Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Jan. 29 2008, 17:10 |
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Edit - I see that while I was writing this, Toby made his post which expresses similar things...apologies for any redundancy in this one
The thing is that, fair or unfair, Mike and Sally agreed to it. The record company is the rightful owner of the work and can charge what they like for it. Had Mike been that concerned about the royalties, he could have bought the rights and released it himself...
That said, I'm not trying to say that I think that the way some record companies treat their artists is terribly nice. Contracts tend to be horribly convoluted, and a 15% royalty is certainly not 15% of the price of the CD you buy (at the very least, there's a deduction for the packaging and breakages - breakages tending to be calculated based on the number of shellac 78s that would get broken in a shipment...I kid you not). Some artists have contracts which pay no royalties at all, while the royalties of others have been known to mysteriously go missing.
Other things have to be taken into account, though. Certainly the physical cost of a CD and the printing is fairly low, but the costs for mastering and design will have been reasonably high, and they'll have to price the CD to make sure they cover those costs. Some of the money goes towards funding experiments, too - the things which they spend a lot of money on, but end up making a loss on (though they do have a lot of ways of making sure that doesn't happen - including the current trend of taking as few risks as possible). There will be various other costs as well - transport, advertising, all those sorts of things.
I'm not trying to say that all record companies are fair in what they charge, but rather that even the fairest, most fat cat free record company would have to charge more than just the duplication costs plus the artist's royalty - they'd not be able to stay in business and be able to support the artists (and more crucially, wouldn't be able to expand to enable themselves to take on more projects) if they didn't. Robert Fripp ran a record label for a while (Discipline Global Mobile) where artists got a 50% royalty and got to keep the copyright of their work...it launched some wonderful music, but just wasn't able to survive commercially. It's a shame, as I always thought it sounded a fantastic idea (indeed, I used to mention it in discussions like this as an example of how it's possible to run a record company that gives a more favourable deal to the artist)...it just didn't work. I'm sure there's a middle way, and it's probably one which is being followed somewhere out there - it might just be nice if it was followed a bit more often.
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