Ok, here is my final input on this, taken from; http://blog.outer-court.com/forum/25240.html
The record company foots the bill for production of the CD. That includes recording, producing, and artwork (for the CD). They expect the artist to help pay these expenses, so they arrange for an "advance", basically lending the artist the money needed for production. The artist only makes money AFTER the record company has recooped that advance, and even then, it's only a very small percentage of the cost of the CD that the artist ever sees. Now, the artist has agreed to this, because the other source of income the artist sees does NOT come from the record company. It's the "Royalties". Royalties are earned every time an artist's song is played on the radio or TV, as long as the artist wrote the song. If someone else wrote the song and the band took that song and recorded it, the band makes no royalties. The writer of the song does. If I write a song, and someone else records it and it gets massive airplay, I get rich, and the band only get's album sales, which is small. That's because the writer of the song ownes the "publishing" writes to the material, and get's payed when it's used. When you sign a deal with a record company, they then own half (it used to be half, maybe more now) of the publishing. SO not only is the record company taking most of the song sales, but also over half of the royalties for the song/album. The royalties are payed by a third party. In Canada it's ASCAP; I'm not sure in the U.S. When you steal music, you're not hurting the artist, you're hurting the record company, and as I said above, "paybacks are a bi_ch" Artists and consumers alike have been ripped off by record companies for many years. Now they're suing the already unhappy and ripped off customers for downloading music. -- cparker ------------------------------------------------------------------------ cparker's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2083 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=25158 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
