The Industry involvement…

I don’t want you to think that in my last post, or this one, I’m moaning about the costs of being a musician. Quite the contrary, there is no more brilliant thing in the world of shopping than going into a music shop with your hard earned cash in your pocket and buying some new amazing toy thats going to make everybody jealous. You pay your money and take your choices. My point in these couple of articles is to give you the idea that the shiny disk, or mp3 you have in your hand and ipod is not the beginning and end for these people. Certainly the introduction of programs such as X-Factor have made this concept more alien – you walk into a room, you sing a song, you get Christmas number 1 and you’ve made it. Going off topic I think the worst thing about these programs is that it gives anyone and everyone the idea they could do it. If you really want it, get into the pubs and clubs, get your act sorted and see what happens from there.

I digress. So we’re about to burst into the murky world of the music industry as a career rather than as fun. This bit is very simple. You get signed to a label, which means you have a whole world of marketing, production, contacts to name but three at your disposal that noone would have given you the day before. But this costs money.

I’m going to keep this purely hypothetical and certainly different artists have different contracts, but I’m going to try to keep it as a average type of thing. Normally bands and artists sign a deal for say 3 albums. For those albums the record label gives you a certain amount of money (lets say £500,000 *at the moment thats a lot in the industry!). This money is essentially a loan, you’ll have to pay it back with a huge amount of interest on top. Out of this money you need to pay for your recording and all that goes along with that (mastering, production etc), your marketing and plugging for magazines and radio stations, and your touring costs – this is not simply money for your back pocket!

The first £500,000 you make belongs (more or less) to the record company. No one should ever think of people in the music industry as fans of music, they are hard nosed stoney hearted business men. If it all goes pearshaped you will still be expected to give this money back. If they decide they don’t like what your doing and drop you from the label (essentially make you redundant) you still have to pay this money back. On top of this money they will take a lovely big cut of anything else you make. Think of it as a tin of beans from Tesco, they buy it from the supplier, push it around a bit, sell it for a bit more, keep the profits. The music industry is no different in many many ways.

Other things currently happening include labels now starting to take cuts from touring royalties, merchandise that maybe made to sell at gigs, appearance fees etc etc  - traditionally all the things that would take the humble musician from being someone who earns a bit of cash but nothing special to being the more affluent type of human.

And that my friends is why you’re hearing about lots of musicians talking about file sharing, yet very little from the actual record label. But more on that next time!

Tags: anonymous musician, costs of being in a band, filesharing, illegal downloading, music, music artists, music industry, P2P

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