Well I've mainly worked in distribution not at labels, but I can say that
Blink 182 (one of the bands at my former employer Cargo Records) made in
excess of 350,000 (that's just royalties, not mechanicals or publishing
either) BEFORE their last record came out. I don't think they're doing badly
at all...
Dirk van den Heuvel (dirkv@groovedis.com)
Groove Distribution
http://www.groovedis.com
Your Guide To The Underground
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Catanzaro [mailto:stevencatanzaro@sprintmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, June 18, 2000 12:13 PM
To: BAO; Jason Witherspoon
Cc: paul s westney; acid-jazz@ucsd.edu
Subject: 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.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jun 18 2000 - 19:46:42 MET DST