We decided to pay our musicians a few weeks early, so they could get their checks before Christmas. This was the first payment they've received since our big growth in membership and a lot of musicians were very pleasantly surprised.
You may have read about how Lady Gaga was #1 for the year on the music service "Spotify" and was paid just $167. Well, Magnatune is a *lot* smaller than Spotify and we just paid out $75,000 (with our top musicians getting thousands of dollars). You can understand why our musicians were happily surprised to see Magnatune's new business direction actually paying them fairly.
Anyhow, that's a very long way of saying that I suddenly find myself flooded with really excellent back-catalog from existing Magnatune musicians who want to get more of their music onto the site. For this reason, I'll be doing 5 releases a week for a while, at no extra cost, to get these fantastic albums out there and into your ears!
By way of further information, I'm attaching real charts of some of magnatune's artist payments over the years (we pay every six months). Because this information is confidential, I've blurred out the artist names (sorry!). These are the charts each musician gets on their own royalty tracking console at Magnatune. You can see that many musicians did well at the beginning, saw a decline, and now things are picking up again for them.
And pretty much everyone at Magnatune makes more than Lady Gaga on Spotify!
-john