Pandora and whiners

When musicians ask me for advice about marketing their music, I usually start with the same questions.

1) Are you on CDBaby?
2) Are you on Pandora?

The reason I ask these questions is because of how music distribution works these days. We all know that selling physical CDs is largely a thing of the past. I have yet to record a project only for digital distribution but that day is coming pretty soon. The vast bulk of music revenue is through downloads and streaming.

CDBaby is important to independent artists because they streamline the process of getting music to all of the major download websites (iTunes and Amazon being the biggest) and almost all the major streaming sites (such as Spotify). There are alternatives to CDBaby such as TuneCore for making this happen but I like CDBaby.

The one big hole in CDBaby’s distribution is Pandora and that is a huge huge hole. Pandora is the giant in the world of streaming and it is not even close. The numbers are staggering. It is inconceivable that any musician would not want to have a presence on Pandora for two reasons.

* Discovery: Because of the way it works, Pandora is far and away the best way to expose new people to your music.

* Revenue: As I will discuss in a minute, Pandora pays artists very very well.

I know that Pandora gets knocked around a lot by musicians. The Internet is full of musicians whining about Pandora. They have two major concerns. First, they have a problem with the fact that Pandora doesn’t just play anyone. They are somewhat picky. With their tiny postmodern-tinged brains, some musicians can’t accept the fact that Pandora does in fact have the right to use music experts to judge their music. They also don’t understand that they do not have the right to be on Pandora in the first place. They talk about Pandora being an unfair gatekeeper that arbitrarily chooses to keep the world from discovering their talents.

The second problem they have with Pandora is how they are paid. Pandora pays US artists about 1/10th of a penny every time someone streams their song. That sounds like a small amount but is it really? I know dozens of artists who don’t have a problem with that rate. If your songs are getting widely played, those fractions of pennies start really adding up. I don’t want to get into a discussion of numbers here but let me assure you that many musicians could not be more thrilled with their Pandora checks.

The truth is that Pandora is a great service for listeners and musicians. They are a great company period. Don’t believe everything you hear. I stumbled on this article this morning and it made me smile. It is the typical half-baked truth that you read from people with an agenda but I assume it is true that founder Tim Westergren made over $11 million in 2013.

Here is why I smiled though. I have Tim’s email address. Last year, I emailed him about a problem I had with my music on Pandora. Late that same day, I got a response back. The first thing he did was apologize for taking so long and mentioned that he was on vacation. He told me he was passing my issue to someone to fix and sure enough, it was fixed within a few days.

I am hardly the biggest artist on Pandora. Really in the scheme of things, I am pretty small, but yet an executive that makes $11 million a year took the time to respond to my email while on vacation. That is pretty impressive. Honestly, it is also convicting because I don’t usually respond to emails that timely even when I am at work. That is typical though of my experience with everyone I have dealt with at Pandora, so don’t tell me that Pandora is a bad company. I don’t buy it and neither do many of my musician friends.

If you are a musician, do your best to get your music on Pandora. Yes it is a slow process getting started but if you are successful there, things get moving faster and faster.

If you are a listener that has not used Pandora before, start now. You simply put in a name or a song you like and they will build a custom station for you that plays songs similar in style to what you ask for. They play about 2 minutes of ads every hour which is a fraction of normal radio. You can listen on your computer or any mobile device.

If you want to listen to music similar to mine there, the easiest way to start is to just click this link: Greg Howlett Radio