Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber
The revenues from live when you write or co-write for a globally recognised artist who tours will always be more lucrative for songwriters than the revenues from recordings. This is because (generally speaking) the revenues for live for songwriters come as a split of box office - and live performance is generally going to gross a lot more than recording for an artist of that stature.<p>For example, in the UK, PRS takes 3% of box office, and that is then paid out to songwriters based on duration of performance. So for example, if someone sells 1000 tickets at 10 each, there is £300 to be paid to PRS. If there are three acts playing and they each play 30 minutes, songwriters get £3.34 per minute. So if two songwriters co-write a song and agree a 60&#x2F;40 split and that song is 4 minutes 30 seconds one songwriter would get £9.02 from this show and the other would get £6.01.<p>Bieber played six dates at the O2 in London - capacity 20,000 - and tickets seem to have been around the £45 mark. Let&#x27;s assume he pretty much sold out - so those six dates grossed £5.4m<p>Assuming he did a 20 song set (so maybe 75 minutes duration for songs, with two support acts each playing 30 minutes - total duration 135 minutes) then the songwriters (for both Bieber and support acts) are getting £1200 per minute of performance across that segment of the tour. So actually, if you are the support act and you are a singer-songwriter playing 30 minutes support to Bieber, you&#x27;re going to walk away with your live appearance fees plus £36k in songwriter royalties.<p>Streaming revenue splits between labels and songwriters (or sound recording copyright royalties, and publishing mechanical royalties) are based on old record label models, where the label invested a large amount of money to record, manufacture and market product; because of this, they took the lion&#x27;s share of revenues from record music sales. It&#x27;s easy to argue that things have changed, but equally, generally speaking a songwriter needs an artist to perform and record the song - and the artist probably needs a label (or someone with some money) to market that song and help it generate the maximum revenues. Songwriters still benefit, because they get MORE revenues than they would have done otherwise. A great song is nothing unless someone records it and performs it.<p>So the problem is not necessarily with Pandora, Spotify, YouTube and all of these other companies - they are following models which by-and-large have been dictated to them by labels - you can&#x27;t operate a music streaming platform without songs to play, and you can&#x27;t play songs without obtaining permission to use the recording, and the recording copyright - and thus that permission - is controlled by record labels rather than songwriters.<p>The scale of the market is completely different. Bieber&#x27;s 2016 world tour apparently grossed $250m in ticket sales - if we stick (for ease) with the UK model for compensating songwriters for live performance, this tour generated $7.5m in revenues for songwriters. Let&#x27;s say that across the whole tour - including Bieber songs, numerous co-writes, and support acts - there were 250 songwriters involved. Assuming everyone&#x27;s song was performed for roughly the same duration then each songwriter should have walked away with about $37,500. Not bad.<p>The problem is not streaming - it&#x27;s people crafting flawed narrative that is based around &quot;my song got streamed a billion times and all I got was this lousy t-shirt&quot; but at the same time ignoring the completely different scales of revenue for live performance vs recording. Bieber has 32 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Assuming that they each listen to an average of 8 tracks a month (for a total of roughly 250m streams) then his label is generating maybe around $1.25m in recording revenues. The songwriters will be getting a fraction of that - and each individual songwriter will get a proportion of that fraction, based on how much their song is listened to. If his most popular song gets 50% of streaming activity, second most popular 25%, third most popular 10%... and his tenth most popular gets 1% then that track is only generating the label $12,500 a month - and maybe $2,500 for the song writer - but it&#x27;s still getting 2.5m streams a month. If the writer has a 20% share of the song, then they are getting $500 - over a year (all things remaining equal) then maybe they get $6,000 for 30m streams.<p>If that song was played on every date of a Bieber tour as part of a 20 song, 75 minute set, on a tour where headliner is performing 60% of the total duration, then based on the 
UK model for songwriter performance royalties the writer of that song would be getting $225,000.<p>If someone has a 20% share of that song they are getting $45,000.