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Some Bands Still Refuse Music Downloads
Zelbinian writes "Wired News reports there are a number of artists, ranging from The Beatles to Radiohead, that are still holding out on iTunes. Some feel that per-track downloads hurt the artistic integrity of albums as a whole; for others it's simply a matter of negotiation troubles. From the article: 'Since record companies have realized the popularity of iTunes and other sites, many reworked contracts to give artists less money per download. Andrews said while record companies once offered artists about 30 cents for each song sold, now musicians are earning less than a dime.'"
"It's amazing how many people go there," Andrews said of iTunes. "We're hoping albums work there." Andrews said he wasn't sure if Apple eventually would allow the album to be kept intact.
I've seen a bunch of tracks that weren't available unless you purchase the entire album. The albums usually have 1 or 2 tracks for sale individually but the rest require you to buy the album. I understand the artistic concerns, but if you would release some of the songs as singles for play on the radio, why not make them available as downloads? Or do artistic concerns end when you want a hit single so the album sells well?
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
It couldn't be because they get less per song than if you buy the CD, despite there being nothing to manufacture, print, burn, store, distribute, stock, or stores to man.
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I would recommend that artist negotiate a seperate contract for digital sales. My band is unsigned, but we get 91 percent of the iTunes cash (after Apple takes their cut). What band could be against that deal? iTunes is a potential cash cow for forward-thinking bands.
To be fair, there are costs for servers and maintenance, design and maintaince for the web site, and bandwidth to pay for. But I think that these would be significantly less than the above items.
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...but I use CDBaby.com to sell my music on iTunes. I actually make more money per song than I would per song per physical CD sold, which is how it should be. I also get paid per play on subscription services. And while that's just a fraction of a cent, it does tend to add up if someone likes a CD and listens to it often.
I chalk this one up to major labels just being bloated and greedy.
vk.
All of Radioheads catalogue is available on warchild. It's like iTunes but it all goes to charity.
Whoever said iTunes needed to get all the goods.
The better question is if there has been a change at all. While the nature of major label contracts means that it is very, very uncommon for the terms of them to be public, I worked in digital music both pre-ITMS and post launch and am very sure that bands on a major label were never close to averaging thirty cents a sale. There may have been an example or three of this, and probably still are but it was never close to the statement that "record companies once offered artists about 30 cents for each song sold". In fact, any averages that came close to this figure would only have _ever_ been for the situation where some smaller itunes content providers offered consolidation deals where they repped 3rd party or unsigned content to apple for more or less pass through costs. These situations never included things like promotion, development or recording costs on the part of the ITMS supplier.
Again, due the the nature of the contracts involved it's nearly impossible to cite sources for this, the same reason it is easy for a wired reporter to make up facts in their article. But consider this logical argument: It is well known that ITMS takes thirty five cents on every dollar on sales (3rd hand citation but other sources are common). That leaves about sixty five cents to the content providers. Even if you have limited knowledge of the music industry it should be easy for you to realize that no major label contracts passed on nearly 45% of gross income from their products to the artists. Whether you like that fact or not, wired is plain wrong in saying that "it used to be so much better" - and I'd bet that probably both the reporter and the editor involved knew that was an intentional distortion. From what I know, majors typically pass on between eight and sixteen cents per track to the artists, and that number hasn't changed much since the ITMS launch.
If anything I believe artist's gross revenue per unbundled song has had slight upward pressure though nothing very dramatic. As I understand this owes the the fact that artists gross revenue per customer with unbundled tracks is understandably down versus typical sales that are bundled (even singles shipped with at least one or two extra songs). Though for all the same reasons I can't cite that so you might as well ignore it.
Then, there's actually uploading. Don't own a Mac? Gotta get one before you can use iTunes Producer to submit content. If you're a label group, guess what? You still have to load your releases manually. Version 1.4 of the software allows you to import a text-list of track metadata, but there's no written spec, and if you actually reverse-engineer the spec from a sample export, you still have to set up each release by hand and load the audio in manually. I'd love to have the time to reverse-engineer the iTunes Producer software itself to figure out the XML feed, but there's only so much time in the day, and asking for the specs gets quite the laugh on the other end of the phone.
Okay, so let's assume that you've taken the time to load up the releases. If you don't have the bulk of content or a massive PR machine behind you, you're going to have a hard time convincing the content manager that you should get a featured spot on your genre's front menu. Otherwise, you get filed in with the rest, and if you're in a popular genre grouping, good luck getting the casual customer market.
We're able to sustain our aggregation model by giving a 60/40 split on all net profit (artist gets the lion's share)... and we're only releasing 5-10 EPs a week. It's safe to assume that, if you up the number of releases a label group/aggregator has to distribute per selling cycle, the more manpower's going to be required to distribute it. It'd be nice if iTMS had an open SOAP spec for reporting and content ingestion, but it should come as no surprise that Apple keeps yet another system closed off from developers.
While I don't know the specifics of how the big labels provide content, I think it's safe to assume that working each release as much as possible for site exposure justifies a bulk of the portion the label takes.
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The album is "Simon Says".
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It's not just Weird Al who signed a bad contract. Nearly all artists get stuck with the same ridiculous clauses. All the major labels give you a simple choice: Sign the standard contract, or be a nobody selling your CDs at pub gigs.
Take a look at this letter from Steve Vai - it lists some of the many ways that the labels burden the artist with every expense, fair and unfair, but retain all ownership of the songs. They short-change them even the few royalties that are due, require large upfront costs for any auditing to check this, disallow auditing of crucial figures like actual manufacturing numbers, then typically "settle" with the artist for around a third of what the artist is actually due anyway.
Regarding iTunes, he says even a well-established and popular artist who is entitled to 15% royalties, would typically see only 4-5c per iTunes track, due to such creative deductions like 15% for "free goods" (there are none, for digital downloads) and the 50% "new technologies" deduction. After, of course, the label has deducted all production and marketing expenses for the songs they now own. Read the linked article, it's hair-raising.
Remember, this isn't some naive and ignorant wannabe speaking, he's been playing for 20-odd years, including many years with Frank Zappa before he went solo - he's been around. He still had no choice. The labels control the radio playlist (via illegal payola) and the shop shelfspace, so if you want to succeed, you have to do a deal with them, and they will only offer the same "standard", artist-raping contract.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
It's a very rare actor that can demand millions up-front. Most have to settle for a percentage of the profits. However, due to accounting practices "considered odd by any normal business standards", 95% of movies, even box-office hits, somehow fail to make a profit - as defined by the studio, anyway. This article lists many of the ways in which this is managed, including spreading of gross receipts amongst poorer-performing pictures, "distribution fees" far in excess of reality, a 10% "overhead" fee to be applied to all marketing expenses, tax breaks that are kept by the studios & not counted for the picture, and many others.
Stan Lee got nothing from the Spider-Man movie, because the studio claimed it did not make a profit, at least as defined by his contract. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was produced cheaply and was a huge success, yet somehow "lost $20 million". Even Babylon 5, which took in $500 million in DVD sales alone, is apparently "$80 million in debt". As the creator, J Michael Straczynski said, "Basically, by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits."
Steve Vai says very similar things about the record labels' own standard contracts, not least their various bogus deductions for digital download sales. As the saying goes, the really creative people are the accountants.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Okay, given, but why should we care?
Art, music included, is not a pure expression of its creator, meant to be interpreted only as he/she sees fit, but instead how the viewer/listener/whatever sees that creation. Once a piece of art gets released to the general public, after all, it becomes, in part, the domain of that public body's imagination.
For example, if I like only two songs off of a Radiohead album, then why should the band dictate that I have to listen to all of the other songs on the album just to get to those two? What if I see those two songs as individually more enjoyable than the album as a whole? Is my preference any less important than the band's? And if so, how far are you willing to take it? Should we stop playing cuts from Dark Side of the Moon on the radio? Bundle songs into one huge (and annoying) track on a CD so that the listener can't skip anything?
So, frankly, I don't give two bollocks what the artist thinks. If they want to keep the precious "artistic integrity" of their work, then they can never release it to the public and keep it hidden in a vault somewhere. But if that's the band's only reason for not releasing already released albums on iTunes, then they should cave in and just do it, unless they're a bunch of pretentious wankers...
...oh, wait, this is Radiohead we're talking about...
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Music, is in the ear of the listener... not in the layout of an album... whether laid out by the artist or the label...
What and how I listen to whatever I chose to listen to is, and should be, up to me.
Precisely. Thank you. That's what I've been having to explain to every single one of the zillions of people who seem to be replying with nothing but "to hell with what you want, someone you don't know has views that matter more than yours do".
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