Music Streaming Radio Cashes In

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I’m a supporter of Last.fm, even though I only discovered it when Pandora was shut off from non-US listeners. Although music streaming radio has had a rocky start, it seems that things are looking up now that Last.fm has begun paying out royalties to artists…

Paid-Per-Listen Streaming Radio

Clicks used to be the primary currency of the Internet, but with bandwith increasing at a rapid rate, other monetisation models are beginning to take hold. The pay-per-view arena is gaining traction amongst Internet marketers generally, and for artists in particular we now have a “get-paid-per-listen” model.

If you opt in to Last.fm’s royalty program, you can get paid when someone listens to your music on their site. There are different rates in place depending on the type of stream. For Canabrism, the rates broke down like this:

  • Free On-Demand: 0.004 cent per stream
  • Radio: 0.0041 cent per stream

Obviously, these are very small numbers and one would need a lot of traffic to see any real benefit, but it’s a start – and an encouraging step up from zero monetisation. Digital Audio Insider posted some results also, and they have a higher return per stream, so it may be the case that as you grow in popularity, your rates also improve.

Streams Of Consciousness

Another new feature that Last.fm artists should be aware of is the addition of an RSS feed option on artist pages. If you have a blog, it would probably be a good idea to add a feed here – gaining valuable backlinks and a potential traffic funnel in the process.

Streaming Radio Baby

If you have released a CD via CD Baby, then your Last.fm earnings should automatically be paid to your CD Baby account. Although CD Baby takes a 9% cut, they apparently negotiated a better deal overall, so that you may actually get more per stream than if you were being paid by Last.fm directly.

Another point to note is that when you release a record through CD Baby (or any major label), Last.fm will prevent you from editing that album’s page on their site. Also, if one of your other albums has the same track title as one of your label releases, then that album may be locked as well.

For example, the Canabrism album “Bodkin Squad” is a live/DJ set that features versions of a couple of tracks from the CD Baby album “Between Things Together“. Even though the former was released on the Podcomplex label, Last.fm automatically locked it down as a CD Baby property because of the duplicated track titles…



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