Music Labels Charge Too Much For Microsoft

Bret540 writes "Yahoo is reporting that Microsoft has ended license talks with four major music labels. From the article: 'The paper [the Wall Street Journal] reported negotiations broke down Friday over what Microsoft considered high royalty rates.' How much more can the music labels demand when even Microsoft won't go to market? With other recent developments, one must wonder how long the music industry can keep pushing."

Comments

Re:Music Industry?

[dgatwood]

UImm... third-party performances are licensed by ASCAP/BMI/SESAC, not the RIAA. The day the RIAA starts going after that market, I and other ASCAP members will be calling for the RIAA's proverbial head on a platter.

:-D

Re:Yahoo!

[Alex P Keaton in da]

Music is a loss leader for Yahoo. A loss leader is when you sell something at a loss in order to get customers into your store, hoping they will buy other things while they are there....
Yahoo composing music download plan
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5152860.html

Re:Gotta love the music industry

[yabos]

WTF are you talking about? That's not what this is about at all.

Re:When..

[the arbiter]

The contracts aren't guesses. The going royalty rate is 5% of net sales, minus expenses. Put another way, one million albums sold at twenty bucks a pop returns about 20 million gross dollars.

Of which the record stores get about 2-3 million.
Of which the artist sees 1 million, BEFORE all the expenses (promotion of every kind, recording of the album, mastering of the album, artwork on the album, videos (realize that a video typically runs $500,000 by itself) payola, 'promotional tours', etc.)

The record company makes at least 17 million and all their expenses are covered out of pocket by the artist.

There's some good reasons I don't play for a living anymore...it's not much of a living, making 30,000/yr before taxes.