LOS ANGELES — Musicians continue to sing the blues over royalty revenues in the digital era, where success online continues to be a mixed bag.
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| (Photo: Dan MacMedan, USA TODAY) |
"Nobody's making any money" in digital music — from songwriters and performers, to music services that had hoped to ease the transition from physical to digital with a thriving music economy, says Paul Resnikoff, editor of the Digital Music News website.
Digital music has hit a few false notes. For example:
• Pandora, the nation's most popular free music-streaming service, continues to gain more listeners yet lose money each quarter amid sky-high royalty payment charges. In its fourth fiscal quarter, Pandora reported a net loss of $30.4 million despite a 44% jump in revenue of $920.8 million. Pandora's monthly listeners: a record 81.5 million.
• Music download sales, once considered the savior to declining CD sales, have seen their sales peak. Unit sales fell 12.5% in 2014, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and look to fall even further this year as more consumers look to cloud-based subscription services.
• Spotify, the world's most popular paid music service, with 15 million subscribers, sits atop a heap of similar services struggling to find audiences, including Radio, Rhapsody and Beats Music. Still, Spotify, where singer Taylor Swift publicly yanked her music in 2014 over a royalty dispute, lost $80 million on revenues of about $1 billion in its most recent filing, for 2013.
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