Slashdot Mirror
How Labels And Artists Divvy Up Your Dollar Online
Subliminal Fusion writes "Business 2.0 has an article that breaks down where that $1 goes when you buy a song from iTunes or other online music services. Key figures: the site takes .40, the labels take .30 and the artists get a measly 12 cents for each download."
I would rather give the artist 50% and the site 50%. leave B&M sales to fund the other leaches.
that the artists should be attacking their own labels...not their fans.
This is why I only use Kazaa to get my music. That way I know the artist is getting 100% of the 0.00$ I spend.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
They're getting just under half of what the labels are getting.
IMHO, "measly" would if they got three cents and the labels got fifty seven cents.
Of course, if they went independent, they'd get 60 [assuming the sites still charged 40 cents].
40+30+12 ?= $1
Which will then be divided between singers, songwriters, musicians, etc.
divvied up with the writer?
photosMy Photostream
Why don't artists skip the labels? Go straight to the Apple Music Store or mp3.com or whatever? With that extra thirty cents a song, they don't need support from Universal or Sony or whoever.
Of course, the hard part is getting started...
Afterall, the labels need all of that money to keeping buying the bullets they constantly (and consistently) shoot themselves in the foot with.
It adds up!
That doesn't add up to a dollar. But the musician and his recording company are still getting more than anyone else. It's just the recording company is screwing the musician. ... On the other hand, when independants start being sold through the Apple Store, it looks like those musicians will be getting their full 42 cents.
the artists get a measly 12 cents for each download. From all the articles there have been about the artists under the RIAA, 12% is a hell of a lot better than the cut they get normally. Sure, it's measly, but it's probably a step up. Here's to hoping it'll increase.
Ok, it's a tangent, but the whole marketing prices I think is a symbol of distrust. Large corporations (who are more likely to do the ".99" nonsense) are willing to insult their customers in the belief that they may get more sales. It's fitting that the artists get so little--clearly they don't respect them either. It's a sickness, and it's disgusting.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Is 12% really that measly? I agree it's low (unless the artist is a britney spears/in sync clone, in which case it's too high), but what percent does an artist get from CD's? What percent is standard for authors? My mom is an author, and gets about 25 cents from a 5.99 paperback... Seems like online music is giving artists a bigger cut compared to more traditional methods.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
What happens when artists self-produce thier own albums? the record labels get 0 cents. Besides P2P, i think this is another thing they dont want to get really big.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
BMG, Universal, and Warner have announced plans to do away with such deductions for digital downloads.
awwwww, that's so thoughtful of them...kinda like a yacht salesman saying to you..."and just for you, I won't charge you for the tired"....wha tha?
Microtransactions have failed up to now because of the extreme costs involved in processing them. The credit card companies like to take a small flat rate fee and then a percentage on top. On amounts of a few dollars and up, the retailer can swallow this.. but on a buck? Regular deals with the credit card companies could end up with them getting about 40 cents out of the dollar.
:-)
Clearly Apple and chums have made some sort of special deal with the credit card companies, but there's no doubt there's a percentage coming out for the credit card companies.. and their chart just doesn't address it.
You could argue that it's the 'middlemen' section, but this is listed as going to subsidaries such as AOL and Amazon (in the case of certain retailers).. and I seriously doubt as if they'd fork over their whole share to VISA!
Someone with some real knowledge of merchant accounts in this capacity.. please fill us in
This is why the record companies churn out the music they do. All they need is an ``artist'' willing to sing some and dance a little to bring in money. They recording industry money machine encompasses the studios, engineers, musicians, distribution, etc, and the money flow chart has no money going out of that process. They take in new money and recycle what they already have.
That's why I don't understand the tone of some people here. They seem to be waiting for the record industry to propose an acceptable solution to the filesharing fiasco before welcoming them back. The record industry, as a whole, exists to take money from you and me. If they have to destroy the computer industry to do it, they will. Instead of trying to work with the record industry, the nerds should be preparing lines of retreat. Versus the money we're facing, I don't believe we can win. Instead, we need to be working now on software tools and hardware tools that can be used without inserted DRM, etc. The hardware is especially important.
According to this guy, artists only get 10%-12% of the cost of the CD.
And thats after paying for promotion. Depressing stuff.
When you make a deal with the devil, you will always get burned. Most artist are stupid about the deals they make and then bitch about gettin screwed. Look how these fools give away thier publishing rights.
It's not 0/0, stupid asshat. It's 0/100. Stupid trolls...the next evolution.
I'm a rapper and if I made it big, 12 cents wouldn't be enough...that's for damn sure.
2003-06-16 17:35:03 How much do the artists really get from mp3 sales? (articles,money) (rejected)
How foolish of me, I should've waited a few days before submitting.
100% of 0 is 0. And everyone gets a hundred percent of the total, including me. Math is fun.
(It all depends on how you ask the question. If you ask "How much is 100% of 0?" you have a well defined answer. If you ask, "What percentage of 0 is 0?" you have a problem with division. The solution: be a little more charitable and allow yourself to laugh every once in a while.)
"the artists get a measly 12 cents for each download"
So that's twelve percent, this actually sounds higher than what they make off of CD sales. What's the big whoop?
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
Considering that if you went to a store and bought an overpriced CD, the artist would get somewhere around 1-3 cents per CD; I don't think that 12 cents per song is a bad deal. I was quite surprised by how often, from Apple's claims, people are downloading whole CDs from them. Then I thought it out. $1 per song, 15 songs: $15 from iTunes; $20 from a store... plus I don't have to get up and walk to the car to drive to the store. Anything that saves you money while making you lazier will be a success.
I know a lot of people here are going to be mad that the record company is getting anything, but I also dont see a problem with that as long as it is the record company that's doing the work of recording, advertising, listing with iTunes, etc. It's what record companies are for, after all.
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
When you buy a car, how much of that money do you figure goes to each engineer who was involved in designing it? Probably much less than the profit margin of the dealer or the car company. Now think about the modern popular music industry: It truly is built on huge economies of scale, and just like that car, every track of music you buy is the result of the work of many different people. The task of the "artist" themselves varies depending on the particular group, but as a general rule, they are more replaceable than a highly-trained engineer, and each has unique value mainly because of their public image, which is itself crafted by record company marketing departments. Nonetheless, probably no one person receives a larger share of this money than the "artist" involved, which is in many ways unfair considering the amount of effort put in by producers, recording engineers, and of course the marketing department, but obviously the market viability of the work depends to a certain extent on the presence of the artist, so the market rewards them with a greater share. These figures, in short, are simply proof that free markets are working well.
(of course, I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine the share of the revenue from each song you pirate on Kazaa that goes to the artist)
Despite the major labels' success in clearing hundreds of thousands of tracks for purchase online through services like Apple's iTunes Music Store, some top artists continue to resist authorizing the dismantling of their albums for Internet consumption as a la carte singles. Some acts are requiring that their music be sold exclusively in album bundles. For example, Linkin Park recently pulled its music as a singles offering from digital services. Sources say the band has expressed concerns about undercutting album sales. Other acts with similar stipulations about their work include Radiohead, Madonna, Jewel and Green Day, sources say.
Now, from an artistic standpoint I can see where they are coming from, there are certainly albums that must be experienced as a whole, or at least in the order that they were laid down. Still, I have to wonder whether they're not just shooting themselves in the foot; if the concern is over money lost to piracy, wouldn't 12 cents in the hand be worth it to an artist rather than 0? Eventually, they'll make the money back on volume; it seems they're too obsessed with immediate returns.
This news is not new. It has been known that for record sales and MP3 sales, that the artists generally pull in a very low percentage of the income made.
Just ask the good majority of music artists out there, that they make more money from their touring rather than their actual record sales (in this case MP3 sales).
This is how its going to be until the artists and the labels reform their relationship, but I have a strong feeling that this is not going to be happening any time soon. This sort of news always gets people wishing that the media industry was different, and gains a lot of sympathy for the talented artists out there.
---
Mike
I'm going to kick the next person that I see with their karma rating in their sig.
...and the artists get a measly 12 cents for each download."...
better then 0 cents a download from the friendly fucks of kazza no?
is this Business 2.0 "Full Speed" or "High Speed"?
$cat
The article states that 12% is average. Only high-successful acts can do better and they are completely free not to opt-in to Apple's music store like Radiohead and Linkin Park have decided to do.
Secondly, these are growing pains. 12% is excellent for a non-MTV/Clearchannel down your throat 24/7 mega-pop band. As diversity in the catalog continues and less money is funneled into four or five pop sensations, but instead funneled into exposing more artists then smaller advertising and word of mouth will produce more varied sales. Bands that start as nobodies and end as nobodies will be getting 12%. That's pretty good.
Personally, I think moving to singles and a diverse selection is a step in the proper direction to satisfy both fans and artists. We're going to look back to the days of big radio and MTV and not believe our rampant fandom and misplaced loyalties, not to mention taste.
You see, after the recoupable costs (which are mighty, and include a "packaging deduction" which is around 15 to 20% of the royalties), then a good portion (half, according to some sources) of what's left is held as "reserve" to account for returned merchendise, etc! The "reserve" is (allegedly) paid back over 2 to 4 years, minus the expenses of returned CDs and stuff (and it's probably not a stretch of imagination to think of labels adding a "0" here or there to the actual figure of returns).
When you take away things like packaging deductions and reserves, the 12% from iTunes is a lot nicer than 12% from albums.
Anyway, 12 cents a song for a 12 track cd = $1.44.
I believe most artists make anywhere from $.75 to $1.50 per cd depending on the popularity of the artist. Yep you read that right.
Infact they get a bigger share because the RIAA does not have to go through a greedy retailer which charges $5-7 per cd, and no shipping or manufactoring costs are considered. Its the retailers and not the RIAA who make the majority of the outrageous prices. If the RIAA sells a cd for $11.99, the retailer will bump up the price to $18.99 and pocket the difference. Infact I believe they already do this. They only discount if the product does not sell well.
That is unless the artist is really big and has their own record label after their contract expires. That is difficult because most contracts require that the RIAA own the first 5-6 cd's. Mostly the big artists can afford to outsource to a small or indie label after many hits when the contract runs out. Metallica for example does have such a deal which explains why they sued Napster. They have alot more vested interest and their newer albums make a shitload more money for them. They do not have to have a huge record label to market for them.
http://saveie6.com/
so its 12%. guess what. that's more than a lot of authors get in book royalties. 10% for the creator of copyrighted products is the norm across alll IP industries.
Does the label really do nothing more than provide $$ in advance (ie: an EXTRAORDINARILY high interest loan) and provide some of the contacts (advertising means, etc.) for the artist to spend the advance on?
Or now that all the radio stations and TV stations are owned by the same companies that own record labels, is it hard/impossible for an artist to get a decent deal on advertising without the media conglomerate's support?
Look at the article, those are just key percentages, there is more to be given out, and it is in a chart on the article.
ok...normal disclaimers apply here...I don't like stereotypes anymore than the next guy...but hey, they're a fact of life. You can, statistically, boil down a socio economic group to fit certain "patterns" and "trends"...like I said, not good, but usually true...so that's my disclaimer done...now onto my point
I have heard a lot of people talking about how RIAA will shoot themselves in the foot because the economies are changing...ie, people will just not pay $20 for something they can download for $2 (taking into account time costs etc)...and I'm thinking to myself...ok...so what really will happen
Ponder the following...and flame me if you think I'm off my rocker
1) To download songs...you need internet access, possibly an mp3 player to play them back...relatively technological savy...and the willingness to spend the time on the computer to get them...this to me, says middle to high socio economic (see above disclaimer before flaming)
2) Combine this with the fact that lower socio economic groups tend to spend more on entertainment (can't back up with specific figures right now...but I think it's a fair statement, and will be backed up by most retailers)
3) Labels will spend more money promoting artists and genres that give them the greatest returns...that's just common business sense
4)If your album doesn't get promoted by a label, at the moment anyway, you don't make it big as an artist...and your music dissapears apart from a few that 'discovered' you, and play you to their friends at parties
5)If I asked someone at a record company...I'm sure they could tell me exactly what kind of music each different socio economic category listens to (statistically speaking), and indeed, could probably break it down further to gender, race etc...I would also go further, and say that these different categories would have very dissimilar tastes in music....so, here's my thoughts (I'm sure a lot of you can already see where this is going)...
We download music...statistically, all within a few different genres....those genres stop being profitable...those genres stop getting promoted...those genres dissapear and get replaced with different kind of music...that appeals to groups that buy cds.....we bitch about how there's no good music anymore.
so...a question...through free market forces, and economics...are we really just shooting ourselves in the foot (over the long term), by downloading music we like???
(Humorous side note...maybe we should all go download some rap music today...consider it a national service)
A box of wheeties with a picture of Tiger Woods on the box: Tiger gets a dime, the farmers get a nickel.
Yeah, but you have to pay most loans back. If the album only sells a few copies, the artist still keeps the advance. If the album makes money, then it retroactively becomes a loan. Otherwise it is just payment for making the album.
Typical artists get a less on CDs.. so how is this a bad thing?
It just doesn't make sense. They want a nice big block of material. Making penny ante deals with every new artist for just 12 songs wouldn't be worth the hassle. Posts like your show how little you know about business.
But hey, the artist is free to set up his own little site, set up his own checkout basket and collect 100%.
According to this article, an artist already gets 12%-14% royalties on 70% of CD sales, and "each time a new format comes out, the percentage is cut further." So, at least in this case, it sounds like they're getting 12% on all sales â" some fare better, some fare worse â" and it isn't a smaller percentage like it has been in the past. Compared to other businesses, if someone else sells and markets your product for you, you don't get very much out of it.
That's not to say I agree with it, but I would think (although I have no proof) that an artist who runs his own label or is on a smaller label could get a larger cut from the label.
at least most of them don't. they make it from touring and merchandise. so if you really want to support an artist, see them on tour, and buy their stuff.
it's a better deal than they get from the majors if for nothing else than they don't get ripped off for the cost of promos, cut-outs, and defects this way ------------ GOD record companies SUCK
people only follow the rules they want to
Notice that 12% is much more than the artists get from CD sales, even after considering that the albums sell for half as much as the CD.
By that logic, the record companies get %100. Come to think of it, I get %100 too :D
Gimme my money!
Mechanical royalties are 8 CENTS. The artist is making a freakin killing stop yer bitching.
The record industry, as a whole, exists to take money from you and me.
What did you think they were, a charity? Why would anyone go into business, other than to attempt to make some money? Why do YOU go to work? Is it just because you have nothing to do? Or is it because you need to make money too?
Are you people so naive and think that products just come from this magical tree somewhere in an enchanted forest? No, it takes human effort to do things, and those humans want money too. This is why things cost money. You must obviously still live with Mommy and Daddy.
very few artists, except for metallicunt and a few others, bitch about file trading. artists make their money on the road. in fact, most don't even own the music. they are treated like 2 dollar vegas whores, get paid for shit, and are turned out like a sorority girl in the morning when their records stop selling. file trading helps the artists by giving them more exposure, and generates fans which go see them live. in fact, i'm actually surprised the in the IP sense, they don't get a dime.
the music "industry" has lost far more due to artisits being able to produce their own albums and generate their own music. technology has hurt the music industry. iut has freed the artist to bypass the studios and go stright to the people. all the music industry has to do is look at the crap they are pushing and see they are dealing with a more discerning clientele. how many teeny-bopper, perky breasted teenagers and tatooed, skinny, psuedo-punk wannabee bands do they think we're gonna buy?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
If as an engineer, I'm the lead designer, and design a product, I don't get 12% of the profit. I would move to jamaca if I got 12%. The engineers working under me, the sales people, the managers, the guy who stocks the soda machine, the people who foot the bill for funding, etc, etc, etc all get a share, including the store that sells it.
Lighten up people
Why don't you show us...
...how Linux distros divvy up their dollars, and what percentage the programmers get.
...how work-for-hire proprietary software houses divvy up the dollars, and what percentage their programmers get.
It's gotta be far less than a penny on the dollar for Linux, and I'd be surprised if it was more than a nickel on the dollar for all but the smallest proprietary software houses (where the coders are probably the owners anyway).
So, if artists can make 12% of the gross online, that's sweet compared to a lot of other situations.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Well if you agree, I assume you would rather get non-marketing prices too. So that's two of us!
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
So trying to cover rent, payroll, taxes and then have a little left over is now considered "greedy"? Oh fucking boy.
...how long before we start seeing cd burning terminals at music stores where you can either buy full licensed albums, or pick and choose tracks ala cart? I imagine that such a service could be provided at similar cost to itunes and still make a buck or two.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
And he'd also have to cover the entire cut of expenses and expend more time being a manager, which takes away from any musical producivity. All of a sudden this extra work doesn't sound appealing, eh?
That figure excludes deductions made by the record label for everything imaginable. Studios charge artists a fortune in promotional costs and touring, limos and so on. But even at 12c per track, that's a much better per track rate than artists have gotten traditionally from prepackaged albums.
Another thing to remember is that Itunes is an unprecidented success in the industry. Say what you will about it, but they're still only targeting 2% of the computing population...
This signature has Super Cow Powers
The record company is the one who actually spends the advance, producing the record. The record company picks the producer, does all the marketing, etc, with the money that was advanced. So they get to use that 12% to pay themselves back, and keep the 30% as profit.
At least with CDs it's not so blatantly transparent that the artists are getting ripped off. After all, someone needs to press the records/cds, printer the liners, and ship them and all that. You don't really think of the cost. Over the internet, it's different. You pay a dollar for almost nothing other then the content. (the bandwidth costs are nominal for a single 3meg upload, compared to a single dollar)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'm sick of people saying that artists get shit for their work. Have any of you watched MTV Cribs? Have you seen the lifestyle these people live in? They have unlimited resources. As long as they're putting money in the bank, they could be set for life. There are people who do better and greater things for society and get paid much less. Perhaps, instead of talking about how little the artists get, we should be talking about how much they get...
blog & fiction: jd87
Obviously you still live with Mommy and Daddy, where all of your expenses are taken care of. Here's a glimpse into the reality of owning a retail business. For starters, you have to pay rent. That's right, the landlord isn't letting you stay in his building for free. Then you have to buy equipment. Did you know that stores want money for that stuff? Then get this, the local government says I have to pay a fee just for the simple fact that I own this stuff. WOW! Then there's the matter of staff. Well fuck me twice, but it seems these people insist on getting PAID! Then if I'm lucky to have anything left over, the IRS for some reason says I got to give them some. They mentioned something called taxes, and that it supposedly pays for roads, the President's salary, welfare, and a bunch of other useless things.
If you want, you can buy manuals from ford or any other manufacturer that will detail every single repair that can be done. Enough information to build the car from scratch if you wanted. A car company is not a content industry. When you pay for a car, you're paying for the metal, and the sweat that went into making it. And yes, a lot of the money that you spend on a car is labor cost, meaning a lot of the money actually goes to the people who built it. And an engineer is always more replacable then an artist.
(of course, I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine the share of the revenue from each song you pirate on Kazaa that goes to the artist)
What do you mean? All of it goes to the artist.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Let's put this in perspective here. I work for a large retailer that grosses $60,000 per day or more (per store, not company-wide). How much of this money do I make in this same day? typically between $28 and $40. That's about 0.25% (give or take) of the gross revenues, for those of you not mathematically inclined. To put this in perspective, they're grossing about 50 times as much as I am, per dollar earned.
Granted, the record labels do not have the recurring expense of having to continually refill stock, while my store does, but nevertheless; Record Labels are small fish in the big pond of economics. Sure, they may be making out like bandits as far as this is concerned, but in the grand scheme of things, not many people invest in record labels today, because they just don't make as much money as other industries do.
All in all, as an artist, it really depends on the label you sign with and the contract you sign. You could make 80% of album sales, you could make 5% of album sales, or you could make 0% of album sales.
This is something that can't really be broken down into a pie chart of percentages unless you're going to average everything.
Typically, if you're good, have a large fan base, and are smart, you'll make a lot of money. However, if your not very good, dumb, or both, you're probably going to get screwed.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I don't get anywhere near 12% of what my employer is raking in for all the software that I write.
If I did, I would see about hiring an assistant.
Hahaha. I'm am just so funny.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The breakup of the $1 single:
.50 - The Record Company
.12 - The Artist
.37 - To bury those who have left us after hearing Celine Dion warble in Las Vegas
.1 - To figure out a way to make Dion contract SARS
Everyone here screams that the artist should cut out the label and be his own distributor. But they think that somehow magically, with on effort, his product will be distributed. They forget that now he will have to secure financing, set up the distribution (whether it be digital or hard product), promote himself and basically set up this business from scratch. All while being a nobody. This is not easy! All this on top of finding the time to be an artist. Your typical Slashbot thinks this is The Sims, where you can accelerate time and live on cheats that give you unlimited money.
That's what signing with a label does. Someone does all that work. And they should be entitled to some money as well.
You're gonna put the idea in these guys heads that now $.99 a song is highway robbery. I have a yacht payment due, man!
I think you're forgetting to factor in at least one variable: socio economic class size.
Which class of these do you think is larger:
1. Upper
2. Upper-middle
3. Middle
4. Lower-middle
5. Low
I would believe that the class populations follow a bell curve. That is to say:
size of low ~= size of upper
size of lower-middle ~= size of upper-middle
And since it should follow a bell curve, that means:
low < lower-middle < middle
upper < upper-middle < middle
So, with all of that, even if you are correct in the assumption that the lower and lower-middle classes spend more on entertainment, does their total, absolute expenditures exceed the total expenditures of the middle, upper-middle, and upper classes?
If they don't then the record companies aren't going to focus their efforts there.
People should keep these rates in perspective with comparison to how much a writer makes off book publishing: A 12% royalty on paperback sales is much higher than normal, and 12% for a hardback is toward the high end of normal. 12% would be a more than respectible rate for a beginning-to-midlist author. (Stephen King and other bestsellers, of course, can get considerably more.) Also, a beginning writer usual gets between $3000-$5000 dollars as an advance on royalties (granted, the ways to screw writers after the advance have been given are far less numerous than in the recording industry...). Usually, there will be escalator clauses that bring higher rates after X number of books have been sold. Anyway, these are ballpark numbers for the science fiction field. Source: The SFWA Handbook, 1990, p. 62-69. (Note: Since 1990, if anything, rates have gotten worse, especially for midlist writers.) I am given to understand that advances in the Romance genre can be as low as $1000 for all rights (i.e., no royalties).
While it is true that recording (and other artists) get screwed by media companies in many ways, the 12% discussed is not at all out of line with current reality in other fields.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
music is a product these days.
... witness the current middle-man payola going on in the industry now.
products are cheap to manufacture. like shoes, say. maybe 20 bucks to make. now, think of music as the product. the people who make it dont get paid for it, because today, its product.
the people who grant us access to distributing the art are the ones offering the valuable opportunity. Clearchannel, RIAA,
"Old man yells at systemd"
Courtney Love Does the Math
>doh...typo...."tired" = "tyres"
;-)Aa
Kids, marijuana and alcohol are bad... for God's sake, it took me nearly 5 or 10 minutes to figures that he meant to say "tires." That's when one should realize to put down the bowl or bud (or both for some) and try to sober a lil before attempting to create a stupid reply on Slashdot. Especially a long rant of something so stupi... [rest of comment clipped by Slashdot
So then no successful artist should be complaining then. They do bad they get to keep the money. They do good then the label gets compensated for taking a chance. Every chance that is taken and succeeds needs to be paid back. So what again are we getting mad about?
Sure, artists can skip labels. Some might make it big on their own: as a bigger example of success, Bad Religion started out putting out their own records under the then-non-existent "Epitaph Records" imprint. Most will not make it at all: they'll be the literally thousands of no-name bands littering mp3.com.
So while I'll agree record labels for the most part suck, the problem is that artists also for the most part suck.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yes, that's the point. Math is an algorithmic process, one that gives answers to various well defined questions. You can ask an unanswerable question, such as "What percentage of 0 is X?" or you can ask an answerable question, such as "What is X% of 0?". The first question will literally have no answer, the second will always be zero.
I also don't know of any other business where the employees get to live like rock stars. It's not like most artists actually work 40-hour weeks like everyone else does. And the biggest problem, from the label's point of view, is that nobody wants to buy CDs from most of them. Thus, the label makes $0 on most of them, so has to take most of the profits from the few that do sell.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
And why does the above rate an interesting? You do more of the work, you get more of the money. You do less of the work, you get less of the money. That's been true since economic systems begain. Why would anyone expect otherwise?
Say 50 people download a bands album without paying for it, and their take home royalty is 5 cents per album. Thats $2.50 in profits gone. One person out of that 50 buys a concert ticket for $35; even if the band only gets 5 bucks from that ticket sale, they've doubled their money vs album sales.
0/0 is not undefined. It is undetermined. 0/0==. The reason it is different than with a non-zero number in the numerator is because division adheres to denominator * result = numerator. It is true for any number with 0/0 and true with no numbers for anything else divided by zero.
:))
Therefore, 0/0 == 100% is true!
(maybe you should take a math class
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
If Joe Sixpack asks for $47k pay for his job, medical benefits, and the ability to leave with two weeks notice, he can't then turn right around and whine that he isn't making $55k and identical bennies. He got what he asked for.
If I'm Jimmy Drummaster, an aspiring upcoming musician, and I don't feel that the promotion and management services provided are worth what current sellers are asking, I'm more than free to set up my own website and sell MP3s. Hell, I'd be selling to a larger market segment than iTunes is (far more people can play MP3s than use Macs).
I'm not trying to be deliberately callous -- I'm simply saying that if musicians don't like iTunes, they can choose a different route. (Of course, there are those that have sold contracts to put out n albums -- stupid sort of deal IMHO, but such is life -- and they'll have to put out n more CDs before they go freelance. And again, they got what they asked for.)
Nobody is shedding tears for *other* classes of workers that don't get better deals than they asked for -- computer consultants or plumbers or proctologists aren't getting any love.
My personal guess is that the people writing the article don't care about the musician *either* and just has some vague ideas that enough undirected protest will somehow result in him getting free music of the caliber he's currently enjoying.
May we never see th
" I'm sick of people saying that artists get shit for their work. Have any of you watched MTV Cribs? Have you seen the lifestyle these people live in? They have unlimited resources. As long as they're putting money in the bank, they could be set for life. There are people who do better and greater things for society and get paid much less. Perhaps, instead of talking about how little the artists get, we should be talking about how much they get..."
Is this suppose to be insightful? Try this 'I'm sick of people saying that Americans get shit for their work Have any of you watched Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? Have you seen the lifestyles these people live in? They have unlimited resources. As long as they're putting money in the bank, they could be set for life. There are Frenchmen who do better and greater things for society and get paid much less. Perhaps, instead of talking about how little Americans get, we should be talking about how much they get...'
And yes you do come across that clueless.
...than current arrangements.
What does an artist get from an album? 50 cents, tops. That's for approximately one hour of content which wholesales for about $10.00 and retails for anything from $10 to $18.
Here, the artist gets paid $0.12 for approximately 4 minutes of content which wholesales for $0.60 and retails for $1.00.
If an artist sells an hour of content online, he gets $1.80, which is 3.6 times what he gets from the CD. Looking at it from wholesale to wholesale, if content with a total wholesale value of $10.00 is sold, the artist gets $2.00, which is 4 times what he was getting previously. If you go for $18.00 at retail, the artist is now getting $2.16. This is about 4 times better than what the artists were getting before.
Who to this day gets "mailbox money" from a hit song she wrote in the '80's.
Klymaxx
I really don't get it. You guys always bitch about how the artists are getting ripped off, after all, it's there work that makes the record companies the cash, but no one seems to fight for your own wages. You do all the work at your company, be it programming, hardware design or anything else. YOU do it, and someone else is making millions, but fair is fair right? Same should go for the music industry!
If you looked at what the average album costs on iTunes, it only runs $10! Which is a HUGE savings compared to Sam Goody or Tower. They're (the artists) getting a sweet deal out of this. I would think that a band such as Aerosmith or U2 could break away from their labels and release the whole thing to iTunes and reap the profits themselves. Offer an exclusive deal for hard copies if so desired by the consumer, but I think this would work for many established artists. Regardless of anyone's hatred for the record labels they do take quite a risk in the promotion and recording of bands. How many one hit wonders are there out there? How many guys do you know that have a "record deal" and nothing came of it? All of those things cost a significant amount of money to produce. In the end I stay away from downloading pirated songs because even though I know the artist gets maybe $0.03 per disc at least it's something for their efforts that I appreciate enough to buy. Cheers!
This is as worse as CD distribution by the record labels. Apple should've striked deals directly with the artists. Hm, if the artists got say .60, then they'd have to sell 5 times as little as they sell now to get the same amount of money. This is bloody ripoff.
On the other hand it also costs as much as regular CDs. You get like ~10-15 songs on a regular CD, which is around $15. If you download 15 songs from Apple, you also end up spending $15, as much as you spent for the CD. Maybe a little cheaper because a CD doesn't always have 15 songs on it. But still.
Ripoff! First, the artists are ripped off, then you, the consumer. I mean it's somehow fair for Apple to get .40 out of it, but the record labels and the publisher? Give me a break!
The record labels are the media intrustry's dinosaurs. And Dinosaurs will die.
I think, anyway that guy has sold well over 5M discs. I think he's makin money.
;)
oh yeah, thanks for the pr0n
but I've heard that apple charges 34 cent per song and their agreement leaves the rest of the division and responsibility up to the label.
/.'s editors:
another slice of info that was rejected by
I received an email from bloodshot records with the following- 'As the music business heads off into uncharted territory we are feeling the effects first hand as stores close, media consolidates and users have no qualms about stealing music from the web. After a fun business trip to Apple HQ in California, we have decided to cast our lot with Appleâ(TM)s new iTunes store. By the end of the summer (hopefully) youâ(TM)ll be able to download individual tracks or albums from nearly every Bloodshot artist (including comps). Weâ(TM)ll let you know when our catalog is ready to go.'
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
To get from "0*100% = 0" to "100% = 0/0" you need to divide both sides by 0, which is not allowed.
So "0/0 = 100%" does not follow from your reasoning.
And if it were true, then 1 = 0/0 = 2,
so 1 = 2,
and the universe would begin to crack.
In the book "All You Need To Know About The Music Business" by Donald s. Passman, an attorney in the music industry, royalties are extensively discussed.
SLRP: suggested retail list price minus 20% for packaging. ex: CD retails at $14.99, minus 20% for the packaging ($3.00), SLRP is $11.99.
New artists signing with an independent label get between 9% to 13% of the SLRP.
New artists signing with a major label get 12% to 14% of the SLRP
Midlevel artists get 15% to 16% of the SLRP
Superstars get 18% to 20%+ of the SLRP.
And that's why it's almost impossible to buy a decent book these days, unless the author happens to be a J.K. Rowling or such.
The whole bit of authoring books, particularly technical ones, is such a gamble for everybody concerned that authors churn them out as quick as humanly possible these days and doesn't it show.
It's just not worth spending the time to do it properly.
The Mechanical was $0.08/song and was listed in that pie chart as a separate item. The mechaincal is paid whether or not the song recoups.
Take a calculus class.
Short refresher:
0/0.01 = 0
0/0.000000000000000000000000001 = 0
0.0.(infinite zeroes)1 = 0
So, 0/0 is approaching 0, and for all useful measures, is 0.
What is preventing some rock band (or whatever) from selling their own songs off of their own website? That is, just go direct to the audience and they'll receive most of the profits.
Beyond the fact that artists shoulder the costs you speak of because the record companies charge them back to the artist your assertion that production and distribution need be done by the label for an artist to be known is absurd. You'll note one of the richest men in the nation is an artist who needed no such label to become famous rather he recorded his own CDs, countering your point that CDs wouldn't exist, and then did his own promotion and sales of those CDs. Now he has his own clothing line and his son is excelling in the music industry. Who is this man you ask? Why it's none other than MasterP. MasterP couldn't get airplay for his songs because they're obscene so he sold his own tapes. Don't believe me? Trust Forbes then: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/40under40/snapshot/ 0,15793,11,00.html Note his progression up the list as well.
Professional because nobody who has the competence and the skills and the background required to put this together works for free, and we really can't expect people to work full-time and overtime for no money indefinitely. We've hit the wall with volunteer, part-time "geek activism".
The price of freedom now is the willingness to pay the people capable of doing political activism in a way that will make politicians do what WE want them to do.
Even in the current FUBARed state of the economy, we could still raise enough in $5/20/100 contributions to buy most of the elected officials Hollywood thinks it 0wNz and defeat the majority of politicians honest enough to stay bought.
The AARP and NRA have done a hell of a lot for their members with organizations of comparable size to the population of serious computer users and lower per-capita income. So if we had a real PAC, we'd be carpet-bombing Hollywood and "rip, mix, and burn" would be a campaign slogan used by any politician who wants to stay in office.
Well, the chance to do this cheaply has come and gone. If somebody or a small group had come forward with $1M a year ago, the Federal and state-level paperwork required to raise and spend money for candidates would have been done a few months ago and those of us (hopefully, everyone on slashdot and a whole lot of people outside the community who want to "rip, mix, and burn" as well) on the mailing list would be sending the PAC our $5/10/100 contributions. The $1M just covers the professional staff and the infrastructure, the real money would come from us, and probably from any consumer electronics vendor who's had it with being pushed around by Hollywood. And the volunteer hours required to multiply the efforts of the full-time core staff would come from us... which is fair enough.
I'm fairly sure there would be some corporate money, there are a lot of people waiting for someone to answer the question:
"Where do you want to go today?"
"To war! Hollywood is that way, what are we waiting for?"
The PAC would be aggregating our contributions into checks big enough to make politicians sit up and take notice, and buying enough media time to make the mass media treat us with respect.
Well, nobody with the megabuck came across. Now, any filing date that hasn't come and gone is going to be horrendously expensive to pay people to prepare the paperwork and possibly, buy enough political influence to make late filings possible.
Can it be done at any price in time to affect the 2004 election? I really don't know. My guess is that the price of entry has gone up to $2-5M.
The odds that anyone would be willing to do this now are slim enough that it's more rational to figure out how to afford to get out of the US than to check into 51 filing deadlines and how tightly they are nailed down and which ones we could afford to miss.
Anyone who can afford to do this isn't going to contribute to any "political effort" that isn't tax-deductible. When they find out that the laws have changed to the point that any research worth doing in consumer tech has to be outsourced offshore because the research can't legally be done here, it's simply going to be too late.
But what the hell, it's cheaper to pay $1/hour to Indian and Chinese programmers and engineers and surely, some way can be come up with to dumb the tech down far enough so it can be sold in the US, right? Who cares if the R&D and production jobs are all offshore if the people who made their money off the high-tech boom and managed to keep it can continue to profit?
The vendor community is still doing "deer in the headlights" thing, hypnotized with Hollywood smoke and mirrors into believing that Real Soon Now, if the vendor commmunty gives
Tech Public Policy stuff
These are the same people who said that the VCR will kill the movie industry and who spent years trying to figure out how to keep the RIAA website running.
In other words, they are clueless fuckheads who make the '90s wave of vulture capitalists look like geniuses, and any high-tech economy they get to run, they will utterly destroy. They can't even figure out how to keep their own products selling, what makes you think they can pick winners in high-tech?
Hopefully, in the unlikely event that you work in high tech (as a janitor, maybe?), your job will go down with it.
You obviously like the idea of living in an economy where high-tech is something that one buys in shrink-wrapped boxes developed in India and China and made in Taiwan.
By the time you figure out how bad this is going to be, you'll be back with your own mommy and daddy... if they can afford to keep you. Of course, if you're as obnoxious in person as you are here, they might enjoy the thought of you eating out of garbage cans and sleeping in dumpsters.
Tech Public Policy stuff
x = 1
y = 1
x = y
x^2 = xy
x^2 - y^2 = xy - y^2
(x + y)(x - y) = y(x - y)
x + y = y
2 = 1
Woops! Maybe you should just relax a bit.
Now, if you want to get really picky.....some branches of mathemathics do not consider the statement 1 = 2 to be the same as 2 = 1. Just because you live in a world limited by "Principia Mathematica" does not mean that we all do.
Eh, maybe I should relax a bit too...
What makes the artist's time so much more valuable than everyone else's? A record company surely must have studio workers, a marketing department, accountants, systems people, administration, human resources, and all the other conveniences of a modern corporation.
A farmer doesn't get 50% of every can of corn sold. Maybe that doesn't seem fair, but he's not the only person involved. Someone has to package it, someone has to ship it, someone has to provide the shelf space for it, and someone has to ring it up at the checkout. And, of course, there are other costs. The supermarket and the distributor have to establish a relationship, coordinate shipments with demand, and so forth. All of this takes work.
most of the artists are rich? So what's the problem?
Depends on how you get to 0, Basic differential.
x^2 (lim x->0)
--- = x (lim x->0) = 0
x
maybe basic maths (not plural - we in the UK can do more than one sum), but basic calculus defines the anwer in a few specific cases (most known is that photons have mass, but no rest mass, since
m=m0(gamma) and gamma=1/0 at speed of light.
Ta.
1. x^2 - y^2 = xy - y^2 2. (x + y)(x - y) = y(x - y) 1 is not the same as 2. 2 is equal to x^2+y^2+2xy =xy - y^2 not x^2 - y^2 = xy - y^2 your algebra is weak
Everything Zen;
Everything Zen;
I don't think so!!!
Unless they're employed by RedHat or IBM or similar, linux coders aren't expected to be paid. The software is also free, so I don't think anyone is too upset missing out on 12% of $0.
As far as the rest of your comparison, most commercial software is produced by large teams of people, built up from libraries written by even more people, etc. Music is produced by the singer and/or band and a producer. Yeah, there are sound engineers and what not, but I'd argue that the band and maybe the producer are the main "artists" of the music. The point being that it takes a lot fewer people to create commercial music than it does to create (most) commercial software. Obviously for software there are exceptions to this, and many of these programmers have become wildly successfull.
AccountKiller
Artists still screwed.
+ + + +
Rationale:
- the companies are not producing the music, the
artists do. Without the artists, companies are
nothing.
- companies have a role only of intermediators
+ + + +
If I was to release a song to the world, and the company was to tell me "for your promotion we get 85 cents over your dollar" I would tell them, "screw you and your promotion".
"I am slashbot, hear me roar!"
You missed something obvious.
Internet radio and P2P downloads are promotion.
Eminem's latest album was "accidentally" prereleased to P2P about a month in advance. (Personally, I suspect that the guy who uploaded it was named Marshall Mathers, taking a page out of the Radiohead playbook and figuring it would make him lots of money and piss off his label - while I'm not that fond of his music, looks like win-win to me) The record supported by lots of Internet-created buzz went straight to #1.
Google on:
Radiohead "Internet promotion".
Lots of bands doing this now, even a few major label bands officially or unofficially.
Why?
Outside RIAA major label executive fantasies, nobody buys an album on without hearing something off it first.
That's why they pay radio stations to play their musicians.
The Internet works just as well for this as playing it on FM radio. The difference being that everybody has access to the Net, and the music industry doesn't like the idea that just anybody has a chance to get to the ears of millions of people.
So they bought politicians to get digital file swapping on the Net treated as a crime while trading cassette tapes made off the label is legal.
Smart bands and musicians with major label backing are bypassing their bosses and using the Internet to unofficially leverage their existing publicity channels... using the Net to create buzz that'll cause Net-connected people to tell their unwired friends about it. Multiply by millions and one has another platinum record.
Madonna is whining about it instead and is wondering what the fuck happened to her career. Must suck to be as young as she is and already obsolete and irrelevant.
Smart indie bands are taking advantage of the Net for promotion, selling records without record stores, and hopefully, selling through iTunes soon.
Hopefully, the CDbaby deal with iTunes will go through and anybody will be able to get onto it, I work with an indie musician now and we don't mind at all getting 12 cents + the 8 cent mechanical royalties per download out of a dollar, we don't have to pay for the bandwidth, we don't have to worry about getting a merchant credit card account, and any chargebacks are on Apple's dime. What's not to like?
Of course, we have to do our own promotion to get people to buy it, but that's the tradeoff for not going with a major label. The upside is being able to do one's own music, not what the label dictates, and keeping ALL the profits, not the "artists" share after Hollywood-style accounting and paying off a massive loan that's spent not by our, but at the record company's discretion.
Even if she only sells 10% as much music as she would with the help of a major label, she still makes more money and hopefully, better music.
The only people who are getting shot in the foot by P2P are the major label people who are afraid the can't compete on the level playing field they call the Internet, with the collateral damage being the record stores who depend on the major labels for product.
The shape of a new record industry is beginning to take form. If the laws bought by the *AA organizations kill it here, this means that the new industry will happen someplace else and we'll be getting not only our tech, but all the cool new music from places Hollywood doesn't OwN the politicians of.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I bought CD's directly from various artists during their live performances for the last few years. In particular, I tend to choose the classical and jazz people, especially if they're totally independent. Goodness knows, that stuff is hard enough to find in the US. Basically, if it doesn't sell in some large chain-store, you're going to have to look for it. Of course, it seems that most of the really good stuff has to be mail-ordered from Europe.
Fuckin' bean-counters. It's all their fault.
C|N>K
www.pico-pay.com Also, this short whitepaper discusses the use of Pico-Pay as a method for online music publishers to easily generate revenue. http://www.pico-pay.com/musicpaper.html
be Back
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Try learning some calculus... the whole point of differentiation is to divide zero by zero algebraically and get the right answer :-)
What ever happened to talk of empowering the artist and all.
I thought I was a synic, I guess I was wrong.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
How Labels And Artists Divvy Up Your Dollar Online
Excuse me, YOUR? You traded that money for the music. That dollar ceast to be 'yours' when the deal was done. Sounds like your about to draw up a banner proclaiming 'the people's money'.
A record label can't just sign anyone. Why? Because there are 4 other major labels, as well as thousands of other labels that will provide better talent and put you out of business. The RIAA is NOT one company. They are in competition with one another. The only associate to promote common interests.
Vote for Pedro
Steve Albini's much more thorough and interesting rant (from 1998), The Problem with Music
Courtney Love was sticking up for artists rather loudly during her lawsuit with Vivendi Universal, but shut up quickly after receiving a nice, fat settlement.
I wish I could say it surprised me.
... And the proctologists, obviously, get the shittiest deal of them all.
By only buying what you want, you get only the tunes you wanted, no filler.
Another case of some really untalented person who thinks they are important. Notice how she has all the money in the world to be an artist 100% of the time, yet has managed about 30 songs worth total? It's not like we're talking Lennon/McCartney here.
I think thats a pretty reasonable ratio for most so called artists. Anyone could do Britneys job really, although i dont know - getting into tantrums and swearing at your fans can get quite hard at times. Heres a break-down of another popular music delivery method, KaZaA:
Label:0% (im helping to reduce their crack habit)
Artist:0% (making art is enough of a reward)
RIAA:0% (always good)
KaZaA:0% (use KaZaA lite so these pirates get jack)
Middle-man:0% (i like to cut out the middle-man)
Publisher:0% (the dude im downloading from - they get no money, but they can have whatever im sharing)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
View it as the artist being the sole owner of a company that makes and sells music. They are seeing a pretax bottom line of 8-12%, or roughly 6-9% aftertax. This is a typtical return for many mature industries.
Compare the two products.
Buying the album from iTunes gives you the ability to listen t the product immediately. Buying it from a music store requires a separate trip to the music store. Buying it from a mailorder or online retailer requires you to wait for delivery.
When you buy an album from iTunes, you get it in a lossy compression format. With a CD, you get the music with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz @ 16 bit.
When you buy an album with iTunes, you may get a small jpeg of the album cover as an ID3 tag. When you buy a CD, you get an actual physical copy of the image on glossy paper, and usually some interesting material in the liner notes.
When you buy an album from iTunes, it is protected with its DRM technology. You are also tying yourself to playing the songs from iTunes, and are trusting that Apple will continue to develop iTunes and maintain their DRM infrastructure. When you buy a CD from a record store, you get a product with no DRM protection, is able to be played a many output devices of many styles, and has a long enough history to assume that new devices will be produced for a long time to come.
An album bought from iTunes can be burned to CD. A CD bought from a store can be ripped to MP3. Mostly a wash, but burning the slightly lower fidelity iTunes AAC file to CD doesn't give it the quality of the CD. Ripping the CD to MP3 reduces the quality, but you still have the high quality original.
When you buy an album from iTunes, you get a very helpful shopping experience. Searching for songs is faster, there are hypertextual jumps between song, artist, and album. On a particular page, it will show you top selling songs by that artist, and the "people who bought this song also bought..." list. Also, if you use the shopping cart, rather than the 1-click purchase, you get a "Recomendations based on albums in your cart." When you buy an album from a record store, you tend to some teenager who sparked up during his last break asking you "Can I help you find anything?" (to which my response is usually. "You still have them arranged alphabetically by artist, right? I think I'm all set.")
Different people will put different weightings on each of these criteria. If you usually listen to music from only one or two Macintoshes, or an iPod, rarely use actual CDs, have audio equipment that doesn't give noticable differences between CD and MP3 quality, then iTunes is a good deal. If you frequently are on non-Macintosh machines, bounce around on more than three Macs when you listen to music (or for some other reason find the need to "authorize" a Mac with your DRM key prohibitive) and have a quality home entertainment system that can show the differences between a lossy rip and the original CD, then a close to 50% price reduction may not quite be enough for you.
If this is all so terribly unfair to "artists", why do they keep on signing those contracts?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Farmers get 2% of a loaf of bread from their wheat. .5%
Landowners selling timber get
Mineral Rights yeild 0.3%
(All figures radically guessed)
Ranchers are artists, the way they create exquisite bovine products from the ground up, some are works of astounding quality. Mmmm.
Most cattlemen sell calves, at about 300 pounds ($1perpound), for the most efficient return, unless they have inherited rangeland, then they can get them to 500-600 pounds (avg75cents per lb) before heading to the feedlot before the final fattening occurs(Feedlot: Production Studio for cattle)
The rancher gets the $300 and distributes it out to the bass player (vet) the auction barn (6%) The lead singer(Jose, the illegal immigrant) 20 bucks, Monsanto for the scientific genetical alteration copyright fees for the Monsanto(c) Bull Sperm(c) 33%.
A rancher get's enough profit to survive another year on a diet of beef and Pepsi, drive a new Dodge and are forced to send their kids to public school.
Could it be an artist is much like a diesel semi-truck? Sold to a broker as a tool to simply perform it's contactual duty to use their powers to generate as much profitable enterprise during it's functional lifespan as possible?
Trucks are sold much like a slave, demand only an operator, mechanic and fuel. An artist is like a truck.
12% indicates the watermark for how much screwing an artist is willing to take to be employed by the art system.
I'll stick to selling my painted hub caps on the side of HWY 471 for 100% profitablity.
For an artist to make 12% of REVENUE is amazing! Even 12% of profits is very good, for CDs sold off the shelf. If you buy a $12 CD with 12 songs on it, it costs some money to create and burn the CD, it costs more money to package it, and it costs money to transport the CD to the retailer. However with downloaded content, the cost is almost zero (technically there's bandwidth and server maintenance but those are extremely small on a per-song basis). If the artist gets 12% of your dollar then that's excellent. What's better is if they got 50% of your dollar but that can only happen with independent artists.
~CGameProgrammer( );
If I'm a retailer, and I buy the CD wholesale for $x and then it is up to me to sell the CD for whatever I can.
There is no obligation on the part of the retailer to give part of the profit or loss to the label or artist. I'm talking about a simple sale here, not a specific contract or other deal a store may have.
What is interesting, is how this case shows that there are other options for distributing music, and the $$.
As I've said for years - changing the distribution channel changes nothing for the artists. The system is rigged to not pay the artists.
To be fair, the record industry needs some of the money, otherwise who will pay for the artists to make the music in the first place? I do agree that more should go to the artist tho and less to the record company.
Since the artist gets a measly 12c on every $, revenue lost because of filesharing hurts the artist the most.
-m
This is completely and totally true. $0.12 is actually PROGRESS when compared to the status quo. Here's a better breakdown of the whole situation, courtesy record producer Steve Albini:
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
As far as the whiners about "the death of the album" go, two things wrong with their premises:
- Up until the 1970s that's the way radio and records went. Top 40 Radio created a singles-oriented business, with the album as gravy. Even with great albums like Sgt. Pepper the Beatles made sure there was at least one good single on there if not a few. It was only with the popularity of Album Oriented Radio in the 1970s that things changed. The last gasp of the single 45rpm record as a mass consumer good was in the early 1980s.
- The primacy of the album has been basically stood on its head in the first decade of the 21st century. The average CD has you back in the '60s again, with albums that have one or two good songs and an ocean of filler. Some of the people complaining on that list are guilty of this crime against the music consumer.
All that Steve Jobs is doing is levelling the playing field for the consumer. You have never been prevented from downloading a whole album on iTunes...in fact, you get an economic incentive to do so with the $9.99 bargain "album" rate. If a band makes a super-bitchen album, and people hear that the album is great as a whole, they will download the whole album rather than download the songs piecemeal without the advantage of the bulk rate.The fact of the matter is that the "album" died years ago. Deal with it.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Drat, that "death of the album" thingy was on another thread. Sorry, folks. The two concepts just went together, like peanut butter and chocolate or Mountain Dew and a marathon gaming session.
Will post a link to the article on the other thread.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
How much of this $1 goes to payola for Clear Channel..?
12% may sound like a lot to some of y'all, but the thing that I will _NEVER_ understand is how "non-creative" entities make MORE on the artists art than the artist him/her-self. You will _NEVER_ convince me that the system is as it should be. Artists deserve the majority of the compensation, not the other way around. Period.
I don't think they do, insofar as the big labels are concerned. I've bought exactly 9 albums since 1998, all of which have been electronica from smaller labels (Hommega, Flying Rhino, Global Underground, etc). Why the hell should I pay for music that I can hear when I turn on any radio station during the morning drive to work and hear ad nauseum or, if I really like it, just snag from KaZaA for free? I'm certainly not going to shell out $10-$15 for the CD, especially when the profits from my sale are paying the salaries of middlemen, and not the compensating the artist.
You're forgetting that all those costs you mention are recoupable-- the artist has to pay the record company back for all of that, and repayment comes out of the artist's royalties before the artist ever sees one thin nickel.
The label is like a bank. You have to pay the bank back. Granted in most cases when a band fails the label doesn't chase them around for the rest of their lives after the recoupable expenses lost. That's the label's risk-- loaning money to a losing prospect.
The songwriter, often the artist gets $0.08/song for a mechanical royalty, which starts being paid from the first song sold.
for plagiarism. His article was printed in The Baffler years before that dumb be0tch.
The article posted just before this one does the same.
o srecords/
We have one of the most successful systems that have debuted singles higher than any other digital download system (payloadz.com).
We charge the record company 10% msrp on each txn, they charge $1.49, paypal makes out big time with $.30 + 2% and the rest goes to the label and artist. Since the publishing units do not get involved, the yield is much higher for the artist.
http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/warnerbr
Not very much work goes into making each disk and hardly any work goes into each copy of the mp3. Unlike the car, where it takes a huge amount of actual work to make the physical copy. When you buy a car, you are paying for the physical copy of the machine, not the 'intelectual property'. Obviously a lot of bands work hard, but all the lables do is market stuff. Why should I pay for a music companies efforts to sell me something?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
QUIT ABUSING your children you fuckwad. What the fuck is wrong with your stupid pedophile head? YOU YOU QUIT IT NOW!!! I've reported you to the authorities for that child porn you shit.
Every musical recording (so-called phonorecord) potentially involves two copyrights, the copyright in the underlying musical work (that is, the song itself), and the copyright in the recording of the musical work (the tracks laid down by what you have been calling the "artists.")
For trivia buffs, the (p) p-in-circle symbol refers to the phonorecord copyright, and the (c) c-in-circle symbol refers to the copyright in the musical work.
At any rate, there is an 8% piece of the pie reserved for the rights to the song -- usually split between the publisher and the songwriter.
So Anka wrote what was for decades one of the most widely broadcast tunes in the world, and he got a lousy $35K a year for it?
Before Leno took over for Carson on Tonight Show, $35,000 was actually worth something. Besides, I'm assuming he supplemented his income from that song with income from other songs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
From a manufacturing point of view, that's not a bad percentage. If you invented a "widget" in the real world you'd probably get less. As a general rule everyone who touches a product get's 50% of it. The retailers, the distributors, etc. Retailer (i.e. Quick-E Mart) 50% Distributor 25% Manufacturer 12.5% Owner 12.5% Once you start talking about commodity products (i.e. toilet paper, tools) things start getting tighter. Many manufacturers that I work with are happy to get a 4% profit margin, and they're the owners/creators/patent holders on their products.
"Estimates are that about 15 percent of Wimbledon revenue goes to prize money, while less than 10 percent of U.S. Open revenue ends up with the players."
m n_ sportsbiz/sportsbiz/index.htm
http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/20/commentary/colu
Artists receive an average 9% of the profits on album sales. $0.12 is actually in line with regular sales.
Standard recording contracts are written to make it impossible for artists to turn a profit. The artist gets 12%, but has to give a quarter of the points to the producer. The record company charges for development of CD technology. There is a clause to prevent pay-outs on 10% of sales based on damaged shipping (this comes from the days of vinyl, when one in ten records really broke in transit). Companies also repackage CDs and sell them at a discount, which stands outside the artist's contract. If you have ever purchased a CD with a small notch in the jewel case, the band didn't see one penny. Outlet stores like Best Buy purchase CDs in bulk to get a discount, so the artist is making an even smaller cut. Whatever discs don't sell get bought back by the record company. They charge the artist for the buyback, notch the discs and sell them in other markets (Europe, India) without crediting the artist with any of the profit.
Artists are being equally screwed by the record companies when we buy music online. It isn't fair, but services like iTMS are not to blame.
Dan
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
Record companies give very bad contracts to the new bands they sign up. If that band does not sign up to those terms there are 20 more out there who will sign up. These bands get none of that 12 cents. It all goes to "expenses" of the record companies.
Now the record companies are coming to us with big crocodile tears saying "pirates' and P2P file shares are ripping off the artist. But the "pirates" are not ripping off the artists. They are ripping off the record companies who are ripping off the artists.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
from the article:
"it's clearly a better deal than they get from piracy."
It's only a better deal if the musician's 12% cut of the download fee is somehow not covered by their recording contract. Normally all expenses of production, manufacturing, advertising and distribution come out of the musician's share, usually leaving zero. This standard recording contract provision is why musicians themselves don't actually lose money to piracy. They don't lose money because they don't make money from record sales. Musicians make money by playing gigs, and the exposure they get from record sales (or airplay, or downloads) generates more and better gigs. Downloading does not hurt musicians, it helps them.
For further explanation read some of Janis Ian's informative articles on the mechanics of the recording business.
They changed it so you can only give away 3 songs now. I don't check our mp3 site much so it took me a bit to notice.
If you pay mp3 $5/month or $15/month, they will give away up to 100 of your songs, will pay you royalties, and will answer your questions.
http://www.mp3.com/premium/
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
[goes off, reads link] Gak. This makes the whole thing pretty much untenable for any artist who doesn't already have either an established audience who can be counted on to buy their CDs, or enough money to blow on self-promotion that may never go anywhere if they fail to get noticed. Three MP3s is not usually even a good cross-section of an artist's work, let alone enough to addict a new fan.
:(
;) I'll have to drag home some of your stuff to check out. -- Hey, I have an old vinyl album "Hogan's Heroes Sing the Best of WW2" that was recorded *by* four of the series stars!! It's actually very good. Did you know there are words to the show's theme song? Funny as hell!
Also, the way the benefits package is structured, it pretty much ensures that the only people who WILL get noticed are those who are already making enough to pay for the extras. IOW, I think they're trying to discourage all the freebies, and everyone who isn't already making *mp3.com* significant bucks.
[reads assorted "CD sales" FAQs] Hrmmm... I wasn't aware that the CDs they sell contain mere 128 or 192kbit MP3s; I'd have expected normal CD quality WAV files. What benefit is there to me, as a customer, over just downloading the MP3s, if what they sell me on a CD doesn't sound any better?? (Uncompressing an MP3 and calling it "CD quality" doesn't cut it.)
No wonder you've got a "don't buy the CD!" statement on your mp3.com page!!
[wanders nokilli.com] You guys are quite properly sick
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I've got 2 or 3 copies of that record too. Part of my huge Hogan's Heroes collection.
We're just a punk rock band, so if that's not your thing, don't get too excited. Although I think some of our lyrics are pretty funny though.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
Some punk gets me excited, some doesn't... never know what's gonna turn my crank. I'll just have to give 'em a download and an ear or two.
;)
[reads lyrics] "drinking Klingonese" -- oh, man, that's enough to give a person the vapours
You ever get sucked into playing "Banned from Argo" ??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Ack, what a horrible vapours pun.
I had to look up Banned from Argo. I've never heard of it. Know where I can get an mp3?
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
We strive for cruel and unusual punishment ;)
:(
I've never seen any of Leslie Fish's stuff as an MP3 (tho you can buy it on CD) -- nor, come to think of it, *any* filk as an MP3.
There's a slight variant built by a Jewish historian: "Banned from Egypt" (after just a plague or two...)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The cost is zero. The cost is in the denominator. Thus, zero is in the denominator. Thus it is indeed undefined. Dipshit.