22 Writers for 1 Song?!?

The official song of the 2015 Pan Am Games, "Together We Are One" sung by Serena Ryder, apparently has 22 writers to its credit.

I can hear the jokes now: "Which word did you write?"

Seriously, this is the music biz at its worst.  Everybody wants a piece of the action so everyone has to have their name on the credits, even if you were just sitting in the room. It's greedy and ridiculous. And the songwriter who did the most work or who came up with the idea (we'll likely never know who that was), is pretty much ripped off because he/she has to share whatever income the song generates, along with getting lost in credits crowded by 21 other people.

The song itself is your standard pop arena anthem with nothing special to it.  Other than the fact there are 22 writer credits.

Honestly.

IJ

Songland Could Be Good If...

If you haven't yet heard about it, Adam Levine, Dave Stewart and the executive producer of The Voice, Audrey Morrissey, will be teaming up to produce a new series called Songland.

The whole idea behind Songland is that songwriters will get a chance to pitch their songs to a panel, very much like vocalists vying for a deal on The Voice, and the winner will, I'm guessing, get their song recorded by a big name artist.

It Ain't Right

One of my favourite songs a couple of years back was the song "Happy" by Pharrell Williams. I was grieving the death of my father who died at the age of 91 of Alzheimer's just before than and that song just perked me up out of my gloom.  I even wrote another post about it.  Well, I didn't write much, I just wanted to feature it.

It's no surprise that the song was an enormous hit.

What IS a surprise is an article I read just recently about the income it generated from Pandora.  There were 43 million streams.  And what did it earn?  A measly $2700.  Yes, to some of you $2700 sounds like a lot of money.  But 43 million streams?

This is why I removed my music from all of the music streaming services more than a year ago. Granted, I wouldn't have expected to have 43 million streams, but I did expect to be fairly compensated for the streams I DID have, and that wasn't going to happen any time soon.

Then I did a little research just for my own satisfaction.  It costs $4.99 a year to join Pandora at the time of this writing.  Let's just round that up to $5.  A website I stumbled across listed 37 "interesting" Pandora statistics, and they listed about 76.5 million active Pandora listeners.  That comes to about $382.5 million bucks.  But wait.  There are actually 250 million subscribers, so Pandora is making $1.25 BILLION a year.

So who is getting all that money?

There have been countless other articles lately bemoaning music streaming services, so I'm not going to tell you anything new here.  Those of us who grew up on radio got used to the idea of it being "free".  Well, it wasn't really free, it was just paid for by somebody else.  Advertisers paid radio stations to run their ads, and radio stations paid PRO's (performer rights organizations) to play their artists' songs.  Why shouldn't music streaming services pay the same per play?  I don't understand why fair pay was not implemented at the very beginning.

The fact is that it is really difficult to explain to non-musicians that artists and bands need to be fairly compensated for their work.  All music lovers want is free music.

But it is not hard to explain to a music streaming service that they should be giving a much larger slice of the pie to the people who created their content.  And no, that doesn't mean charging listeners more.  It simply means not giving so much to the fat, belching CEO's who could care less about the music.

Okay, rant over.

IJ