As an addendum to the Last.fm story today, what are the actual royalty rates we’re talking here? They’re not much – precisely the reason musicians will have to get broadcast-style play counts to ever see anything worth counting. For instance, Last.fm makes the comparison with the BBC in the Wired story. The BBC has more hegemony than even a giant US ClearChannel radio station, and I suspect it’d be virtually impossible for an unsigned artist to see that number of plays.

How little? Try $0.0005 per play, as Steve of sighup writes in comments. (I think that’s just radio plays; assuming you get both radio and on-demand plays, you should do a little better – but, still, you might be better off with your CD sales out of your guitar case.) Keep in mind, that’s on top of other revenue, like performance royalties from ASCAP, BMI, and such, but it’s still not much.

Low as that may sound, it’s in the same ballpark as traditional webcasting rates. Prior to the big shake-up over Copyright Royalty Board rates here in the US, its rate was US$0.0008. And that’s only in the US, whereas Last.fm is international – and some of that goes to SoundExchange, and some goes to your label, and … you get the picture.

It’s clear that the new world of music listening involves more — more music, listening in more places, with more styles of music from more places in the world. So, naturally, it makes sense that we won’t pay per-album fees for everything we hear; even if you were addicted to your indie college radio station 20 years ago, that’s the case. (And I’ll be you didn’t buy everything you heard, though you probably bought some of it.)

The question is, how to model those costs, so the people making and distributing the music make money. Make whatever argument you like about “all music should be free,” but someone will want to turn it into a business model. And it’s not necessarily fair to say all that money will come from live gigs; on the contrary, the best way to make your live gigs work as an income stream is to have other income streams.

This week, I’ve been playing with the beta of a new version of lala.com, an online streaming and discovery service. (See next.lala.com; lala.com is the old site.) Their model is this:

1. The first time you listen to a track — any in their large library — it’s free, via online streaming.
2. Add it to your library, and you can listen to it an unlimited number of times via streaming, for 10 cents a song. (Believe it or not, that adds up, but they give you 50 to start with.)
3. If you want to keep the track, you can buy a DRM-free, reasonably high-quality MP3 for 89 cents a track (slightly less for a whole album).

Via the wonderful art and technology resource Rhizome, New Zealand-born new media guru Adam Hyde has made public a huge repository of information on, well, just about everything to do with streaming anything. Whether you’re streaming audio or video, whether you’re on Mac, Windows, or Linux, whether you’re using Pure Data or something else, if you want to get audio and video from one computer to other computers, this should be your first stop.

As if that weren’t enough, it’s all Creative Commons-licensed, and there’s even a handy guide to getting started with Pure Data.

Streaming Suitcase

Adam does workshops on the topic, so if you’re looking for someone to teach this stuff, he could be your man. Did he leave anything out? (I notice Pd video streaming isn’t there, for instance.) Give us a holler and let us know. In fact, if you have a request for this kind of tutorial on CDM, let me know on the suggestions forum; I’m all about sharing knowledge!