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by helixten 965 days ago
If I am not mistaken, over the air radio does not have to pay royalties.
1 comments

Mostly correct. Radio, satellite, and internet all pay different kinds of royalties at different levels (or used to, last I checked). I believe radio only pays the songwriters/publishers, whereas [streamer] might’ve also paid the performers.

This is also different than how individual companies - say Spotify - pay for content via direct deals.

I’m also confused because Pandora is ad-supported and generated ~1B per year, but the numbers here are low. But that may be captured in some other metric.