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Paypal turning the screw…1 min read

At Shockwave-Sound.com we represent about 150 different music composers/producers who receive their royalties from us quarterly. We’ve been using Paypal Mass Pay to pay out their royalties and the Paypal fee for this has been capped at $1 per recipient. So when we sent out royalties to 150 receivers, it cost us $150. No problem.

Last month however, Paypal massively increased the fee for sending Mass Pay, to 2% of the value of the payment, up to a max of $45 per recipient. This means that when we now pay out royalties to 150 composers, it costs us over $1,000 in Paypal FEE for one Mass Pay. This represents a price increase overnight over several hundred percent!

The Mass Pay function is a fully automated operation that nobody in Paypal has to lift a finger to make happen. As a Paypal user we do the whole operation ourselves, using our Paypal account screen. It seems excessive to me, for Paypal to charge over $1,000 in fee for one automated process.

Looks like Paypal are starting to realize some of the monopoly they have on this market and is starting to maximize profit by blackmail type fees. 🙁

Ironically, it’s still slightly cheaper than sending 150 international bank wire transfers, and of course, the Paypal Mass Pay is a lot less work.

We have communicated this with our composers and they have kindly agreed to share the new 2% Paypal fee with us, so we are now paying 1% and the composers the other 1%, and I guess we can just about live with that.

Bjorn Lynne

Bjørn Lynne is a Norwegian sound engineer and music composer, now living and working in Stavern, Norway. He was also known as a tracker music composer under the name "Dr. Awesome" in the demoscene in the 1980s and 1990s when he released tunes in MOD format and made music for Amiga games.