The Price of Music: How radio royalties actually work
Earning a living as a professional musician has never been so hard. With touring overheads at an all-time high and streaming royalties offering recording artists little more than peanuts, many are finding the reality of today’s music industry to be far harsher than they would have hoped. Thankfully, there is one platform musicians cans still rely on: radio. So, how do radio royalties actually work, and how can modern musicians use the good old-fashioned wireless to their advantage? This is the price of music.
Let’s start with how much radio stations actually pay their artists. Obviously, every nation has its own central broadcaster, but, being British, I’m going to be using the BBC, that great gatekeeper of cultural innovation, as an example. In truth, broadcasters such as the BBC don’t actually pay artists directly. They pay two royalty collection organisations, PRS and PPL. These organisations then funnel that money to artists or artist representatives in instalments.
Now, the amount of money in those instalments depends on the size of the station’s listenership. BBC Radio 1, for example, pays PRS £13.63 per minute, while BBC Radio 2 offers PRS a tasty £24.27 per minute. BBC Radio 6 Music, on the other hand, pays just £5.25 per minute. These figures are from 2016, so the amounts may well have changed since, as listenership fluctuates year on year. According to data from 2013, BBC Radio 1 pays PPL £37.76 per minute. BBC Radio 2 pays £82.07 per minute, and BBC Radio 6 Music pays £8.06 per minute. Again, these figures will be out of date now.
So why do radio royalties matter? First of all, remember that Spotify once paid artists as little as $0.0033 per stream. That should be enough to clarify why getting a song on the radio is still so important for musicians hoping to make a living from their craft. If, for example, an artist gets a four-minute track playlisted on Radio 2, the combined income from PRS and PPL will leave them £6830.40 better off before deductions, that’s £106.34 per minute. Obviously, getting playlisted on BBC Radio makes it more likely that an artist will find their way onto other stations, too, leading to more income. Sadly, artists have to take into account the various parties that take a cut of their royal cheques. Still, they are generally left with a reasonable proportion of their earnings.
