In a new interview, famed producer Desmond Child (KISS, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith) talked to Music Business Worldwide about the impact of streaming on songwriters. 

“Well, ‘Livin’ On a Prayer’ got 392 million plays on Pandora alone, in just one year, but my take home pay on that was $6,000. It’s not tenable”, says Child

He went on to say, “Who would ever chose this as a career? They wouldn’t. You are going to get potentially genius songwriters who say, ‘No, I want to be able to support a family, I want to eat nice food and live in a nice place, so I can’t be a songwriter, I’ll be a realtor’ – and the world is less for it.

“Meanwhile, the big corporations line their pockets through our music. It’s unfair and we have to fix it.

“We’re saddled with legislation that suppresses our rates in a terrible way, through out-dated [US] consent decrees that are 76 years old. The last time they were even reviewed was 2001, before the iPod had even been launched. We are in a dire, dire situation.

“When digital [music] came into being, the people protecting songwriters’ rights weren’t young enough, hip enough or educated enough to understand the impact that the internet was going to have.

“So we got sold down the river and it’s been very difficult, almost impossible, to recover from the mistakes our leaders made at that time. It’s tragic.

“People go on and on about lost jobs in coal – they shout about 7,000 workers have lost their jobs etc. Well guess what? In the last 10 years, the music industry has lost one million jobs. When I first arrived in Nashville, in 1992, there were 5,000 signed writers within the 440 Circle. At last count I think there were 232.”