It’s probably safe to say that before being sued most are at least potential customers. Afterward, probably not so much.
=note= This post kinda got away from me and ended up on 3 different tangents…
Also, someone like Beyonce or Mick Jagger gets the bulk of their income not from royalties, but from endorsements, sponsorships, licensing, and the like. AND, shit is WILDLY disparate between levels of success and fame.
Take CD sales- Go into Best Buy and buy a $15 major label CD, and the artist sees maybe .10 or .20 CENTS of that money. Come to one of my gigs and pay $15 for my CD, I pocket roughly $13 of that.
Spotify and the like pay next to nothing, but they pay it based on actual plays. If you played one of my songs 24/7 on your jukebox, I would never see one red cent of your BMI license fees because their payouts are based on the Billboard charts- That money goes to Ke$ha and Justin Bieber. But if you stream my track 10 times and Rhianna’s track 10 times, we get the same amount from that service.
I might get a couple hundred to play a bar gig, or a band could get $3k for a wedding or good club. From that, I might pay for a sound tech or someone to man the swag table. A stadium act gets 30%-60% of ticket sales, but also needs to pay for all their transportation, crew, staging, lights, and everything else- Along with 10%-20% to their agent.
Were I lucky enough to get an endorsement deal, at my level it might mean anything from a 10% discount to being able to get their product at cost. For a #1 chart topper, they get a couple free guitars a year and a million bucks to use them exclusively.
Big stars, especially the attractive ones (video killed the radio star), get millions of dollars in cash, support, and/or promotion for modelling, commercials, and letting companies use their brands.
The stuff the RIAA deals with is a very small part of the money going in and out of the music industry.
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There is a lot of talk about digital communication tech taking away musicians income streams, but conversely there’s an analysis that it is actually the publishers that were responsible, (this is what I’ve heard from actual working musicians who were there in the days when musical performance was a viable middle class occupation and a routine job description, not only for media mega-stars). What changed the equation was a societal shift towards acceptance of recorded music being played in bars and other social gathering venues. The thing that killed working class musicianship (at least in the form that it had evolved into by the 70’s) was disco, or specifically industrially produced mass-culture tunes supplanting the live local player world that existed since forever. Prior to canned music played in establishments becoming a thing - a band could tour and play every night of the at a tavern and then go a few miles over and do it again the next week and make a living.
We can see similar patterns of abuse and profiteering in many publishing industries where the actual producers are exploited as the product - whether it’s academic textbooks, or substack style micro-blogging platforms, even the comic book industry to an extent - tons of fields that have an aspirational status perception components use these dubious come-ons to effectively indenture the content creators.
Obligatory Steve Albini rant here
(aha - that I now see @gracchus already stealthily linked to above! posting again for emphasis)
also citing … Inside the topsy-turvy world of record label royalty reporting | Boing Boing
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I’m sure there were harpsichord players upset that using the piano forte is cheating or woodwind players that said “you can’t just make a woodwind out of brass and name it after yourself!” And we know for a fact how people were upset about the electric guitar ruining music. And now it’s precisely the fans of electric guitar music that complain about the next innovations.
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Some old folkies are still pissed at Dylan, I hear…
Of course not everyone likes electronic music, but it’s like every other kind of music… some is really great, some sucks…
Anyways… Kraftwerk on my friend…
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Is that grouchester then?
No, that’s clearly pronounced like grooster.
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