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Musicians vs. RIAA At USA Today
An anonymous reader writes "USA Today has an article about the growing friction between recording artists and the 5 major labels which make up the RIAA. Many issues are covered, including copyright reform, fraudulent accounting on the part of record labels, and how selling a quarter million albums can leave you owing your label $14,000."
So, if the musicians don't like them, and we don't like them... why do they still exist?
levine
Non-musicians, like Brittany Spears, are the ones selling millions of records to people NOT like us.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
An interesting article by all means. Perhaps the time has come for all artists, new upcomers or old timers, to seek an alternative distribution model. I have often thought, considering the very slim royalties most performers receive from CD sales, that simply selling tunes direct to the customer on a website could put the power back where it belongs - in the hands of the people who have the talent.
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
Michael Jackson's recent high-profile leap onto the bandwagon was met with skepticism. In rallying support for his financial grievances against Sony Music, he asserted, "If you fight for me, you're fighting for all black people."
Sorry, I may have missed something. Why the link between Michael Jackson and black people?
Yeah but you can thank suburban white CD buying 18 year olds for demanding the image and lifestyle you describe.
.. thank the protected coddled white masses in the 'burbs and the execs who market the image.
They don't do this stuff in a vacuum - the image sells, so blame your kids for wanting a Puff Daddy instead of a De La Soul, or wanting a Wu Tang instead of a Del tha Funky Homosapien.
There are plenty of positive, concious rappers out there who do not condone the "thug life". But the CD buying public drives the demand for the thug life
"Old man yells at systemd"
Short anecdote: This June, I'm driving to Connecticut from Jersey in ridiculous rain. I stop at a Mobil gas station and go inside to get a coffee. It's dark, rainy, etc. I walk up to the door and look at the guy leaving as I'm going in. I go, "Mike?" He says, "Yup" and walks away. It happened to be Mike Gordon (coincidently look at my sig) from Phish, driving himself somewhere in a ragged T-Shirt and jeans. Now, here's a band that has untold gobs of money and yet still drive themselves around and don't really care what they look like. Here's also a band that gives away its music to any who would want to hear it. This is the kind of band the RIAA is scared of because they don't act greedy like the RIAA themselves.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
"Miles Copeland, chairman of Ark 21 Records, predicts that passage could significantly harm 'the entire music business because of the very visible complaining by a few successful recording artists. If the mega artists succeed with this effort, I feel strongly that it would be at the expense of those artists who have not made it yet.'"
:)
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sure, it might be bad to an executive like Copeland, who relies on sub-talented "artists" like Britney Spears to generate income for that new yacht. But this actually be the wakeup call needed to actually *develop* new artists, rather than toss them out there like so many Big Macs for huge immediate profits.
The whole industry needs an enema, and I am very happy to see some *real* artists starting to voice their concerns. There may be hope after all
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
You can read the original piece by the brilliant Steve Albini here, and probably lots of other places. Thanks to some slashdot comment I read last week but have since lost.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
I never thought of it like this before, but that's really what happens. What's worse - there's nothing more frustrating than a band changing labels -- the old label still owns all the band's old music, which unfortunately means that they take some pretty good stuff and stick it in a basement somewhere. This is where Janis Ian's suggestion of letting artist re-release their out-of-print stuff would really be of use. Of course, that would require the RIAA to give up some control...
Boy, did she get screwed.
First, her parents signed her up with Curb Records for TEN albums when she was 12. She grossed over $300,000,000 for Curb Records. That's right, a third of a billion dollars.
When her parents got divorced, her mom got to ride horses with the WalMart heirs, her dad lives in luxury, and Leann has enough to buy herself a used car.
There are laws that are supposed to protect child stars from getting fucked like this. There isn't a single honest judge to enforce them, though. Leann is suing her dad, her label, and probably her mother, agents, and promoters. It's the judges that will do her in.
If Jimmy Buffett has his way (and looks like he is attracting some takers), the RIAA has more to fear from J.B. than from P2P. Check out this article on Buffett leading the charge against the big labels. With CD's cheap and easy to make, the RIAA and the big labels that make it up are going to have a harder and harder time justifying their existence. They can keep blaming P2P, but they'd better wake up to the fact that they can't keep treating their artists and customers like dirt -- the artists and customers CAN and WILL get together with or without them. I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore -- from Fruitcakes by J.B.
Life is short: void the warranty.
Cool that he didn't bother giving you the time of day
...Soul legend Sam Moore and other artists are suing record companies and the AFTRA Health and Retirement Funds (a separate entity from the union) for pension benefits. Atlantic, which has sold Moore's music since 1967, never deposited a nickel into his pension because of convoluted formulas tied to royalties. Not surprisingly, labels are balking at paying roughly 20,000 artists up to 30 years of back pension and health benefits.....
I wonder if this includes the artists who died penniless. (Back pension to the widowed families)
What would be nice is if they could reverse the law that lets the Big-5 keep the copyrights forever. Retrieval of copyrights back to the family of deseased artists could be a form of income for them.
Although it's possible the Big-5 think of these as revenue for themselves, the fact is, they sit on them without re-releasing songs because it's not "profitable" to them. These families have smaller overhead, and it could be profitable for THEM.
Yeah. Nothing like walking by a yuppie bar and seeing a bunch of rich white guys standing around outside and saying things like, "Whazzat? Watchoo sayin?" "Yo, I said, Wassup, bitch?" "Mofo, I'm gonna bust a cap in yo ass!" Makes we want to drag them down to the nearest ER (where I used to work) and shove their faces in a convenient pool of blood. "That's 'wazzup,' you idiot."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"It's about profit, profit and more profit that always comes at a cost of principles. The predicament the record industry finds itself in is of its own making. They've alienated consumers and artists, and whether the rights movement succeeds, the house will fall under its own weight."
Welcome to capitalism.
"We're on the threshold of a whole new system," says Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. "The time where accountants decide what music people hear is coming to an end. Accountants may be good at numbers, but they have terrible taste in music. I don't know how I'm going to get paid, but I'd rather go out into the brave new world than live with dinosaurs that are far too big for their boots."
Someone UNDERSTOOD something Richards SAID!?
He talks like Prince writes.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I'd rather go out into the brave new world than live with dinosaurs that are far too big for their boots.
Anyone else get a laugh out of the fact that Keith Richards is derisively calling anyone a dinosaur ??
That's not the artists' fault, so don't make them pay for the labels' poor decisions. It's the fault of the labels for signing every jackass garage band it 'discovers' to multi-album contracts.
Perhaps they'd lose less money (and maybe make some?) if their tastes and qualifications were a little more discriminating.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I was a record producer for fifteen years and got out of the business because it simply sickened me. Here's an example:
Artists are paid a points royalty on sale of master recordings (while songwriters are paid publishing royalties on the sales of songs). 15% (15 points) is quite a good royalty for a new band, or even one with a hit under their belt.
But does that mean 15 points off all sales? Nope.
It means 15% of 90% of the worldwide gross. Why 90%?
Because in the 1940's (when the label business models we hate so much were established) lacquer records were still sold and many of them broke in shipment. A 10% "breakage allowance" was standard.
It still is. CDs don't break. But the labels, almost without exception, skim 10% off the top for "breakage" before even getting to recoupment. If IBM skimmed 10% off their earnings before issuing dividends the Board would be crucified. But music labels? No problem!
As for recoupment, the example given in the USA Today article is tame. I won't mention the name, but there is a band who has sold millions, for each of their more than five albums. But each time, video costs, recording costs, marketing/promotion costs, plane fares (for huge label entourages), hotel bills (for these same label execs) were all paid for by the band.
Sum total? They sold 35 million records and still OWE the label over 2 million dollars.
The system was devised in the 40's and has no place in the 21st Century. Hilary Rosen can whine all she wants, but the labels are truly in serious trouble due to their religious adherence to these ancient business models.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
While intentionally not paying royalties is obviously fraudulent accounting. The traditional system of applying overhead to jobs also needs to be eliminated because they're charging artists for idle time that's not the artists' fault, but the fault of the Labels. Take recording for instance. If a recording studio applies overhead based on the estimated number of studio hours they think they'll incur throughout the year, the overhead cost will be more per studio hour than if the studio applied overhead based on capacity of recording hours available which is the way it should be done. Artists should only have to pay for the time, labor, and materials it takes to produce their own albums, not the studio's idle time because they can't get enough business. While this will result in underapplied overhead for the studio and an increase in cost of sales, that's not the artists' fault and it shouldn't be their problem. The Labels and the studios need to find a way to bring their actual recording hours closer to capacity to get their profit margin back rather than overcharging the artists for it which is, unfortunately, still legal in the USA. This is why an album can sell 250,000 copies and still leave an artist owing money, because they're sticking it to them by overapplying overhead.
"In the past 20 years, an industry that was led by visionaries and music lovers has become dominated by accountants, financial analysts and people who can't think ahead more than 90 days."
Sounds a lot like the software industry
whatever the record company is making from the sale of a CD, you can be sure that only a very small fraction of its costs are related to producing the CD itself. marketing, office staff, physical distribution, office costs, studio time, lost money on flops, ... the list goes on.
i'm not justifying any particular price for a CD, but demanding that because a CD is cheap to make means that recorded music sold in CD format should be sold for very little is incredibly naive. the price of the product is not just the price of making the final disc.
i'm also curious at the level of complaint about this particular consumer item, when exactly the same concerns and cost/price relationship exists for most other things that we buy, particularly clothes. i don't hear many people (especially on slashdot) talking this way about t-shirts and shoes, which cost very, very little to make but sell for at least as much as a CD.Major Label rappers who promote positve messages (and can be found in the stores you list):
.. anyone who watches The Sopranos has no right to diss Gangsta Rap. Thats not to say that you value the Sopranos, but I want to make it perfectly clear that ALL cultures glamoize the criminal underworld. Both portray a glamorized, clean-cut interpretation of seedy underworlds; the only difference is that The Mafia seems to have some sort of romance that people identify with, where as most folks cant identify with the romance in the gangsta life. Thats not to say that there is any, since I cant find the romance in The Mafia culture, but hey, thats just my take. Selling and glamorizing the criminal element is not something the rap culture came up with - hell, the roots of rap are in positive social change (read up on HipHop Culture if you have time on your hands), but as usual, the commercialization of something tends to support the perversion of any positive message.
De La Soul
Tribe Called Quest
Black Eyed Peas
Common
Mos Def
Talib Kwali
The Roots
The list goes on. That was my point. There are lots of positive rappers, but blame the marketers for not trying to sell it to you and the kids for not being interested in searching for a truth outside of the allure of gansta rap.
As a slight aside, something that irks me about the dismissal of Gangsta Rap as having no redeeming value
There's plenty of good rap out there like there is plenty of good Nu Metal bands out there. But like food, the better it is, the less people will like it, and thus the less it will be promoted into the public conciousness.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Al Sharpton is an opportunistic vulture. Nobody's taken him seriously for several years. Besides, Michael suprised even Sharpton when he called Tommy Mottola a racist (see the MTV article).
Race is entirely a social construct. There is only one race, the human race. We're all the same color, just different shades. It is easily possible to be closer genetically to a person of a different so-called race, than somebody that looks fairly similar to yourself.
It's "Imma bussa cap in yo ass!"
Anyone else get Jar-Jar flashbacks when they read this?
A couple of weeks ago I got an email advertising Tom Petty's new single, "The Last DJ", mentioned in this article. Although I'm not even a casual fan, I checked it out anyway... Definately worth a listen for anyone opposed to the Clear Clannel-ification of radio and the trend towards pay-per-play. Hard to beleive his label let him put this song on the CD let alone promote it as his first single!
It seems the streaming version is gone but you might be able to request it at a local rock & roll station.
"The Last DJ"
Well you can't turn him into a company man
You can't turn him into a whore
And the boys upstairs just don't understand anymore
Well the top brass don't like him talking so much
And he won't play what they want to play
And he don?t want to change what don't need to change
CHORUS:
There goes the last DJ
Who plays what he wants to play
And says what he wants to say
Hey hey hey
And there goes your freedom of choice
There goes the last human voice
There goes the last DJ
While some folks said you gotta hang him so high
Cause you just can't do what he did
There's some things you just can't put in the minds of the kids
As we celebrate mediocrity
Our boys upstairs want to see
How much you want to pay for what you used to get for free
CHORUS
Well he got in a station down in Mexico
And sometimes it'll kind of come in
And I'll bust a move and remember how it was back then
CHORUS
The RAC has a good web site: http://www.recordingartistscoalition.com/
Would you still share music illegally if the artist was getting the money directly?
I think the biggest reason that a lot of people laugh off issues about music sharing is because we all know that the people complaining about music theft are the company fat cats, not the starving artists. The individual artist really isn't that affected when people share their music.
Check the numbers.
The RIAA lists around 800 recording companies as members. There are probably around 1,000 artists per recording company.
Say Billy BadGuy hooks up with his 50 friends, each of which has 200 CDs that they have all ripped.
By some magical twist of fate, no two people have the same CD, so we have a total of 10,000 different CDs that exist on the network to be illegally shared.
(10,000 CDs * $16) / 800 recording companies = $200 per company
Realistically there are probably only about 20 recording companies that likely produced the majority of those CDs.
(10,000 CDs * $16) / 20 real recording companies = $8,000 per company
On the artists side of the fence, if we assume that we have 10,000 different artists:
(10,000 CDs * $16) / 10,000 artists = $16 per artist
Realistically there are probably a few repeats, let's say 1/4 of the CDs are paired up with one other from the same artist. That means that 2,500 CDs belong to 1,250 artists, and the remaining 7,500 CDs belong to 7,500 artists.
(2,500 CDs * $16) / 1,250 artists = $32 per artist (for 1,250 artists)
(10,000 CDs * $16) / 8,750 artists = ~$18.29 per artist (average for artists)
Pair all of this up with the average number of (signed) artists in the world:
(7,500 artists + 1,250 popular artists) / 800,000 artists = 0.0109375
That means that 1 percent of the artists are paying about $18 per 50 geeks sharing files, with the majority of them paying only $16.
Now to poke at the RIAA's numbers some. They reported that they lost around 600 million dollars from 2000 to 2001 because of illegal file sharing. Using our above example:
$600,000,000 lost / (10,000 CDs * $16) = 3,750 occurrences
That means that the above example of 50 people with 200 unique CDs would have to have been repeated (uniquely) almost 3,750 times in order for the RIAA's posted losses to be correct.
3,750 cases * 51 people per case = 191,250 unique naughty people
(How many users are on SlashDot?)
On top of that, their numbers would fail again if any one of the almost 200,000 people bought any CDs based on what they heard on these networks.
Now any monkey with a keyboard should be able to sit here with these numbers and crunch out some figures, but in 99 out of 100 calculations, you're going to see this:
Recording Artists + Recording Companies = RIAA Monopoly
Besides all our fun number crunching, the article had some pretty good points.
"Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, once stated that the record business is the only industry in which the bank still owns the house after the mortgage is paid."
Not only do they still own the house, they can kick you out of it, sell it, and keep all the money.
Then when you try to buy a new house with a different bank, they sue your ass!
"...virtually all contracts renegotiated after a hit album added terms favoring the artist..."
Well that's a no-brainer. Think of it as a poor man with a $5,000 house that the bank is trying to repossess. All of a sudden he wins the lotto and has $500,000,000. You can bet that bank will be a lot nicer, hoping he will keep all of his money in their bank accounts.
"Artists know record companies are giving blood, sweat and millions of dollars to help them realize their dreams."
Wonderfully vague statement that should be fun to pick apart.
They neglect to mention that the blood they give is being sucked out of all the other artists that they've screwed over, and that the dreams they are realizing are for their own billion dollar mansions in La Hoya.
Artists know record companies have been screwing people out of their dreams for years.
To make another parallel, imagine that you want to buy a car so that you can go to work and make some money. So you go to your local GM dealer and find out that you have to pay them a bunch of money over a few years for the car. Ok that's not too bad, but wait...
It's not surprising that independent artists end up happily riding horses for most of their career. Sure you might not be able to get on the expressway, but if your ass hurts from too much riding at least you can get off of the horse.
"You have record companies bought and sold on the strength of copyrights created by artists who sign away all rights in perpetuity to a faceless corporation."
Who knew Don Henley was so eloquent?