In our “how much can you earn series,” we’ve already covered Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Soundcloud. But this time, we have to go and introduce Pandora Radio’s royalties.
Pandora is an online radio company with around two million average active sessions per month. The company has experienced a steady decline in the past 4 years, but it still retains around 60 million registered users and is the 6th biggest music streaming platform in the world in 2020.
How much can you earn from Pandora Radio?
Compared to other streaming platforms Pandora is less generous in its payouts for its artists. How much are we talking about?
According to Visual Capitalist, a musical artist can be expected to receive $0.00133. This means you’d need around 752 people to stream your music or podcast to receive $1 through ads.
This doesn’t seem like a lot, since companies like Spotify pay $0.00437 per stream. With Spotify, you would need 223 people to listen to your content. This is more than three times more than with Pandora to make $1.
On a side note, Youtube pays the least per view, where you’d only earn $0.00069. With Youtube, you’d need an estimated 1449 views to make $1.
Pandora is perhaps not the first choice for people to upload their songs. But it is by no means, something anyone should avoid. The market is huge and the company’s revenue through ads is on the rise.
Artists are continuing to receive their royalties through SoundExchange that takes its usual fee of roughly 4.6%. The details of Premium royalties vary from license to license and are confidential.
But we do know that premium service payouts take about 70% of revenue. About 57% of this revenue goes to record labels or artists. The remaining 13% is split by music publishers and performance rights organizations.
Here are the three ways royalties are paid out.
1, Ad-supported tier: Artists get royalties from SoundExchange; labels get royalties directly from Pandora.
2, Pandora Plus: Payment of all royalties are directly sent to music labels
3, Premium: All royalties are paid to labels; artist receive their royalties from labels. Tracks not covered by direct deals are played on only non-interactive radio stations under the statutory license.
How to get your content on Pandora Radio’s playlist and generate revenue?
If you are a non-US resident, you can still submit your songs to Pandora for consideration.you are independent to create a Pandora account and submit your music here.
The procedure is actually simple and straightforward.
- Create a Pandora listener account.
- Submit your musical content for consideration.
- Once approved, your music will be available on Pandora’s ad-supported radio service, Pandora Plus, and Pandora Premium.
- Create a personal website to brand yourself or your album.
- Through your website, you can send emails to reach people, grow your fan mailing list, build your brand, or your name as a musician so that people can find you in search engines like Google. This will probably turn out to be better than focusing on social media or other streaming services.
What are Pandora’s Radio restrictions and boundaries?
Be aware that at this moment, Pandora Radio is only available for US residents. While anyone can submit their songs, Pandora’s audience is smaller compared to Spotify’s 175 or Soundcloud’s 76 million registered users. If Pandora becomes available for the rest of the world, musical artists will be able to expand their audiences and get more streams. But that is a big “if!”
For the moment, Pandora’s users are on a steady decline. Having around 74 million users in 2018, the estimated users are expected to decline to 57.8 million by 2023. But this should not scare you since Pandora is still in the top 10 most popular streaming services in the world.
How to start Promoting your Podcast or Music on Pandora Radio?
If you enjoy speaking and creating music with an audience, there are two platforms I would highly recommend using to help you out.
Buzzsprout is a free podcasting platform and software that lets you upload, host, and promote your podcast. From secure and reliable hosting to full iTunes support, HTML5 players, show stats, and of course, Buzzsprout has everything you need to publish and promote your podcast!
They also offer a $20 Amazon Gift Card if you decide to sign up to their paid plans, which you can receive after the second paid invoice.
The second is Tunecore, which allows you to upload your content to different streaming platforms, including Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple, and Amazon Music.
Conclusion
Pandora radio is a popular streaming and podcasting platform for millions of users. If you are a podcaster, Pandora radio should definitely be on your list of places to upload your content. It will undoubtedly open doors to a bigger audience and help you squeeze out some extra cash.
