Pandora Talks Payments To Little-Known Working Artists

We all know that the mainstream artists we hear played in heavy rotation on radio stations around the country make huge amounts of money each year. I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering if significantly lesser-known artists are able to make any money making music. According to some numbers that Pandora offered recently, many little known artists are able to make quite a comfortable living from Pandora alone.

Pandora wonders if any of us have heard of artists, including Donnie McClurkin, French Montana or Grupo Bryndis. Those artists have Amazon sales rankings of 4752, 17,000, and 183,187 respectively. With rankings like that it would be no surprise that most of us have never heard of anyone in that trio of artists. However, over the next 12 months Pandora says that is on track to pay performance fees to those three artists of $100,228, $138,567, and $114,192 respectively.

Those are impressive incomes for musicians odds are none of us know. Pandora says for over 2000 and other artists who are even lesser known it will pay out $10,000 each over the next 12 months. For over 800 artists who are more popular, Pandora will be paying out over $50,000 over the next 12 months. $50,000 is a comfortable middle-class income in many parts of the country.

If little-known artists are making this much money from Pandora alone, you might be wondering what megahit artists and groups are making. Pandora says that Coldplay, Adele, Wiz Khalifa, and Jason Aldean have already been paid out over $1 million each. Even more impressive is that Drake and Lil Wayne are close to $3 million annually each from Pandora alone.