how u can get rich making music! (was... courtney love)

From: Steve Catanzaro (stevencatanzaro@sprintmail.com)
Date: Sun Jun 18 2000 - 19:12:53 MET DST

  • Next message: Dirk van den Heuvel: "RE: how u can get rich making music! (was... courtney love)"

    And if that fails, just take it as a tax write-off. If the artist,
    > however, earns the company millions, the artist is lucky to make what
    > a college professor makes.

    Well, even though I'm as anti-record company as you can get, that's not
    exactly true. I was a college professor, my friend made her recording
    company millions, and I would gladly trade places with her, dollar for
    dollar!

    Even if the artist who sells 2 million records barely breaks even on record
    sales (a literal crime, I strongly agree), that artist still has gigantic
    earning power, especially if they write their own songs.

    In the US, ASCAP (or BMI) pays the artist royalties for all forms of
    airplay; so, when you a hear a song on the radio, the artist gets paid.
    Ditto when you hear a song on tv, a movie, an airplane, muzak, etc. In fact,
    artists even (purportedly) get paid when songs are performed on jukeboxes,
    by bar bands, dj's, etc.

    How? ASCAP quite literally has scouts that go around and try to "survey"
    what songs are being played. Nightclubs have to pay a licensing fee to ASCAP
    and BMI to play their music. (You might see the ASCAP logo proudly displayed
    in the window of your favorite nightclub.)

    Plus, the royalties are paid on an escalating scale. If your song gets
    played in the hundreds of thousands of times, you're probably getting well
    over $1 U.S. each time. A song like "Yesterday" or "You've Lost That Lovin'
    Feelin'" could feed everyone on this list, and their families, for a
    lifetime, based on airplay revenue alone.

    In fact, sampling artists, ala Puffy, MC Hammer, etc. turns out to help the
    original artists. People like George Clinton, Rick James, and the Godfather
    of Soul benefit greatly when their songs are sampled by hip-hoppers and
    subsequently receive mad airplay. And now you know why the Roots, Dimitri,
    Propellerheads, and whoever else probably fall all over themselves to get a
    song under a Volkswagen or Jaguar spot. Either they get paid a huge
    licensing fee, or they get royalties on it, or, in some cases, both.

    And this is also why conventional radio is so terrible. The big radio
    stations do listening surveys where they put a bunch of kids in a room, give
    'em a questionnaire, and ask them to rate songs. The songs that win get
    airplay; and those winners are not the great ones, not the bad ones, just
    the ones that soothe your impulse to turn the dial. Because radio is in the
    business of selling commercials, so they're generally looking for pleasant,
    mediocre non-offensive material that'll ease you into the commercial
    segments.

    Since everyone more or less knows what kinds of songs radio is looking for,
    that's what they write. Hence Brittney Spears' writer, Max Morath, has
    released 3 songs that are, music theory wise, almost identical, or Dianne
    Warren, who has recycled the same chord progressions about 500 times now,
    keeps showing up on all the Monica, Brandy, and Whitney type records.

    Oh, and by the way.... most record companies take half of the airplay
    royalties too... but, at least that's better than 90%.

    (Oh no, it turned into another rant... Oops, I did it again. I'm so excited,
    I just can't sleep. Hit me baby one more time.)



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