Wow, that is so sad. One million plays is pretty crappy. Consider that there are 70M active subscribers [1] that means 1 in 7 of them may have listened to your song exactly once. And for the low price of $16.49 a million people have heard your song, where as before nobody had heard it.
Now go look at your iTunes sales, how many copies of that song have you sold? 10? 100? 1000? How many of those sales occurred because people heard your song on Pandora, who won't play specific songs on command, and so they wanted to hear it again on their time?
Back in the bad old payola days you would have paid much more than that just to have your song even on the freakin' radio. Because that was the cost of letting other people hear your music and come to the conclusion they wanted to buy it.
Um, this is an established band. This song is from 1993. It was pretty big at the time. That's why they still get thousands of dollars in radio revenue. That's why they aren't very impressed by the "exposure" or the $15 in payout.
The radio exposure is many many times more listens. They would be paid similarly if they got anywhere close to the same amount of exposure on Pandora (actually a lot more, Pandora pays a ton more than a radio station).
Not sure why people are voting you down. I'm pretty sure that it's common knowledge that artists, even in the old radio days, made their money on touring and often times ended up in the hole on album sales and radio play.
Now go look at your iTunes sales, how many copies of that song have you sold? 10? 100? 1000? How many of those sales occurred because people heard your song on Pandora, who won't play specific songs on command, and so they wanted to hear it again on their time?
Back in the bad old payola days you would have paid much more than that just to have your song even on the freakin' radio. Because that was the cost of letting other people hear your music and come to the conclusion they wanted to buy it.
[1] http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/05/pandora-reports-70m-a...