I am curious to know what is the going wage for a jazz or classical pianist playing at an upscale restaurant. It would be a 3 hour gig and take place 4 times a week. The pianist would not be required to sing. Thank you so much

God bless you and your endeavors!

Sometime ago I had asked all my affiliates BMI,AFM,& my library site Audiosparx to look into the operation of Spotify. As a composer and producer it makes no sense giving their disposition of royalty payments to artist. It really is counter-productive and why would you give it away when there are other avenues to travel in regards to optimizing your streams of income ? Back in 1998-99 when I went digital and launched my projects via internet, there was the Napster pirates of which after investigating some 2,500 downloads of my music of which I received nothing ! The lie was that if you give free downloads it will help sell your CD along with marketing exposure ! And Pink Pigs Fly at Easter ! This happened to many artist when joining music sites that leaked into Napster. There were many lobbies on Capital Hill about copyrights,artist rights and of course intellectual property rights of which the AFM,BMI,ASACP and many others fought to keep our rights intact however not always successful unfortunately. Below I took the liberty to copy a Criticism from Wikipedia it’s worth the read.

(The service has come under fire for failing to compe
nsate independent artists fairly. Helienne Lindvall of The Guardian reported that “indie labels… as opposed to the majors and Merlin members, receive no advance, receive no minimum per stream and only get a 50% share of ad revenue on a pro-rata basis.”[86] Swedish musician Magnus Uggla wanted to pull his music from the service, stating that after six months he’d only earned “what a mediocre busker could earn in a day”.[87] Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported in 2009 that record label Racing Junior had only earned NOK 19 ($3.00 USD) after their artists had been streamed over 55,100 times.[88] According to an infographic by David McCandless, an independent artist on Spotify would need over four million streams per month to earn US$1,160.[89] Luke Lewis of NME points to problems with the Spotify business model, saying he was “convinced the ‘free’ aspect of Spotify is unsustainable” and that if “Spotify is to have a future, it needs to be a viable business”.[90]

In September of 2011, Brooklyn-based independent label Projekt Records entered a public disagreement with Spotify, stating “In the world I want to live in, I envision artists fairly compensated for their creations, because we (the audience) believe in the value of what artists create. The artist’s passion, dedication and expression is respected and rewarded. Spotify is NOT a service that does this. Projekt will not be part of this unprincipled concept.” [91]

A 2011 blog post alleged that the higher 320 kbps bitrate supposedly available to Premium subscribers was in reality only available on around 30% of tracks.[59] A large majority of the content was actually streamed in 160 kbps.[59]

The usefulness of Spotify for listening to classical music has been criticised, because playback is not gapless (there is a slight pause between tracks), which affects much classical music, and searching is very poor.[92] This is also a problem in other types of music, including popular music, where some albums are intended to be listened to without gaps. [93]

Spotify has also been criticised for bugs in the Android version, which prevents the use of offline playlist functionality on Honeycomb-based devices.[94]

Spotify also faces new issues with the introduction of requiring a Facebook account. [95] )

See Cam’s article for more: Spotify From a Musician’s Perspective

U.S. Copyright law §102 is specific. A copyright for a song can be either a “musical work, including lyrics” or a “sound recording.” In both cases, the songwriter owns the entire copyright (unless he signs it away). If a recording company approaches a songwriter about recording a song, it makes a deal with the songwriter that has traditionally been 50-50. If a songwriter (usually a band or band member) approaches a recording company, the deal will usually be weighted heavily toward the recording company and most first-time songwriters sign away much if not all of their rights to a song for the opportunity of getting the song recorded. I do not know whether or not the Universal Music Group handled primarily new acts, but established songwriters, like Carol Bayer Sager, Burt Bacharach, David Foster, Babyface, etc., usually get the 50-50 treatment because they have track records of success that the record companies would like to leverage for their own gain. It’s a sliding scale with no hard, fast rules; but, the general principles remain unchanged.

In any event, the term “master recording rights” may be used by a company to describe the copyright they acquired to a song, but it exists nowhere in copyright law. Seriously, check out the two books I mentioned earlier and download the U.S. Copyright law. I guarantee that you will be glad you did. Keep rocking!