ABSTRACT
Physical music sales declined rapidly over the course of the 2000s and consumers increasingly turned to digital music sites such as Spotify and Pandora, many musicians and songwriters raised serious concerns about the meager royalties generated from these new companies. Pandora is considered “non-terrestrial radio,” and consequently must pay the musicians who play on the recordings it streams, as well as the songwriters. These musicians’ royalties are collected by Sound Exchange, a non-profit created by the government when satellite radio came into existence. Pandora in fact considers this additional musicians’ royalty an extraordinary financial burden, and they are aggressively lobbying for a new law—it’s a bill before the US Congress—designed to relieve them of it. Music itself seems to be irrelevant to music businesses—it is just another form of information, the same as any other that might entice to click a link or a buy button on a stock exchange.
