[shortformblog]

From the original post: "I am also paid a seperate royalty for being the performer of the song. It’s higher but also what I would regard as unsustainable. I’ll post that later this week."

Footnote from this post: "He does clarify in the footnotes that $16.89 is only for 40% of the songwriting and there is a separate performance royalty, but certainly the headline & coverage could leave many with the impression that $16.89 was everything."

I'm not defending Lowery—he clearly wrote that post in an effort to draw negative attention to Pandora's practices—but he stated that the documents he threw online were outlining songwriting revenue—he made that delineation in the very first line of the post.

[wmf]

Arguably songwriting is kind of a dead field anyway since in recent decades bands mostly write the songs they perform.

[route66]

I don't know what channel you are listening to, but in general there have always been musicians (and bands) writing their own music as there were have always been musicians performing songs composed by others with lyrics written by others. Songwriting is about as dead as cooking.

[ImprovedSilence]

From what I've seen, it depends on what you listen to. Pop, country, and R%B are largely written and produced by someone other than the performer (hence, they are called "acts"). Most rock/inde/actual "bands" will do their own writing 90% percent of the time.

[_delirium]

With the fields dominated by acts, how people make a living gets even more convoluted. Some songwriters who regularly work in-house for a label get paid "advances" that are really more like salaries (regular monthly payments, sometimes considerably higher than the expected royalties). That's especially common for career songwriters in-house at places like Nashville. Young pop or hip-hop songwriters hoping to use it as a stepping-stone to become an act themselves might not get paid a salary.