A musician who worked in the sound track orchestra for a movie complained that they spent more on limo rentals for the stars than they paid the musicians.
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They get a salary and bonuses. Any profit sharing comes in the form of stock grants. Most tech companies work this way.
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The $43 billion includes concert revenue. I suspect that the 12% take is higher than the previous 7% because there is a higher percentage of concert revenue in the mix, making the artists’ take higher. Because streaming and CD sales aren’t close to the amount that CD sales made in the past.
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Interesting. The article notes that revenue for subscriptions, CDs, and concert tickets generated $20 billion, of which artists receive $5 billion, or 25%.
The reason they only end up with 12% is that the other $23 billion is from advertising and publishing revenue, of which artists receive nothing.
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Ex pro-musician here. I saw the headline an was going to comment that I was surprised i it was as high as 12% and then saw
The best part? 12% is an improvement . Before the internet came along, it was seven percent .
Yeah. That sounds more like it.
Actually, the best thing that could happen to artists would be to go back to the old 14/28 year copyright periods. It first that seems like a bad deal for creators, but it’s not. Shorter periods would prevent companies like Disney and Warner from existing in their current incarnation and controlling the market.
It would encourage the creation of new works, which is the whole point of having copyrights in the first place.
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The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
– Hunter S. Thompson (attrib.)
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I think the idea is that you wouldn’t be able to assign your copyright completely but only for a limited period. It would eventually revert back to you, leaving you free to monetise it once again.
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Well they did say that most of that is from touring revenue. As for music sales…It has been true for a LONG time that with the possible exception of a few superstars, musicians are basically releasing music for “exposure.” Perhaps a little pin money.
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I have never heard any kind of plausible explanation of how extending the copyright term for EXISTING works (as has been done repeatedly) is supposed to “promote the useful arts” It is rent-seeking, plain and simple.
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Which is even more true when one considers that music is not physically acquired any more (LPs, CDs, etc), so it did not matter to the marketeers or musicians (financially) if you did not listen to the physical products once the money changed hands. Now it is more streaming and online access, it has to be listened to, so it becomes less a buyers/sellers market, but more an attention market, along with all the other attention-sucking product markets - different competition. And I really do need to spend less time here, and more time with my eyes closed and my headphones on.
(Someone’s gonna stick a ‘why not both’ gif in here, I just know it. Well, reasons.)
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Right. But this article is talking about revenue, not profit sharing.
Last year Apple’s revenues were around $230 billion. If 12% of that went to the engineers that create the product, then that would mean roughly $27 billion. I don’t know how many engineers and developers work at Apple, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they get less than 12%.
The 1995 UK copyright regulations for written works were particularly egregious: they extended the copyright term from life plus fifty years to life plus seventy years, even for works that had already fallen out of copyright. So the Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, entered the public domain in Britain in 1980 (50 years after Arthur Conan Doyle’s death) and left it again on 1 January 1996 (when the 1995 regulations came into force).
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But think of all the works that authors will be motivated to create 50 years after they are dead. /snark.
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There is a reason why Disney was so hell bent on pushing for longer copyright…
Whatever the length, I’d love to see copyrights always revert back to the person/people who created it in the first place, at least in regards to artistic works.
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When art is created, it belongs just to the maker. How is it that it can be removed from the artist and given to someone else? Kinda like absentee landlords, there’s no intrinsic advantage to this, unless you’re a capitalist predator who gets the dosh.
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The advantage is that without accepting their deal, they won’t let you play in their sandbox (distribution monopoly).
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I’m old enough to remember when people thought that the internet would free us from the rentiers controlling the means of distribution.
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The difference being your typical Apple employee has a base compensation that’s likely much higher than your average workaday musician.
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Punks and postpunks figured out a work around, for a short time (indie labels, indie distribution, small record shops, college radio), but those have been bought out by the majors now.
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There are still a lot of Indie record labels (and even some distributors) but from what I hear it’s a question of scale. If you don’t play with the majors, you just don’t get on the radio, get into the bigger venues, get picked up by youtube algorithms etc.
I have friends who play in successful indie bands, who tour world wide and put out albums on bigger indie labels. At the end of a tour, they come home and work in restaurants to make ends meet. One friend told me that he was happy when the music was bringing in enough to cover it’s own expenses and the new gear he was buying, because even without copyright or rock star money, he was going to be playing anyway.
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