A 45-year-old song's royalties: 1.500€ a day, according to a forum

A 45-year-old song still pays its writer 1.500 euros a day

A song that was a global smash 45 years ago is still earning whoever wrote it as much as 1.500 euros a day in royalties, according to the figure being floated in the thread. The reference comes from a TV programme that revisits hits of the past —the topic comes up at a specific minute in the broadcast— and the figure has landed like a stone on the old debate about intellectual property. The writer recorded the track once. Forty-five years later, he doesn't need to play it again to get paid.

The comparison is what stings. An ordinary job barely gets you to the end of the month, while a single creative hit is still paying bills four and a half decades later. This isn't about whether the song is good. It's about the design of the system.

Where the money comes from for a song nobody plays anymore

If almost no one pays to listen to it, who's putting up the cash? As one participant argues, the answer lies in the commercial exploitation of the work: films that put it in a scene, ads that use it in the background, TV programmes, covers, radio and streaming platforms. The logic he defends is simple: if someone is lining their pockets with a product where that song plays, it's reasonable that the writer gets a cut. Whoever exploits it, pays.

The problem appears when that principle is stretched to infinity and turns a work into a perpetual income stream. And that's where the disagreements start.

How much does Hacienda (Spain's tax office) keep from a song's royalties?

The calculation being used in the thread leaves the writer with a fraction of what is announced. First Hacienda, which takes roughly half of that income. Then VAT, which shaves off another twenty-something percent. By that reckoning, of the 1.500 euros a day, the composer doesn't even get a third of the starting amount. And the rest of the chain is still missing: publishers, collection societies and distributors who take their cut before the money reaches the creator's account.

One participant maintains an uncomfortable maxim: the one who takes the least out of this whole circuit is precisely the one who composes. The writer earns less than the middleman, and the middleman earns without having created anything. That detail partly dismantles the image of the artist living off royalties... and partly doesn't, because there are still royalties.

Why does a patent last 20 years and copyright 70 years after death?

The asymmetry is striking. As the thread recalls, an industrial patent protects its holder for around 20 years. Copyright, by contrast, extends up to 70 years after the creator's death and benefits their heirs. It doesn't seem like the same scale: investing a decade and a fortune in developing a drug isn't the same as sitting down one fine day with a guitar and coming up with a catchy chorus.

Some argue that without that protection no one would risk creating. The reply comes quickly: no one creates from nothing, and every author builds on what those before them did. The balance between incentive and monopoly is the shadow line running through the whole system.

The digital levy: you pay copyright even on a phone

There's the detail that irritates most. According to the debate, buying a memory card, a hard drive or a phone comes with a levy intended to compensate rights holders, whether or not the device is used to copy music. In other words: you pay copyright just for buying a device. The money is collected upfront and then distributed among the rights holders.

The underlying criticism is that this payment doesn't depend on the work being used, but merely on possessing the device. A preventive levy that buyers are never asked whether they want to fund, and that benefits both the writer of the smash hit and someone who has never composed anything in their life.

The smash-hit business: from the song of the summer to Motomami

The conversation soon fills with cases. An orchestra musician, as one forum user recalled, was absolutely clear about it: landing the song of the summer for a single year is enough to live on for the rest of your life without playing again. Another remembers that in the late 1980s someone made more than a million pesetas by stringing together village parties from May to September. And some have seen a mansion built in Sotogrande for an artist who had spent two decades living off a single song in French.

The list also includes Macarena and its eternal success, El Chaval de la Peca and his reign in the nineties club scene, or the figures attributed to Rosalía for Motomami. To the legend of the song that started all this, a story circulating in the thread adds that its performer convinced a very young Madonna, then a dancer, to start singing.

And then there's the uncomfortable mirror. The creator who lives off the royalties from a smash hit is celebrated, but people walk right past the rentier who inherited hundreds of flats and commercial premises without lifting a finger. The official sarracena —that talent, sooner or later, pays— works just as well for anyone who already had money to start with.

With these figures on the table, the question isn't whether the system works, but for whom. A worker gets paid for the hours they put in; an author gets paid for how many times their work is used, even 45 years later. How long should the right to live off something you did once last?