Quote:
Originally posted by yankee04
I feel terrible. How can one survive on $20 million. How can one buy food let alone a place to live with that much money. Now you are making me feel bad for the lost album sales.
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Uh hello?! Do you have any idea what a small percentage of that $20 million goes to the artist? First of all, you have to account for the fact that any place you buy the album (Best Buy, Amazon, iTunes, Wal-Mart, etc.) all have a high profit margin (i.e. when a cd costs $14 bucks, roughly half of that goes to the store, the other half to the label). So now you're left with $10 million dollars, divide that between the producers, mixers, instrumentalists, record execs, promo, and artwork and there isn't much left for the artist. That's why so many musicians are being forced to endorse products just to make some more money, and now most labels are starting to take a cut of artist's proceeds from shows and venues just to make up for the lost cd sales.
It's easy for the established artists like Madonna, Radiohead, NIN, Jay-Z to break away from major labels because they have the money and status behind them, but up-and-coming artists won't have much of a chance except with indie labels or funding themselves. It really irks me that everyone just assumes the labels get all the profit off of cd sales, but what you fail to recognize is that if it weren't for the labels, these artists would have a very hard time establishing themselves. Labels handle all the marketing, which is a pro in that it helps artist's achieve a larger audience but also a con in that record execs tend to get an unfair share of the profits.
I suggest you read up on some of the things John Mayer and Lily Allen have said, or research what happened to TLC in the mid-90's. If people keep stealing albums and major artists take a more independent approach, then there will be no way for newer artists to thrive in this biz.
LOL.
