Fear Factory frontman Burton C. Bell sat in with Musicbusinessfacts.net this past August and discussed various aspects of the industry. During the episode he shared some interesting thoughts on streaming music services such as Pandora and Spotify:
“Streaming is a very debated issue right now, because companies like Pandora and Spotify are getting away with murder, basically, because they are going with a contract… they are going with a trademark agreement written in the 1940’s to pay the artists the least amount of royalty possible, because in the 1940’s, there was no such things as the internet, and they never expected it.
So, because of that, they’re using this copyright/trademark law that was written to get away with paying the artist literally nothing. For instance, an artist like Adele—multi-platinum artist. One of her songs, ‘Someone Like You‘ or whatever, had over 11 million listens on Pandora. The person who wrote that song, because of the royalty rate, only got paid 11 thousands dollars. For over 11 million million hits [or] listens on Pandora! That’s fucking ridiculous! And that’s what they’re getting away with, and Pandora is fighting to keep it that way.”
