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At Atlantic Records, Digital Sales Surpass CDs
The NYTimes reports that Atlantic is the first major label to report getting a majority of its revenue from digital sales, not CDs. Analysts say that Atlantic is out in front — the industry as a whole isn't expected to hit the 50% mark until 2011. By 2013, music industry revenues will be 37% down from their 1999 levels (when Napster arrived on the scene), according to Forrester. "'It's not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,' said John Rose, a former executive at EMI ... Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours. ... In virtually all... corners of the media world, executives are fighting to hold onto as much of their old business as possible while transitioning to digital — a difficult process that NBC Universal's chief executive ... has described as 'trading analog dollars for digital pennies.'"
So there were NO good acts or albums from the late 90s? Seriously? None?
Nope. Nothing at all. Complete wasteland.
Actually, they do think they are paying the artists too much. They tried to reduce the mandatory amount of money per song they had to pay for royalties this summer as part of 'negotiations',
If by "too much" you mean "more than they think they can get away with" then I agree with you.
And it's not like the labels looked at digital downloads and said, well, this gets rid of pretty much all distribution, transportation and 'loss' from the ledger, so we can just divvy up that money between us, the songwriter and the performers. They did the opposite. They are keeping all the extra money. They continue to charge artists for so-called 'losses' (as a fixed percentage). They went over all their contracts, and picked out all the ones that were poorly worded, and then decided to pay those bands ZERO for digital downloads (songwriters still were paid, but not the performers).
So...you expected them to generate revenue from this new business stream, and, without any sort of contractual obligation, give it away? They didn't "decide" to pay the bands ZERO - the bands' contracted were written in such a way that they didn't owe them anything, therefore the expected behaviour is to not give them any money. I'm not saying the contracts are fair, or just, or a good idea...but they do exist.
I should add, I'm purposefully not considering any possibilities of fraud or similar illegal or tortious actions. These are outside any point I wish to made and should be dealt with appropriately.