Gabriel and Eno Start Digital Music Artist Union

An anonymous reader writes "We have long heard stories about how the record companies cheat their own artists with audit techniques that would make Enron blush. They are already applying the same techniques to the revenues they draw from digital download sites like Apple iTunes, which is one reason many artists have refused to allow their music be sold through them (those who can control it at least). Looking to take a stand in the digital music arena before these practices become status quo Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno are starting a new union the "Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists" or MUDDA. Gabriel, co-founder of OD2 - an iTunes competitor - has that company as a first source to negotiate terms with the new union."

Comments

Peter Gabriel has a conscience

[Space cowboy]

He's done a lot of work for charity, and lots of his songs point out inequality/bigotry/social issues. I have a lot of respect for a bloke who can make good music with such activism inherent in the whole thing. It'll take a guy with this level of credibility to really hit the music industry where it hurts. ... cos basically we want to reform it, so we can start actually buying CD's and so on again, right ? Or download (and pay for) them from the internet... Oh happy day...

Simon

Re:Peter Gabriel has a conscience

[daviddennis]

I don't think most people are buying from the iTunes music store to make political points.

They're doing it because it's fun, easy, and cheap.

And because they don't like leaving artists with nothing. 10%-odd royalties aren't much, but they sure are better than what the artists get through Kazaa.

Those are my reasons, anyway.

D

Re:Peter Gabriel has a conscience

[worm eater]

cos basically we want to reform it, so we can start actually buying CD's and so on again, right ?

Look... there are thousands of independant labels out there putting out music that's just as good as (and often better than) the major labels. Not only that, but there are plenty of sites where you can learn about this independent music. The All Music Guide covers quite a few non-RIAA bands with tiny distributions. If you're not sure which bands are part of the RIAA, there's the RIAA Radar, which will tell you which bands/albums send money to the RIAA. As far as distribution, Forced Exposure, In Sound, and several other outlets (including the music download services) offer tons of RIAA-free music.

Personally, I'm very taken with these labels:
IDEA Records
Beta-Lactam Ring
MEGO Records
Drag City Records

Here's my issue. The RIAA will die a slow, painful death. This is inevitable. Don't worry about it. Small labels are just as capable of recording, producing, packaging and (to a lesser extent) distributing music as the RIAA. If you, as a consumer, will do a little research, you can find a whole world of underground music -- sure it isn't on the commercial radio stations or MTV, but it will play in the same CD player that all your RIAA CDs play in. Nobody's really being locked out. It is very different in the software industry, but you all know abou that...

Just for the records

[Pope Raymond Lama]

"MUDA" is a portuguese word to mean "DUMB".

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female form. double "d"'s do not change the pronounce
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Re:Just for the records

[identity0]

And in Japanese, "Muda" means "wasted effort", or "pointless". Truely an unfortunate name for an interesting project.

It could be worse... I bet in Klingon, it means "Eno sucks" ;-)

Global reach

[BWJones]

The real issue is going to be "How to make these Unions work within the larger global music arena". Peter Gabriel has made strides in bringing global music to western ears, (among much other musical work, I first heard the Qawwali of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan thanks to Real World Records) but how to incorporate all that talent into an architecture that can help promote and disseminate funds to those artists around the world is daunting. I guess, like the model held forth with the small independent music stores, a healthy music industry (like the computer industry and most biological systems) needs diversity and the fewer huge corporations in music demanding defined profit margins the better.

Re:itunes at fault?

[Abjifyicious]

I'm pretty sure that in every iTunes sale, Apple keeps something around thirty cents and passes the rest to the label. The thing that can vary is the amount of money that's passed through the label and on to the artist.

With the major labels for instance, the artist might get something like ten cents per song sold. On the other end of the spectrum, an artist selling their music through CDBaby gets something around 60 cents per song sold.

cdBaby gets major digital distro 4 indie artists

[Speequinox]

I do Web design for a Middle-Eastern Jewish band, and, like 54,360 other independant artists, they sell their CD at CDBaby.com. Unlike traditional distribution schemes that leave signed bands with, say, 25 cents for every CD (which they have to split among the band members), CDBaby takes only $4 from every sale and gives the rest to the artist. They have already paid out over $6 million to independant artists, and they are univerally loved by those artists.

If the artist so requests, CDBaby will also shop the CD to download services like Rhapsody, BuyMusic, Emusic, the new Napster, AOL's MusicNet, and MusicMatch (no iTunes yet). The cool part is that CDBaby only takes 5% of what the download services pay them, passing on the rest, which is about 60 cents per track, to the artist, and when they do that they forward the detailed accounting report to the artist.

This is great, CDBaby has an impeccable track record of honesty and fair dealing with the artists, and 60 cents is more per track than what the vast majority of signed artists get per entire CD. But the potential for accounting shenanigans perpetrated by the download services themselves is high. They could simply lie, or fail to correct some error in their accounting software, and the artist would be none the wiser. CDBaby already helps independant artists by harnessing the collective bargaining power of all its members, but the additional pressure and oversight of a union like Mudda could help keep the pressure on.

Re:Paying for the missing middle...

[Anonymous Coward]

Albums generally cost $9.99 on iTunes.

The iTunes Quandry: 13% v. 50%

[ClickTheVote]

The Anonymous Coward submitting this story knows a little inside baseball that has yet to really hit the press. Standard recording artist contracts before 1998 treated revenue generated by licenses differently than revenue generated by CD sales.

For a CD sale the label pays the artist about 13% of wholesale, minus various charges like packaging deductions, to recoup against all advances. In a licensing scenario where, for example, a recording is synchronized in a movie or TV show, the labels pays 50% of revenue without any deductions.

The labels licensed some of their catalogs to Apple but want to treat that revenue like a CD sale at 13% and not as licensing revenue at 50%. That is why in large part some of the more popular artists with more leverage have been holding back on granting permission. It is also probably the major obstacle to record labels licensing for P2P sharing.

The whole thing will come to a head later this year when the record labels must issue royalty statements to the artists showing how they treated the iTunes revenue. Gabriel and Eno are organizing artists for that battle.

Music fans should be organzing too .

Re:cdBaby gets major digital distro 4 indie artist

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds good for the artist, but magnatune.com is still better for end users, allowing as it does listening to complete albums in decent mp3. They 'get it' better than any alternative I've seen. If/when you decide to buy you can download a high quality version suitable for burning a cd with, or converting to better quality oggs.

Bingo -- iRATE Radio

[zooblethorpe]

The project you had in mind might very well have been iRate Radio, available for free over on Sourceforge.

The system includes exactly the kind of collaborative rating you mention, designed to figure out what sort of music you like. You train it kinda like you train a spam filter, 'this one's good, that one's bad', such that over time it gets better at predicting what you might like, based also on the ratings of people with similar rating patterns as your own.

HTH

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If I can own an idea, does that mean I can legally claim some portion of your soul once I tell you that idea? Or even if you just come up with it on your own? Heck, who needs contracts written in blood...