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RIAA Admits 70 Cent Price is 'In the Range'
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In its professed battle to protect the 'confidentiality' of its 70-cents-per-download wholesale price, the RIAA has now publicly filed papers in UMG v. Lindor in which it admits that the 70-cents-per-download price claimed by the defendant is 'in the range'.(pdf) From the article: 'The pricing data really may not be all that secret. Late in 2005, former New York Attorney General (and current Governor) Eliot Spitzer launched an investigation into price fixing by the record labels, alleging collusion between the major labels in their dealings with the online music industry. Gabriel believes that making the pricing information public would 'implicate [sic] very real antitrust concerns' as the labels are not supposed to share contract information with one another ... Beckerman argues in a letter to the judge that the only reason the labels want to keep this information confidential is to 'serve their strategic objectives for other cases,' which he says does not rise to the legal threshold necessary for a protective order. The proposed order would force the labels to turn over contracts with their 12 largest customers. Most details--such as the identities of the parties--would be kept confidential, but pricing information and volume would not.'"
No matter how many more songs there are on a disc, an album is nearly always defined as containing 10 songs in a recording contract. And payment is based on that figure to the artist, which means the labels do a good deal better on CD sales than online downloads, though that doesn't account for materials costs I suspose.
Quite true, and many more costs besides. The artists have to bear the entire cost of creating and selling the album, before they get any royalties.
Fair enough, you say? Perhaps - except they don't get to keep it. That album, that they conceived, wrote, performed, recorded, marketed and paid for in full, is no longer theirs. Copyright for the album is owned by the LABEL, and NOT the artist. That really sucks.
Time to link to Steve Vai's words of experience too, on this and the many other nefarious clauses that appear in a standard label contract.Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?