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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

> Jerkins’ stake in the song generated $146,000 in performance royalties, while streaming revenue from the same period garnered $278 for 38 million Pandora plays and $218 for 34 million YouTube streams.

In those two scenarios, how much does the band/performer get?

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The performer's share - 40%. Songwriter's share - 7%.

And what does the label get?

Labels negotiate their own deals. Lots more than the songwriter, which makes sense to most people since they pay for musicians, recording studios, advertising, and bunch of other stuff for the song plus all the other songs that didn’t turn out to be the popular song.

wow, that feels very unfair. most artists feel like the labels have shafted the artists, among other things making very very unfair contracts to the artists when digital and streaming came along.

I think that's an opinion that only looks fair to the labels. The labels also do things to suppress competition, and their very opaque contracts only benefit themselves. Clearly the millions of streams should result in more money than less than $300 for 38 million streams? And I'm not an artist, just another programmer. :-)

If they didn't participate in writing the song, 0%.

Is that really true? That seems pretty insane.

This carried over from radio. It was decided that recording artists benefited sufficiently from the publicity of being played on the radio leading to record purchases and concert ticket sales. Song writers managed to get a compulsory royalty instead. Their compensation is written in law, they can not negotiate for more, but at least they get paid.

I thought royalties were split between writer, composer and performer. This leads to the saying, “change a word, get a third” for performers who try to get co-writing credits on the songs originally written by others.

Incorrect, as far as streaming royalties go. Performers get 5-6x what songwriters are paid.

I'm not going to correct all the replies to this post, I'm just going to suggest that you should read TFA. This is about the songwriter's cut, and if you didn't write the song you performed, this changes nothing about the 0% of the songwriting royalties to which you were entitled.

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