It's not apples-to-apples. The Sirius XM and radio play counts are per broadcast. Pandoras are per listener.
Let's look at Sirius. Sirius has ~20M subscribers. He got paid $181.94 for 179 broadcasts, or $1.02 each. Well, he's only making more per listen if it reaches less than 0.3% of those subscribers (60K). Otherwise the Pandora model actually pays him more.
If you get more listeners on Sirius, that per-listen payout goes down. With the Pandora model it scales proportionately.
He just has to keep in mind that Pandora is much smaller than radio right now and that's why the absolute payout is small. It's confusing for musicians when they see big numbers like One Million I guess. ;-)
Let's look at Sirius. Sirius has ~20M subscribers. He got paid $181.94 for 179 broadcasts, or $1.02 each. Well, he's only making more per listen if it reaches less than 0.3% of those subscribers (60K). Otherwise the Pandora model actually pays him more.
Pandora: $16.89 / 1M listens = 0.0017 cents
Sirius XM: $1.02 per broadcast / 60K listens = 0.0017 cents
If you get more listeners on Sirius, that per-listen payout goes down. With the Pandora model it scales proportionately.
He just has to keep in mind that Pandora is much smaller than radio right now and that's why the absolute payout is small. It's confusing for musicians when they see big numbers like One Million I guess. ;-)