Radio

by selling advertising

NoteBoat, you seem to be a man with many answers, and I am grateful for your replies. A few months ago I posted a question about how a song writer gets paid because someone was considering singing a song I wrote. (that never materialized by the way)
You replied: You get paid on two things - on discs sold, and on airplay. These royalties are called 'mechanicals', and the best way to go about making sure you get them is to join a performing arts society like BMI or ASCAP. They handle the bookkeeping and audits, take 1/2 for their cut, and send you a check for your half.
My question now is, if a radio station gets paid from advertising, where is the money coming from to pay the songwriter for airplay?

Im curious, not quite enough yet to pay for a few semesters yet, but still curious. Thanks.

Rbert

from advertising

The radio makes money selling airtime or "spots" in 15, 20, 30 and 60 second intervals.

That money goes in. Then they have to pay out to whoever owns the rights to the songs they play. There are a bunch of calculations that go with this, like time of day, estimated number of listeners, etc etc

I'll have to see if I can find the book I was reading about this stuff.

I'm no expert in how it works, but I'll take my best guess based on what I know...

I know bars that have live entertainment pay licensing fees to BMI, ASCAP, and maybe SESAC as well. I believe it's an annual fee deal - a bar might pay a few hundred or a few thousand dollars per year, and it'll cover everything played there. They probably have a formula based on seating capacity, the number of nights per week, etc.

Radio stations have Arbitron ratings that show how big their audience is, so I'm guessing they pay a similar annual license fee.

The rights organizations send people out to do surveys of what's played in clubs (and to make sure the club owner has licensed their music), and I think they either compile logs of what's played on random stations or they get logs from the stations themselves. Based on a sample, they can say that artist X got 5/100ths of the airtime, and artist Y got 3/10,000ths, etc. They probably extrapolate that and figure out how much of the money pool belongs to each artist.

Then they take their cut, and send a check for the rest.

So basically, if you've got national airplay you won't get shafted. If it's local or regional, I guess it depends on whether your market was surveyed - if a song only gets played when they're not keeping track, I guess it'd be hard to get royalties.

Now wait until you figure in the new IP based radio stations.

They'll probably simplify things for small artist, actually - there'll be a digital trail of what's played, and data to mine for exposure.