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Pandora has now paid out over $1.5 billion

By | Published on Thursday 24 September 2015

Pandora

So, Pandora, the streaming service everyone loves to hate – apart from the 80 million people who use it – has now paid out $1.5 billion to the music industry. “So stop all your fucking moaning music types”, the streaming company didn’t say. Though I’m sure it wanted to.

Of course, having just past its tenth birthday, Pandora has been going much longer than most other streaming services, and with younger Spotify recently boasting it had now paid double that sum over to the music community, some might see this latest brag from the US-based personalised radio service as just further proof it’s getting too favourable a deal on royalties because of the compulsory licence it gets to use in its home and primary market.

But CEO Brian McAndrews was having none of that. He told reporters of the $1.5 billion milestone: “I am proud of our enormous royalty contributions, and our progress on building on a broader vision for the future of music. We are very passionate about our mission to help artists find their audience and help listeners find their music – music they love, that moves them, that they personally connect with – and we are achieving significant momentum”.

Pessimists might find hope in the fact that $500 million of those royalties came in during the last year. Though probably not. They are pessimists after all.



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