{"id":4298,"date":"2009-12-03T09:50:41","date_gmt":"2009-12-03T09:50:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/12\/03\/why-the-record-industry-sucks\/"},"modified":"2009-12-03T09:50:41","modified_gmt":"2009-12-03T09:50:41","slug":"why-the-record-industry-sucks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/12\/03\/why-the-record-industry-sucks\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Record Industry Sucks, Aleph-nought in a Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a companion piece to Steve Albini’s famous rant<\/a> about how the pop music industry systematically screws its artist, theToo Much Joy blog provides a look at their royalty statement<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I got something in the mail last week I’d been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant\/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero income, and our unrecouped balance ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the same.<\/p>\n

Now, I don’t ever expect that unrecouped balance to turn into a positive number, but since the band had been seeing thousands of dollars in digital royalties each year from IODA for the four indie albums we control ourselves, I figured five years’ worth of digital income from our far more popular major label albums would at least make a small dent in the figure. Our IODA royalties during that time had totaled about $12,000 – not a princely sum, but enough to suggest that the total haul over the same period from our major label material should be at least that much, if not two to five times more. Even with the band receiving only a percentage of the major label take, getting our unrecouped balance below $375,000 seemed reasonable, and knocking it closer to -$350,000 wasn’t out of the question.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You can follow the link to learn what the actual total was, according to Warner Brothers. And that they just can’t really be bothered to follow through on their contractual obligations to people who worked for them.<\/p>\n

These two pieces are worth keeping in mind the next time you hear a music industry figure piously whining about how the Internet is taking money away from struggling musicians. They’re not concerned about the plight of the artists, they’re trying to protect their monopoly on screwing musicians over.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I have a little more sympathy for people fretting about possible damage to the book publishing industry. Not just because it’s been good to me– I have a tenured faculty job, remember, so I’ll still be able to put food on the table even if the book industry goes blooey– but because they’re about a billion times more ethical than the music industry. I’m sure there are some dubious aspects to the typical publishing contract, but at least nobody who publishes a book with a major publisher ends up owing them money<\/em>, even on paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a companion piece to Steve Albini’s famous rant about how the pop music industry systematically screws its artist, theToo Much Joy blog provides a look at their royalty statement: I got something in the mail last week I’d been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included… Continue reading Why the Record Industry Sucks, Aleph-nought in a Series<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,49,139,15,28,81,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-class_issues","category-culture","category-music","category-politics","category-economics_1","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}