Check it out…With the way most deals are structured, you may earn more working for a fast food restaurant than you would by having a platinum single. Here’s why…
Let’s suppose you got a record deal, a decent signing advance, and sold a million singles of your song “Bodacious Booty Bounce”. Your situation may breakdown something like this…
Maybe your signing advance is around $150,000. Sounds good right? Don’t get too happy yet because you have to pay all of that money back to the label before you make a penny off of your single sales.
“Booty Bounce” sells on iTunes for $.99. iTunes gets 30 cents of every single sale because they’re gangsta like that. Seriously though, see back when the labels were suing people and panicking at the thought that people were stealing and trading their music on the internet, Apple (a fucking computer company), figured out a way to make people enjoy the process of purchasing music online. They created the market and therefore, set the rules. If it had been left up to the labels, you better believe you would be paying 2.99 for a digital download. iTunes set the price at $.99 which upsets the labels to this day. Apple didn’t care. They were in the business of selling iPods, which they sold a shitload of. It was a stroke of genius! But let me get back to the subject at hand.
Okay, the average artist on a label gets about 15% of all sales. So that means that you’ll get 15 cents of every iTunes single purchase.
Let’s say you sell a million singles. With you getting 15 cents per sale, that puts you at a cool $150,000. That’s just enough to pay back the advance the label loaned you. So you’re at zero. In fact, you’re in debt because the label will spend hundreds of thousands paying for your promotion and radio play. All of this you have to pay back, and I haven’t touched on what you’d pay to your management and attorney. This is why artists go broke. They never stop owing the label. Even if you manage to pay them back the label owns the copyrights to your music…forever! Naw, this aint the Sopranos, it’s the music biz.
So when you see your favorite artist showing off his duffle bag full of money on Youtube, this is usually money gained from touring, endorsement deals or other things the artist has done to capitalize on his fame…or he’s just plain frontin’ his ass off.
These days you’re better off staying independent.
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