Pay stub: what one US radio hit pays a songwriter in performance royalties

A song crosses over and lives on US commercial radio for a year. Who gets paid, and how much lands with one of the people who wrote it? This stub works through the performance royalty from radio only, collected by a PRO such as ASCAP or BMI.

Assumptions

1. The rate. David Touve's estimate from public 2014 data puts the value of one US radio spin at about $0.0000955 per listener to songwriters, and the same to publishers, after PRO fees that averaged about 12.85% at ASCAP and BMI (Hypebot). That is roughly $95.50 per million listeners to the writer side. PROs do not publish a per-spin rate, so this is an estimate, and it is over a decade old.
2. The hit. 100,000 logged spins over a year, each to an average audience of 20,000 listeners. Both numbers are our assumptions for a mid-size national hit; big-market stations reach far more and small ones far fewer. Soundcharts says a spin on big commercial radio is likely to drive 100 times more than a college radio broadcast (Soundcharts).
3. Four co-writers, equal splits. Common for chart pop; your splits sheet decides the real number.
4. US only, radio only. No streaming, sync, mechanicals or foreign income. BMI's Hit Song Bonus, applied to songs performed more than 95,000 times in a quarter (Soundcharts), is left out, so this is conservative for a very big hit.
5. The singer gets nothing here. In the US, radio pays songwriters but not recording artists (Soundcharts); the U.S. Copyright Office has recommended that the country adopt a terrestrial performance right for sound recordings (U.S. Copyright Office). If the writer is also the performer, only the writing pays.

The stub

All figures are our arithmetic on the assumptions above.

What we think

• Radio still pays songwriters more per event than anything else they do. On these numbers one hit year is worth tens of thousands of dollars to one writer, which no small streaming catalogue comes close to.
• The headline number shrinks fast. The $382,000 the song generates on the writing side becomes under $48,000 for a writer who has signed away their publishing and shares the song with three others.
• The rate is the weakest link. The only public per-listener figure is built on 2014 data. Rates, audiences and PRO distribution rules have all moved since, so treat our totals as an order of magnitude, and trust your PRO statement, not a calculator.
• Performers are the losers. The same airplay pays the singer nothing in the US. That gap is why US artists keep pushing for a radio performance right, and why writing credits matter so much to performers.