Um, actually I was not given the impression from the article that this has anything to do with kids. It sounds like the kind of place where kids are not allowed. It seems more like an American "massage parlor": private booths, "Internet surfing lessons" from pretty Asian women...
The problem with this approach is it does just the opposite of what it appears to. Theoretically, we want our $$ to go to the artists and not the suits, and that is just the argument the suits have been using all along: that these provisions "protect the artist". Well, artists don't get paid when records get returned but record companies do. Even if Universal accepts returns from stores at full price, they are still going to make money. Picture this scenario:
The artist is in hock to the record company for a few hundred thousand dollars. This is typical, and pretty lowball, actually. The way the artists gets out of debt to the company is through royalty rates: Out of the sale price of the CD you've bought at Tower, Tower gets a cut, the distributor (possibly a shell company owned by the record company) gets a cut, leaving the wholesale price for the record company. Let's say that's $10, just to keep the numbers easy.
The songwriter must get paid, by law. Last I checked, it was.066 dollars per song, per unit sold. Let's say there's 10 songs on the album; the songwriter gets 66 cents on the CD you bought, right? No, during contract negotiations, the songwriter probably "voluntarily" negotiated that down to 4 cents on maybe 8 of the album tracks, so $.34.
The rest of the musicians in the band get $0; they don't get paid until they are out of debt to the record company. Out of the $10 wholesale, they get say 6%, and the hundreds of thousands they owe the record company are made up out of this 6%, not the wholesale price of the CD.
The record producer gets paid by the company. He probably has a 15% cut of albums shipped. So he gets $1.50 for the CD whether you bought it or not, just because it's at the store. So the company is down $1.50 per cd for the producer, right? Nope. That expense goes to the artist to be recouped from their royalty rate.
The artist also gets to pay for packaging out of royalties. This is an absurd amount, like $1.50 - $2.00, more than I pay to do it myself in my room, and way more than an independant would pay a pressing factory. There's also a deduction for breakage that's around 1%, I believe. Also, the 6% they get is not actually 6%, since the record companies even in this day and age consider CDs to be 'expirimental media', and they pay about 1/2% less on CD sales. Let's say they bump this figure up to 1% because of this radical new anti-pirate technology.
The score so far:
Record company: $9.66
Songwriter: $.34
Producer: (100,000 units shipped, as an example) $150,000
Band: 4% (6% per unit - 1% breakage - 1% new technology) = $.40 - packaging, producer's fee, manager's cut (generally 10-15%), marketing/promotion, returns, and initial advance.
So, along comes you, returning your shitty copy protected CD to Tower.
Scenario 1: Tower puts it in its cut bin. Record Company gets paid, producer gets paid, distributor gets paid, Tower gets paid, albeit at a lower rate than normal. Songwriter does not get paid, royalties on sale are not credited to band.
Scenario 2: Let's say Universal refunds the wholesale price to Tower and to the distributor. First, the distributor is probably Universal itself, so the difference between the wholesale and the distributor's price is still in Universal's hands, but written off as a loss to be deducted from the band's royalties. Universal is now in posession of a number of "defective" CD's. They could:
deduct the wholesale price from the artists royalties.
sell the CD's to a third party to be distributed to cut bins, used CD stores, and/or Europe, resulting in the same payment scheme as if Tower put it in their own cut bin. And deduct the wholesale price from the artists royalties. Or
They could "lose" them. (to a third party to be distributed back to Tower, cut bins, used CD stores, and/or Europe). And deduct the wholesale price from the artists royalties.
This is the kind of creative accounting that goes on in the record industry. I guarantee that the copy protection WILL be used to justify paying artists a lower royalty rate on the front end, and to further reduce payment to them on the back end. That's just how they work...
I don't know if you've tried to upload anything lately, but they now take their good sweet time approving songs that go up unless you pay the $20/mo.
I recently joined a band that did not have an MP3.com page (I've had a solo page for a couple years now), so I set us up with an account. I've been used to about a 24-hour turnaround time on new tracks, but it took 4 days to get the new page up. In addition, they sat on our best track for about 4 weeks before posting it.
But if you pay the $20, you get "priority approval". Musicians being notoriously stupid and used to being screwed, I wonder how many of us are falling for this???
I think the best thing to do is buy it, send it back for a replacement, send that back too. Make the broken-standard discs *cost* the RIAA a large amount of money in returns, demands for compensation etc. Write to the artist in question complaining that you can't buy his latest CD because the record company have made it incorrectly. Get elderly ladies to take copies back and let the sales assistants explain to them that it doesn't play in their cd player because the might send copies of it over the internet. We need to make the non-standard cd's *expensive* for the music industry.
The problem with this approach is that this is exactly one of the ways that the record companies screw the artists: They write off a certain percentage of units sold to "breakage" and do not credit the artist with the sale, the royalty percentage of that sale goes to the company and not to the artist (or more accurately: to the amount the artist owes the company for recording, promotion, distribution, packaging, and all the other nonsense the artist pays for but doesn't actually own). Breakage comes from the late, great vinyl days of course, and the figures were inflated even for vinyl. The "breakage" percentage did not diminish with the introduction of the more durable CD and has not diminished in the 20 years since...
So, on the off chance that you folks really do give a damn about the artist and the flames you send back and forth are really directed at the major companies, this CD return idea is bad because it adds justification to the already ridiculous "breakage" percentage they charge.
On a different but related note, did you know that the companies, despite nearly universal abandonment of vinyl and adoption of CD, still consider the CD to be "expirimental technology"? Yup, it's been twenty years, but artists still sacrifice a percentage of their royalties for the privilege of having their art appear in an "expirimental" form. I wonder how many more points will be shaved off the average royalty, should "anti-pirate" CD's be adopted by the whole industry...
Vinyl is dead? Not to the record companies if they can make a buck.
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Um, actually I was not given the impression from the article that this has anything to do with kids. It sounds like the kind of place where kids are not allowed. It seems more like an American "massage parlor": private booths, "Internet surfing lessons" from pretty Asian women...
Picture this scenario:
The artist is in hock to the record company for a few hundred thousand dollars. This is typical, and pretty lowball, actually. The way the artists gets out of debt to the company is through royalty rates: Out of the sale price of the CD you've bought at Tower, Tower gets a cut, the distributor (possibly a shell company owned by the record company) gets a cut, leaving the wholesale price for the record company. Let's say that's $10, just to keep the numbers easy.
The songwriter must get paid, by law. Last I checked, it was
The rest of the musicians in the band get $0; they don't get paid until they are out of debt to the record company. Out of the $10 wholesale, they get say 6%, and the hundreds of thousands they owe the record company are made up out of this 6%, not the wholesale price of the CD.
The record producer gets paid by the company. He probably has a 15% cut of albums shipped. So he gets $1.50 for the CD whether you bought it or not, just because it's at the store. So the company is down $1.50 per cd for the producer, right? Nope. That expense goes to the artist to be recouped from their royalty rate.
The artist also gets to pay for packaging out of royalties. This is an absurd amount, like $1.50 - $2.00, more than I pay to do it myself in my room, and way more than an independant would pay a pressing factory. There's also a deduction for breakage that's around 1%, I believe. Also, the 6% they get is not actually 6%, since the record companies even in this day and age consider CDs to be 'expirimental media', and they pay about 1/2% less on CD sales. Let's say they bump this figure up to 1% because of this radical new anti-pirate technology.
So, along comes you, returning your shitty copy protected CD to Tower.
Scenario 1: Tower puts it in its cut bin. Record Company gets paid, producer gets paid, distributor gets paid, Tower gets paid, albeit at a lower rate than normal. Songwriter does not get paid, royalties on sale are not credited to band.
Scenario 2: Let's say Universal refunds the wholesale price to Tower and to the distributor. First, the distributor is probably Universal itself, so the difference between the wholesale and the distributor's price is still in Universal's hands, but written off as a loss to be deducted from the band's royalties. Universal is now in posession of a number of "defective" CD's. They could:
This is the kind of creative accounting that goes on in the record industry. I guarantee that the copy protection WILL be used to justify paying artists a lower royalty rate on the front end, and to further reduce payment to them on the back end. That's just how they work...
I vote for Robert Tilden!
I don't know if you've tried to upload anything lately, but they now take their good sweet time approving songs that go up unless you pay the $20/mo.
I recently joined a band that did not have an MP3.com page (I've had a solo page for a couple years now), so I set us up with an account. I've been used to about a 24-hour turnaround time on new tracks, but it took 4 days to get the new page up. In addition, they sat on our best track for about 4 weeks before posting it.
But if you pay the $20, you get "priority approval". Musicians being notoriously stupid and used to being screwed, I wonder how many of us are falling for this???
The problem with this approach is that this is exactly one of the ways that the record companies screw the artists: They write off a certain percentage of units sold to "breakage" and do not credit the artist with the sale, the royalty percentage of that sale goes to the company and not to the artist (or more accurately: to the amount the artist owes the company for recording, promotion, distribution, packaging, and all the other nonsense the artist pays for but doesn't actually own). Breakage comes from the late, great vinyl days of course, and the figures were inflated even for vinyl. The "breakage" percentage did not diminish with the introduction of the more durable CD and has not diminished in the 20 years since...
So, on the off chance that you folks really do give a damn about the artist and the flames you send back and forth are really directed at the major companies, this CD return idea is bad because it adds justification to the already ridiculous "breakage" percentage they charge.
On a different but related note, did you know that the companies, despite nearly universal abandonment of vinyl and adoption of CD, still consider the CD to be "expirimental technology"? Yup, it's been twenty years, but artists still sacrifice a percentage of their royalties for the privilege of having their art appear in an "expirimental" form. I wonder how many more points will be shaved off the average royalty, should "anti-pirate" CD's be adopted by the whole industry... Vinyl is dead? Not to the record companies if they can make a buck.