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
John, I think you're misrepresenting the Lady Gaga quote. First, it is clear that this is what she earned for one single song, "Poker Face". Gaga has a few dozen songs, though this might indeed be the most popular one. Second, it's not even clear from the article whether it was played one million times during the year or whether the stated sum was per one million streams. If they said that was for 1,200,000 or 800,000 plays I'd agree that was the total; since it's a round million, I suspect they meant per million. I find it hard to believe that millions of users listened to this very popular song just one million times in total over a year. Third, we don't know how large her part is in the total royalties paid for the song. The article carefully states how much Gaga earned, not how much Spotify paid. And lastly, this is an unconfirmed and unsourced number anyway.
It's obviously not an important part of your post and I wish Magnatune and its artists a bright future of increasing profits and great music.
Posted by: Uri | December 17, 2010 at 03:25 PM
It's interesting to see some numbers, even if Lady Gaga's are coming from an Internet source.
I kinda' like her stuff too, why not run your deal by her?
Posted by: PV | January 01, 2011 at 09:27 PM