Pandora's most recent 10-K filing (here) and concludes that the top webcaster alone accounts for all of SoundExchange's 2012 revenue growth.

"Pandora paid 55.9% of its revenues to SoundExchange for the fiscal year that ended January 31, 2013," MacDonald wrote in Audio4cast today. "Pandora’s total revenues last year were $427.1 million. Based on the above figures, Pandora paid SoundExchange over $238.7 million ($427.1 million multiplied by 55.9%)" in that fiscal year. "That $238.7 million figure represents 47.53% of SoundExchange’s total royalty revenues ($502.2 million) in 2012," says McDonald.

Pandora paid about $132 million more for royalties in 2012 than in 2011. So while SoundExchange's collections increased by $130 million in a year, that means Pandora completely footed that increase (and a little more). MacDonald also points out that Pandora's FY 2013 royalty bill ($238.7 million) was close to its total revenue for the previous year ($274.3 million for FY 2012).

Pandora strongly backs legislative efforts (such as the Internet Radio Fairness Act, more here) to reform the process that determine royalty rates, in the hopes of decreasing that obligation. Recording industry groups like SoundExchange and the RIAA have strenuously opposed such efforts.

"With Pandora’s ever-surging listening hours and royalty payments, SoundExchange (as well as the record labels and artists who split the royalties collected by SoundExchange) need a healthy Pandora as much as Pandora needs a reasonable Pureplay-like rate for the next royalty term (2016-2020)," MacDonald concluded.

RIAA CEO Cary Sherman recently told The Verge's Greg Sandoval, "Access models" (industry terminology for services that license digital recordings, like Pandora, but also Spotify and YouTube) "are our present and our future... [This] underscores how vital it is to protect these increasingly important revenue streams."

Read MacDonald's guest column in Audio4cast here.

The RIAA issued its revenue report recently which showed $462 million of its 2012 digital revenue -- about 45% -- came from non-interactive digital services like Pandora and SiriusXM (see more in RAIN here).

Yesterday (in this article) we alluded to RIAA financial statements that revealed streaming revenue from sources like Pandora, Spotify, and YouTube (known as "access models") amounted to $1.0328 billion in 2012, accounting for 15% of total industry revenue.

$462 million, or about 45% of the digital total, came from non-interactive digital services operating under statutory licenses (Internet, satellite, and cable radio) via SoundExchange.

Physical retail sales (CDs/vinyl) amounted to about $2.584 billion, down 18.5% in a year. Downloads amounted to $3.02 billion.

See the RIAA revenue summary sheet here.

The Verge columnist Greg Sandoval cites an RIAA report and statements made by SoundExchange (which collects sound recording royalties from licensed webcast services and satellite radio) to report "Pandora contributes about 25% of all the money the labels receive from the access models. (Incidentally, SoundExchange's revenue was up 58% last year.)" ("Access models" is label terminology for licensed streaming services.)

And this, according to Greg Sandoval in The Verge, is precisely why the labels need to play hardball with Pandora and Internet radio.

"Access models" "are our present and our future," RIAA CEO Cary Sherman told The Verge. "[This] underscores how vital it is to protect these increasingly important revenue streams."

In other words, the labels need to avoid destroying these revenue sources -- yet maintain the upwards pressure on royalties because they also need to maximize profit (and these services are labels' only bright spot right now). Rocco Pendola, columnist for TheStreet, says this shows "the music industry needs Pandora just as bad as -- or, dare I say, worse than -- Pandora needs them. Same goes for the rest of Internet radio."

"If access models fail," Sandoval writes, "the labels risk ending up back in a world where a single player like Apple holds all the power." Industry sources told The Verge that Apple and labels are increasingly close to a deals that would pave the way for an Apple "iRadio" streaming service.

In fact, should the record label give Apple royalty rates that are actually more affordable than the statutory streaming rates, Pandora would have "plenty of ammunition to argue on Capitol Hill that web radio is getting screwed."

Despite this, The Motely Fool is warning investors against Pandora. In a posted video, Motley Fool CTO Jeremy Phillips says Pandora is open to competitive disruption because it doesn't own the content it streams, and any deep-pocketed competitor can easily enter the business. In fact, companies like Google, Amazon, or Apple could operate streaming services at a loss to widen the market for their other businesses.

TheStreet's Pendola strongly disagrees, saying Pandora's Music Genome (its proprietary database of human collected characteristics about each song it plays that drives its algorithmic music programming) is a great example of intellectual property that can't easily be duplicated by a competitor. He also points to the fact that Pandora has been assembling both national and local sales forces to compete with broadcast radio, another accomplishment that won't be easy for a competitor to duplicate.

He writes, "Competitor after competitor has come in and done absolutely nothing to slow Pandora's growth. In fact, the growth has never stalled. In terms of listener hours and revenue, particularly on mobile, the company is as healthy as it has ever been. Don't expect that trend to reverse, even if Apple hits the market with an iRadio product."

Read Sandoval in The Verge here, see video from The Motely Fool here, and read Pendola in TheStreet here.

Writing about the Internet Radio Fairness Act, musician David Fagin points squarely at the "one-sided, unfair exemption terrestrial radio currently enjoys" on royalties, and says the solution is to "make them pay their fair share of performance royalties to artists and labels -- just as the rest of the radio-playing world has to do."

Fagin is also a writer and producer and former member of the band The Rosenbergs, and represented independent artists in webcasting copyright hearings in 2001.

In a piece for the Huffington Post, he suggests IRFA foes are really on the same side when it comes to wanting to artists to succeed and get paid, and on the matter of FM radio's royalty exemption. But the music industry and webcasters are stuck fighting each other, because neither has the power to fight broadcasters. 

"Congress is scared to go after big radio and their lobby, and the RIAA is 'just fine' with the status quo. In the meantime, both sides have decided to just kick each other's asses, instead."

(Interestingly, he holds that the current royalty situation is harming the webcasting industry, evidenced by the fact that just a single "brand-name" success exists, Pandora. He also cuts through the music industry anti-Pandora rhetoric: "The 'fleecing of artists'... argument makes no sense, whatsoever. Why would a company, whose main business model consists of promoting independent artists over 60% of the time, and is practically the only place to hear new music on a regular basis, want to destroy the very artists whose careers it's sustaining, and who are sustaining it?")

Interesting read, in Huffington Post, here.

Jennifer Lane, in her Audio4Cast blog, takes the record industry to task for its treatment of webcasters on its WhyMusicMatters.com website.

The music industry site serves as a directory for consumers to find legitimate, licensed music services. Lane describes the site's presentation of various services offering "downloads/mp3s," "streaming," and more.

But while on-demand and music subscription services (as well as services in a category called "Premium Internet Radio") are given bold-face "headline" names, brief text descriptions, and thumbnail images, most webcasters are relegated to a "statutory services" page "where the listener has to click through hundreds of alphabetized radio stations (no logos, no descriptions, no links) to find one," according to Lane.

"I’m disappointed in the site," she writes. "Unfortunately, this site is a glaring in-your-face example of a bad business partnership. Internet radio services, Pandora in particular, are paying a lot of money in royalties to SoundExchange, the royalty collection arm of the RIAA, and in return they get a listing buried deep in the site with no logo or link."

She continues: "Is there any other business you can think of where the vendors treat their retailers so badly? Because that’s what this is, it’s streaming services buying the rights to content and offering it to consumers. And clearly the RIAA and NARM are bad business partners for Internet radio."

Read her blog here. 

An article in yesterday's New York Times likens the conflict over Internet radio royalties to the presidential race: business suffering under government-inflicted costs vs. wealthy industrialists cheating the middle class.

What the different players are saying sure makes the comparison apt.

Pandora founder Tim Westergren told journalist Ben Sisario, "This adversarial reaction toward Internet radio is counterproductive. It’s causing other businesses to sit on the sidelines, and that is hurting musicians. Ultimately, you want to have many boats in the harbor."

But MusicFirst Coalition, the record industry group that's the main face in the fight against proposed royalty reform, "says it believes that if Pandora gets everything it wants, it could cut its royalty bill by up to 85%," writes Sisario.

The Internet Radio Fairness Act, co-sponsored in the House of Representatives by Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah (more here), would require Copyright Judges who determine Internet radio's royalty rates to make their decisions using the "801(b)" standard of Copyright Law, instead of the controversial "willing buyer willing seller." Webcasters like Pandora support the bill, as all other forms of digital radio have their royalties set using 801(b). The music industry is firmly against the bill.

Westergren said, "No one has yet explained to us why Internet radio is under a different standard. No one responds to that fundamental premise."

Naturally, for RIAA CEO Cary Sherman, it's really a matter of companies like Pandora trying to cheat the "entire music community" out of "a fair return on the creative works that are the reason companies like Pandora exist."

Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman is largely credited with making his company a major online radio force with its launch of the iHeartRadio platform. He says the record industry is wrong to focus on rates. With lower rates, more companies will stream more music, and lead to more income. "If the rate suppresses the volume, there’s less money. If it encourages volume, there’s more money."

Of everyone siding with Internet radio services, it was Rep. Chaffetz himself who stood out with a shot at the music industry establishment: "The old-school dinosaurs are trying to help, but they’re stuck in the tar. They can go talk to the pterodactyls."

Read the New York Times article here.