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How iTunes Hurts Weird Al
Johnny X writes "Weird Al Yankovic recently said he makes far less money when you buy from iTunes than when you buy an actual CD. This guy did the math and showed that Weird Al could be losing up to 85% of his record sales income due to the 'weird' ways the record companies compute digital sales. Are all artists getting the shaft like this?"
Actually, a lot of artists never got to sign for digital.
For example, with web/digital radio. RIAA bought off Congress so that they could collect royalties for all music played over webcasts. Guess what, my friend's band whom I'm the manager for...never got to negotiate.
RIAA is !@#$% up....
I must say that from my own personal experience, Weird Al is a nice guy willing to watch out for his fans... I wrote him a letter once (when CD's were the rage) and asked him where I could purchase his albums, stating that I had a hard time finding them in local shops. He responded (or his lackeys, whatever- they refelct his attitude IMHO) thanking me for being a fan and shipped me ALL of his albums for free.
Some rare fan treatment if you ask me. Now, it may be that he makes much less on iTunes sales, but I'm sure he's not hurting- hopefully he remembers his bill-paying fans that make him what he is.
Wow! This must be a PERSONAL letter, just for me!
Steve Vai said the same thing a couple of years ago: http://www.vai.com/AllAboutSteve/postcard_040220.h tml
Here's an excerpt about iTunes in particular:
For instance, If you go to Itunes and download a song for $.99, Apple retains about $.34 and the label receives about $.65. Labels then calculate a royalty base price to apply to the artists deal points. Following are some of the deductions:
a. A packaging fee (container cost) of up to, and sometimes more than, 25%. That's 25% of retail which is $.99 equaling about $.25 (by the way, there is no packaging on a digital download).
b. A 15% deduction for free goods. That's an additional $.15 or so. (There is usually no free goods with digital downloads unless someone is ripping it from the net.
That leaves a royalty base price of close to $.60 per track that the artists royalty is calculated against. If an artist receives 15 points in their deal (and remember, that's a very good deal) then he is entitled to aprox. $.09 a track. This is then cut in half because of the "new technology clause" that is incorporated into most deals. The artists royalty is then calced out at $.04-.05 a download and from that, 100% of it is withheld by the label to go towards recoupment of any advances to make the record, advances in general, tour support, radio promotion and other things in some cases. Most managers and producers are paid from record one and are paid regardless of the expenses, leaving the artists with even more of a recoupment burden before they start to see any income.
IOW, freakin' artist needs to be extremely lucky to see ANY of the money, ever, despite the fact that it's his work being sold. OTOH he may be able repay his debt to the label - this is something they won't be able to do if their stuff is sold through allofmp3.com.
Here's my experience as an indie artist.
I sell CDs through CDBaby, which gives me digital distribution through iTunes and other services. If you buy one of my tracks on iTunes (the store that pays me the most), I make between 59.1 and 63.7 cents, depending on the track. I'm not sure why one track pays more than another, but I notice that my best-selling track pays 63.7 cents. A full album download on iTunes gets me $6.37, after CDBaby takes their flat 9 percent cut.
That's not much different from what I get from my physical sales, but that's by choice. The deal with CDBaby is, I set my price as I wish, then they tack on their own $4 overhead. So I said I wanted $6.50 per CD, and my CD sells for $10.50.
Online sales also allow for tiny sales - if you stream my song on one of many services, for example, I might get a fraction of a cent or as much as four cents.
At any rate, for me, digital sale prices are merely out of my control - iTunes will charge what it wants, take a certain cut, let CDBaby take a certain cut, and I'll get the rest. On my physical sales, I can decide how much I want per CD, assuming I can find customers at the price I set.
[salesplug] If anybody wants to check me out on CDBaby, I'm at http://www.cdbaby.com/nathanlong [/salesplug]
It's been said before, and it has to be said again--the RIAA is merely a lobby group that represents the labels. The RIAA has nothing to do with Weird Al's contract; his label does. People have been mindlessly referring to "the RIAA" for so long that they think it's interchangeable with the music industry and any and all record labels.
This is a contract issue between Weird Al and his label. However, I expect most of the Slashdot discussion to devolve toward another generalized music industry bashing session instead of focusing on the actual topic here of Weird Al and his label contract...
"Sufferin' succotash."
But, here's my thing. Saying that a wildly successful artist (like Weird Al definitely is) is aggrieved by a distribution that, OMG, reduces the profit per sale of his songs, is like saying that professional baseball players are aggrieved when there is a absurdly high salary cap installed; yeah, its technically true in the sense that they aren't quite as filthy rich as before, but I won't weep that much for them.
OTOH, there are those artists, let us call them the 'filthy rabble (tm)' who aren't successful, and under normal circumstances wouldn't generate enough sales potential to justify to a record label the cost and risk of publishing their work. For these folks, an electronic distribution model is the only likely way for themto ever hope to get content to potential consumers.
Point the third, its not like sucessful artists don't have leverage when dealing with major labels. Volcano, which is Weird Al's label, was embroiled, for example, in a contarct dispute with Tool, another wildly successful band. Tool, after a protracted argument, prevailed in most of the ways that matter. Artists can leverage their potential future sales to benefit them in contract negotiations, and they do it all the time.
There is plenty to complain about in the music industry, and the RIAA and the labels on behalf of whom they lobby are in many ways foolish in their relatively unenlightened pursuit of bare self-interested greed, but this, I do believe, is not a good example of that trend. It is simply a successful artist going through the relatively painless 'pain' of adjusting to a new distribution paradigm. There are better thinsg to complain about (like pushing very short sighted DRM schemes that treat all customers like would-be criminals rather than treating them, oh I don't know, well). P.S., I like Weird Al's work; he's a hell of a satirist.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)