Billboard is Changing...

The charts should be based on how much money a song generates. If you stream on spotify and have 100 million downloads that is worth about 25cents approx
Sell one CD $14 dollars.

Even tho this example is stupid if you are giving away your music (spotify is effectively giving away your music) why should that be counted.
If your song sell's to an add agency for 10million that should put you to the top. Dollars for a tune is what count's. The tune's that make the most money should be top of the charts.. In the movie business they carry on about which movie made the most money music should be the same..

The original idea for the Billboard chart was a guide for record stores informing them of what to stock. It was based on shipments to stores nationally rather than sales because they primarily wanted to be sure they had what everybody else had. Records in the U.S. were sold on consignment so it was not unheard of to ship gold and come back platinum when a record stiffed in most markets. Obviously the entire premise is obsolete today.

I assume the customer is advertisers.

BTW - just so you know...Lady Antebellum had over 72 Million streams of "I Need You Now"...the songwriters split $6000. That is LESS than .000113 cents per stream. The good news is, they would have been credited for another 48,000 albums sold. Whoopie shit.

The only money that's generated comes form radio play. That is "Performance Royalty." The sales of albums are "Mechanical Royalties"...basically, there are no mechanical royalties anymore.

Yes...just for instance - a mechanical royalty for one song on one album is .0925 cents in the US. So - if you're on a million selling Platinum album, you would make $92,500. But, you co-wrote it, so you only make $46,250. But, your publisher has paid you $30K per year in advances for the last two years. So, $60,000 minus $46,250 = $13,750 that your publisher will recoup before you see a dime. But alas...you can also see money if your song is singled and released to radio by a major artist. And that's easy as pie...

Sorry - I was being sarcastic...here's some info.


How does a songwriter earn money? —— [Insert your own punchline here.]

But the real answer is… music publishing!

There’re a number of different kinds of publishing royalties you can earn from the usage of your original music.

One of the big sources of publishing revenue you’ll earn as a songwriter is performance royalties. But another revenue stream (at least for the music publishing industry at large) is mechanical royalties, which we’ll talk about in this article.

Mechanical royalties and independent songwriters
Wikipedia says:

The term “mechanical” and “mechanical license” has its origins in the “piano rolls” on which music was recorded in the early part of the 20th Century. Although its concept is now primarily oriented to royalty income from sale of compact discs (CDs), its scope is wider and covers any copyrighted audio composition that is rendered mechanically; that is, without human performers.

In a nutshell: every time a song you’ve written is manufactured to be sold in a CD, downloaded on a digital music retail site, or streamed through services like Spotify and Rdio, you are owed a mechanical royalty.

Now for the longer explanation of mechanical royalties…
As a songwriter/publisher, you are owed a royalty every time your composition is reproduced (on vinyl, tape, CD, MP3, etc). In the United States, this royalty is generally equal to 9.1 cents per reproduced “copy” of that song, regardless of whether those albums or singles are sold. (The mechanical royalty rate for on-demand streams through services like Spotify and Rdio is far lower; and yes — those services owe you both a mechanical royalty AND a performance royalty for your music’s usage). But let’s get back to mechanical royalties for CD sales and downloads for a second…

If someone covers one of your songs and they manufacture 1000 CDs — they owe you $91, regardless of whether those CDs ever get purchased by customers. If they sell 100 MP3s of your song, they owe you $9.10.

You are also owed a mechanical royalty for the sales of your music on YOUR OWN albums. But here’s where things get a little virtual; if you’re acting as your own label and putting out music that you’ve written, you’ll effectively be paying that royalty to yourself from album proceeds.

At least that’s how it works in the US, where download retailers like iTunes and Amazon pass on that mechanical royalty to you as part of the net payment for the sale of the MP3. But in many countries outside the US, mechanical royalties are set aside BY the retailer, to be paid to collection societies who then distribute those royalties to publishers and writers.

BUT performing rights organizations like ASCAP and BMI do NOT collect mechanical royalties. Their job is to collect performance royalties, NOT mechanicals. So…

How do you collect “foreign mechanicals” generated outside the US?
In order to collect international mechanical royalties (as well as mechanicals for both global and domestic streams), you’d need to register your music with many royalty collection societies around the world.

As our friend Justin Kalifowitz of SongTrust is fond of saying, you CAN do it yourself if you really want to — but you’ll probably have to stop making music for a while. Affiliating yourself and registering your songs directly with all the international collection societies would not only take hundreds of hours of paperwork and filling out online forms, but you’d need to be proficient in dozens of languages — or hire a translator. And who wants to do that when you’ve got gigs to play?