At 8:22 AM -0400 7/10/10, dhbailey wrote:
I have no idea if the situation has improved any these days, but for many years that was very true, often with performers being on the hook to the record labels for a lot of money which was never recouped by the record sales, due in large part to "creative accounting" on the part of the record labels.
In the interest of fairness, perhaps I should explain this. And yes, I've had personal experience of it, up front and personal.
We're not talking about the companies' doing anything illegal (which is always possible, but that's a different discussion), just with writing very restrictive contracts that recording artists had very little chance of changing except for the very biggest stars. The way it worked was this. The record company put up all the front money and paid for the arrangements, the recording studio, the union musicians playing the backup, the engineering and editing and pressing, the manufacturing and the distribution. That was a REALLY good deal for the artists, because trust me, we never could have afforded it! (And this was in the '60s, before record companies stopped actually producing records and started just buying finished demos that the artists had paid for themselves!)
But the so-called "creative" part was simply charging ALL of those up-front expenses back against the artists' accounts, which meant that the artists never got a penny until ALL the up-front costs has been charged off against the royalties that were due. Not illegal, and not even immoral really, just sharp business practices and good lawyers! So yes, the record companies took in their wholesale profits and the retailers took in their retail profits whether the recording and production expenses ever got paid off or not. But the artists only got their cut if the sales were so phenomenal that the expenses WERE paid off. And that rather seldom happened.
The only way most recording artists ever made money was through attendance at their live performances, due in large part to the success of the record sales for which the artists often didn't make any money at all while the record labels grew fabulously wealthy.
The former is exactly true, as I've pointed out before. But I'm not sure the latter really is. If you ever walked through a record company's distribution warehouse (and I have), you realize that of all the records that company fronted for and released, only a few ever turned out to make it onto the charts and turn a respectable profit for them. In fact, it was the successful artists' record sales that supported the many other artists' recordings--like my quartet's!! So naturally, when multinationals started buying up copyrights as business properties, they only wanted to buy up the profitable ones, and that's exactly how the biggies like Sony made their money. But just as in the case of music publishers, I suspect that the "fabulous wealth" we accuse them of simply makes them laugh at our naiveté regarding the business world.
All that said, though, the system is STILL broken! John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:john.how...@vt.edu) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
