http://music.cbc.ca/#/blogs/2012/6/T...rding-industry
This is a 5 part series on the Music Industry and it's history; very interesting.
It talks about how it peaked with Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston in the 1990's and how even then, artists were being charged:
- breakage fees for CDs; and CDs didn't break but 7.5% came off their royalties
- reinvestment and enhancement fees to further develop technology; I think that was even more than 7.5%; I think it was like 15%;
- all the costs for promoting, recording
And this went on all through the 80's and 90's and was part of the cause of Michael Jackson suing Sony.
It also says this part of the history of music is over because two decades of young people have never paid for their music now............and they won't start paying now. So royalties and the power of the record company are finished.
It also says in it's heyday if you sold a million records, the artist made about $70000. That's all.
And at it's peak, only about 10 records made money for the record company in any given year ~ but the money they made was phenomenal ~ like a billion dollars. And when the money flowed, it poured in.
This is worth listening too...........but it is about 5 hours long; it ran for quite a bit of the summer on CBC.
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