Suppose I’m Elton John and I hear the song Rocket Man on the radio. How much money did I just make? I don’t need an exact amount but is it pennies? dollars?
Can you compare amounts for small and large radio stations because I know its different?
Is there a difference if I heard it on a Canadian radio station? Is it more or less?
What if I hear the song on Spotify?
Now suppose its the song Grey Seal which is much less popular. Does that make any difference?
I appreciate that this is very complex because of co-writers, publishers etc. but I am just looking for a ballpark amount.
Thanks.
I’d think it depends on the market area. But one play will definitely be well below a dollar.
I remember hearing an interview with the songwriter from Edward Bear, a Canadian pop group. They had two major 60’s/70’s hits, You, Me and Mexico and "Last Song* which still play occasionally on classic rock stations. This interview was in the early 90’s and he mentioned how it was interesting to get, for example, a cheque from the Netherlands for $3. Presumably that was for a couple of plays on the radio there.
I read something that only the top 100 or so bands can make a decent income from royalties. I believe it depends on the audience size of the radio or service playing the song. Allegedly people who wrote the theme songs for popular TV series do the best. Think theme for “Friends” or “Love Boat” or such, provided it’s not written work for hire. I ahve an old DVD of Beverly Hillbillies and nothing, not even the theme song, is original - since I guess they could get the license or didn’t want to pay
Threadjack: I used to hear “Last Song” on a station in my old town, and never found out who did it. My first guess was Loggins & Messina but I quickly realized it wasn’t.
I swear that song royalties are the most mysterious thing on the planet Earth. No one know anything about them and there is scant information on the internet. I’ve asked similar questions in the past and never gotten good answers.
The only thing that I have learned is that it is very complex varying by country and by medium of delivery.
Still, someone must know something. Are there no artists on the SD that receive music royalties? Did no one run a radio station?
Medium definitely matters. In the case of songs on TV shows, writers love them (even if it’s a one-off song for a particular episode) because they get way more residuals from that than from the story/script they wrote. The fees for broadcast vs distribution are different too. It’s generally cheaper to put a song on a show for broadcast (not sure how reruns/syndication work) but it can be a hefty chunk more for fixed media like VHS or DVD. That’s why many series replace music like @md-2000 said. Music royalties are one of the biggest killers of box set releases, especially when the music is so integral with the production, such as with Malcolm in the Middle. Of course, those residuals are not all going to the artist, in fact very little may be, it’s mostly going to the publisher/license holders. I did hear that for music on streaming services like Pandora or Spotify the payments per play are on the order of a few cents.
The theme song for reissues of Married with Children is almost comical in skirting the line. It’s obviously based on the original “Love and Marriage” but just different enough to keep it out of courts.
Once in a while I get .0003 cents or something like that from a song I wrote being played or downloaded on Spotify or one of their ilk.
Once upon a time we had a member who had been one of the Five Americans and cowrote one of their two hits in '66. His cut was $300/year.
There’s how much you made and how much you should have made. Tommy James wrote a book ( Me, The Mob, and The Music) about getting screwed out of royalties.
James estimates the company owed him $30–40 million in royalties he never received.[5][12] Roulette was used as a front for organized crime, also functioning as a money laundering operation, as Levy was closely allied with the Genovese crime family. In the early 1970s, the Genovese outfit found itself in a bloody gang war with the Gambino family, which saw victims not only among mobsters (such as Levy’s close friend and business partner Thomas Eboli), but increasingly among non-mob figures on the periphery of the organizations. Levy had taken a somewhat fatherly shine to James, and worried that he might be a target for those who wanted to get at the Genovese family through Levy, so he warned Tommy to flee New York for an extended period, until the war was over.
The article on Levy says:
In 1996, a court found Levy’s estate posthumously liable for $4 million in a case initiated by Herman Santiago and Jimmy Merchant of the Teenagers, authors of the song “Why Do Fools Fall in Love”, who sued Levy for unpaid songwriting royalties.[23][24] During the trial, the two testified they had received just $1,000 for the 1956 hit, which sold more than 3 million copies.[25] Santiago testified that Levy told him, “Don’t come down here anymore or I’ll have to kill you or hurt you.”[25]