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Are MP3 Web Sites Unfair to Indie Artists?

Posted by Roblimo on from the same-old-music-biz-stuff dept.

dafunn writes "CNN is running a story [from Salon] about how times have changed, but not really. The new breed of music distributors, the online mp3 sites, are still pulling the same old 'screw the artist' tricks..." This article sure paints a bleak picture. Anyone have any personal experience from the band/artist perpective you'd like to share?

2 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. More info by SaxmanISU · · Score: 5

    If any musicians out there want some help avoiding getting screwed, I suggest getting "Music Law: How to Run Your Band's Business" by Nolo Press. There is a lot of great info in there that can help you avoid getting taken advantage of by anyone. You just need to know how to protect yourself. It is proving to be valuble information to my own band.

  2. Tales from an indie... (warning : bleak) by Rift · · Score: 5

    We had a 'thriving' local band.. we could sometimes do 4 gigs a month, and had a fairly good following. We had pressed our own CDs, and could sell a few, but we wanted the almighty exposure. We figured, hey, if more people heard our work, we could sell lots more CDs

    So we signed up with a 'service' (that will rename nameless as long as I remain named). Mistake.

    Here's the picture: we paid for top billing for a week, and had over 6,000 downloads. One of our songs was on a 'sampler' CD. Great, right?

    Nope. we made exactly $0 from all this, and only sold 43 CDs. The profit we were paid lost us money over OUR costs to press each CD (our profit was about $.45 per CD, had we sold them all at that rate. But since we didn't we lost lots of money on the CDs we pressed in anticipation)

    We were not told anything about the demographics of the audience downloading our CDs (I'm sure 'service' sold that information to someone else, though), and we made no money. We now have two songs that we can not ever put on CDs (at least we can play them live.) that are not sold through the 'service', and life generally sucks.

    Now, even though we had a small local following, we are broken up. Could we have been contenders had we sticked it out? Probably not, but who knows... if a traditional label had signed us, we would certainly have sold more, made more, and still be playing...

    Moral of the story: The record industry screws artists. The e-music industry is much worse, however, and should be avoided at all costs. Hell, I'd rather have had our mp3s pirated.