![]() Of course, you can’t just throw any music on Pandora and get spins. Anthony has been dead for two decades but he is still earning money on Pandora for whoever owns his music. As a great example of that, I am most associated with Anthony Burger on Pandora, a pianist familiar to many of you. I get nice deposits in my bank account from Pandora’s licensing companies every month and will for a long time regardless of what I do with music in the future. Submitting to Pandora is free and if you get approved and start getting spins, it is great residual income. That does not mean you should not get on though. ![]() Thus, if you get on Pandora today, you should know that it will be probably be harder for you to get spins than it was for me and much harder than it was for the Whispering guys like Nevue and McLaughlin. ![]() In other words, your spins tend to grow exponentially on Pandora rather than linearly. If I had focused on Pandora as soon as they did, I don’t know where my spin count would be now but in general, Pandora does favor longevity. The same guys in this article were the ones that turned me on to Pandora several years ago but I was already about ten years late to the party. One of my dumbest business mistakes ever was ignoring Pandora for as long as I did. I mentioned that I am way behind some of those guys in spins. If you have a billion spins, you have earned $1,000,000 from Pandora. That works out to $1,000 per million spins. Basically, as a musician, you can expect to earn about $0.001 per spin. You don’t earn much per spin but you don’t have to if you are getting those kinds of numbers. My Pandora spin count is only between 50-100 million spins but I think that is also a huge number. A billion spins is a ridiculously huge number. The article mentions a few that have over a billion spins on Pandora (a spin is a single song streamed). Let me peel back a few layers about the finances. They have just found a niche: the niche of background music.īasically, these guys are getting streams from people that are in situations where they want music that is not distracting. How can it be that musicians you have never heard of are making six figures in music while famous musicians are making almost nothing? How can it be that a guy that almost never does concerts with more than 30 people in attendance can earn more than some that play to thousands? It is not complicated. ![]() That is probably low and I know others that make more than that or at least did at one time. The article mentions Michelle McLaughlin earning $250,000/year. Those would be the musicians that are broke…Īs the article points out, many of these guys make far more money than artists that you might hear on pop radio. They could play Chopin but they choose to play music that might be classified as Chopin-Lite.Īgain, a lot of musicians don’t understand that perspective. However, they intentionally write the music they do because there is a market for it. Frankly, I don’t care for some of it either but some of those guys are incredible musicians that can play rings around me. There are many professional musicians that sneer at this music. The two albums of mine that play on Whisperings are Solace and Quiet Place if that gives you an idea. It is the kind of music you play when you want to relax while reading a book or studying. Basically, it is relatively uncomplicated music that you might hear at the dentist. I prefer the latter because New Age has some negative connotations that have nothing to do with what these guys write. Some would call it New Age and some would call it Neo-Classical. The music of Whisperings is George Winston-like for the most part. A lot of us get together every year, normally in San Diego, but next year in Atlanta. If you get airplay on Whisperings Radio, you are a member by default. They are practically all members of Whisperings, a group of maybe eighty professional solo pianists (including me) that is the brainchild of David Nevue. If you are one of those pianists that wants to earn a living in music, I encourage you to read this Rolling Stone article.Īs it turns out, I know most if not all of the musicians listed in that article personally and many of them are friends. Today, I am going to give another perspective though not about the same genre. I dropped a lot of negativity a few weeks ago about professional music.
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