No, it isn’t really Apple’s problem. I suspect that the rights holders actually get better than a 70/30 split on Apple Music. It’s an issue with a downstream system, an issue that predates the Apple Corp vs Apple Computer legal issues or even the founding of Apple. Apple has little power to determine the split an artist gets as part of their contract with their label.
Aye. Letting them dictate the direction of the music industry has left an indelible stain upon human culture. [CURMUDGEON]Lyrics used to have meaning, music used to be good, singers used to have talent.[\CURMUDGEON]
Hype only gets a group or person so far, look at the “career” of Jimmy “Orion” Ellis. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), that means that those things you (or I, for that matter) don’t like about modern music are things that some people are willing to pay a significant load of money on. We might not like it, but someone (who may indeed have poor taste, or maybe they have good taste within a niche that we’d view as bad taste) is willing to part money to the music industry for supplying it.
You are totally wrong on ALL counts.
If the label finds a writer for the song, records the song, produces it, markets it, distributes it, creates a music video and pays the performer an advance on future earnings (which is not recouped by earned royalties in 80% of cases), then I don't necessarily see the issue. Many singers in pop are just a face that the record label put on songs they produce from A to Z. Labels need to recoup their investments. And of course the labels don't get a cut from touring - i.e. the artist benefits from the promotion the label created around their songs "for free".
Recent studies by bodies such as the BPI have proven that artist royalty shares were higer in the download era than in the physical era, and higher in the streaming era than in the download era. However, consumer spend is vastly different. Instead of having a small number of customers spending hundreds/thousands on album new releases, we now have a mass market where everybody spends $100 a year and most of their money goes to catalogue i.e. established artists.I'm siding with the streaming services on this.
Record labels have long stiffed artist royalties.The sad part is the labels are the one dictating the direction of music today.? I miss the old days when we had real music and singers place greater emphasis on music rather than theatrics. Today's music all sound like noise to me. It's only worth watching on TV, YouTube with the volume turned down.?
Reality is artists need major labels more than ever to break through the noise. The quantity of music released is phenomenal and it's extremely difficult to reach a sizeable audience by going indie. Only majors have the marketing bucks. Besides, majors have much better deals than indies because they are big enough to have bargaining power vs companies like Apple. Small DIY distro platforms? Not so much. So that translates to lower royalty rates for artists on majors, perhaps, but these are smaller percentages from much bigger figures. Plus all the financial perks of being signed to a major e.g. health insurance (useful in certain "small" countries without public health systems) and the fact that they pay their artists when they negotiate and sell equity in DSPs like Spotify.
As an ex full-time producer I couldn't agree more! Yes...as you said there are good deals and bad deals, but on the whole, the deals where the artists get low percentage splits are where there have been large advances so that's a big financial risk for them as they have no idea what the income will be like. If you are Rihanna then you probably get a fairly substantial advance and a good royalty because you are somewhat of a known quantity. But if you are a new artist in your first deal, it's a huge risk for the record label so the risk/reward ratio will be tipped heavily in their favour.
Well yeah, and that’s ultimately why they’re pushing on Apple so hard. Their own house is not in order, and they seem to think that being able to offer direct in-app purchases without Apple’s cut will save them. I kinda doubt it would, their business practices doomed them more than anything. I’ve seen job offers in my area at Spotify for a technology stack I actually know decently well (and it might be a pay raise), but I just don’t trust that I would necessarily have a job in the near future if I worked for them.
I’ve noticed that people are often inherently biased in favor of (artists, app developers, employees, etc.) against (employers, app stores, labels, etc.), especially when it’s a familiar face or they identify with them in some way. That’s not to say that employers (I’ll use that term generally now) aren’t in the wrong sometimes, but people’s bias in favor of employees (again, using the term generally) causes them to support the employees even when it’s clear that their demands are unreasonable. Likewise, while corporations can be guilty of malfeasance, so can employees. The employee who embezzles from WalMart isn’t some sort of Robin Hood esque hero character but makes it harder for WalMart to sell goods to its target audience, many of whom need WalMart’s cheap prices to make ends meet and get the necessities and nice-to-haves of life.
50/50 between the label and the artists? Who are the parties to this 50/50 and 15/85 split?
Performers get 50% of airplay revenue in the UK, but it's essentially 50% of (almost) nothing. They also get 50% on synchronization, for instance. Different rights yield different splits. But on recorded music (physical, download, streaming) they get their record label deal share, which averages at ~18% (bit higher than the 15% mentioned here) but ranges from very low to very high depending on advances / level of risk and investment from the label etc.
Oh okay, the 15/85 split is the record company’s revenue, so this is a separate split than than the streaming services’ split.
