Pandora and Royalties
I think that, in order to understand ‘spins’ on Pandora, we must also know how many times a purchased track (iTunes, CD, etc) is played over its lifetime, on average.<p>In my iTunes library, I can see how many times I’ve played a song. There are some that I’ve played hundreds of times, and there are some that I’ve never played. For all those songs, I paid about the same amount. If I’d have to guess, I’d say, on average, I’ll play each track 10 times.<p>That means I pay about $0.10 per ‘iTunes spin’, of which more than 60% goes to the creators. Compare that to a Pandora spin, which they say pays $0.00137 (one-tenth of a cent).