7 royalty cheques that’ll make you lose your faith in the music industry
One source claimed that, on streaming music services, an artist requires nearly 50,000 plays to receive the revenue earned from one album sale.
http://m.aux.tv/news/100455-7-royalty-cheques-that-ll-make-you-lose-your-faith-in-the-music-industry
http://www.metalhammer.co.uk/news/trivium-darkest-hour-members-post-depressing-royalty-cheques-realit/
http://m.aux.tv/news/100455-7-royalty-cheques-that-ll-make-you-lose-your-faith-in-the-music-industry
http://www.metalhammer.co.uk/news/trivium-darkest-hour-members-post-depressing-royalty-cheques-realit/
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Comments
Not really if the royalty agreement they have with their label is really that pathetic.
The only way to make money as an artist/band is to tour. There is no money in music sales.
These artists are seeing the result of their labels taking a huge cut from pandora and spotify streaming.
Pandora currently pays about $0.00210 per song play. So the guy with 1.1 million streams got $2,434 in royalties.. and his label took $2,417 of that.
Call it punk, call it new wave, call it whatever but the Indie scene and ethos that existed then seems long gone.
Probably unrepeatable.
Should be noted that 50,000 plays nets the artist $105. That's far more than one album sale.
There's a movement going today designed to stop this too, actually 2 movements. They are called crowd funding and Bandcamp
Does that all go to the artist, or does the label take a cut?
I was somewhat surprised to see this report yesterday. It's not only the unsigned artists who are doing it.
Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian is asking fans to help produce a DVD of his recent spoken word tour.
Scott’s recent show up in Glasgow was filmed with the intention of putting together a DVD package, but the project needs funding – which is where YOU can come in.
Fan can donate money to the project via a Pledge Campaign Scott has set up, nabbing themselves some awesome prizes that can include catching a New York Yankees game with the man himself, one of his custom guitars and even getting him to play on your band’s next album!
http://www.metalhammer.co.uk/news/scott-ian-launches-pledge-campaign/
The Beach Boys and Slash have also had crowd funding campaigns. British AOR legends, FM, too. I contributed to that one.
It goes to the rights holders.. so if the artist signed their rights over to a label, then it's up to the label how much they get.
Pandora says that 44% of the music played is from self-signed artists... those are artists without labels, and they get the whole thing.
She earned what she did when there was loads of money in the music industry.
There simply isn't anymore, it's much less than there used to be, thanks to piracy, iTunes killing the album (why buy an album when you can buy individual tracks?) and more options on what to spend your "leisure" money on.
And touring is NOWHERE near as lucrative as it used to be. Touring costs have gone up, there's less money in tour support money from labels than there used to be, all deals are 360 so the label will take a percentage, clowns like Ticketmaster get their cut...heritage acts do well but that's about it.
Who says I don't?
If the album is dying (not convinced it is) it is not because of itunes. It is because of years of albums with 2/3 great songs and 10 mediocre ones. Why buy an album full of filler when you can buy the songs you love?
As for there not being money in the music industry, bollocks. What we are seeing is greater distribution of sales and thus greater distribution of the money because there is so much choice now.
The music listener is becoming more discerning about what they will pay for and that is a good thing for music overall.
There's always licensing.
David Housden did the soundtrack for Thomas Was Alone, you can buy the album yourself from bandcamp here: http://thomaswasalone.bandcamp.com/
Standard videogame music license is 8 cents per composition, which in this case would be about $1 per game sold.
The game itself has sold more than 700,000 copies.
That's just the funding model. And actually that form of subscription funding has been around for centuries, especially in the publishing industry. it's just got a new name.
It has puzzled me though. You would expect crowd funding to at least support interesting new musics but we're not hearing it so far it would seem. Perhaps Bandcamp is as subject to the same fragmentation of audience as other media like internet radio and streaming? Or, it is like others suggest and there is simply too much piracy?
Of course, the 70s are unrepeatable because the past is unrepeatable.
Bandcamp is a distribution model, not a funding model. One that allows fans to purchase directly from the artist which is the future in my opinion.
I don't think piracy is the massive factor that people like to say it is. There is just simply so much choice in music these days (people have made interesting and creative music from their bedrooms) and the sales are more distributed than ever before.
Unfortunately you are completely wrong on that one, although I'm not sure anyone saw this as it is some what counter intuitive, but actually when there is all this choice people buy more of the same. This is the Guardian article which explains why music listeners aren't all that discerning at all. http://gu.com/p/243mf
In short talent doesn't stretch as far as the web does.
See above for why you are barking up the wrong tree.....again. The answer is in your own last sentence.
But as pointed out in the comments (I often find the comments on the Guardian are more enlightening), looking at the top 100 doesn't prove or disprove the long tail. One needs to look deeper, much deeper, into the bowels of the data to draw any meaningful conclusions.
In any case, I must be a statistical anomaly as I buy the majority of my music from independent sources like Bandcamp and CD Baby. I am not so sure that the long tail is a myth but it may be exaggerated at the moment but as sites like Bandcamp become more popular, I can see that changing. Or maybe I am just a hopeless optimist.
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20130529/15560423243/massive-growth-independent-musicians-singers-over-past-decade.shtml
I would like to see more people employed in the music industry. I don't believe in music just for music's sake, I would like to see British and Irish music at the top of the creative tree again. I don't mean to stifle optimism but I don't think there is a multitude of brilliant artists out there, I just think there are some. And some will make it and some will not. And that's ok. We don"t need lots and lots of good music, we need some brilliant music.