SoundGreen

Okay, so perhaps an artist couldn’t sell 200,000 albums with us… point taken… but we do think that getting the artist on tour for 90 shows a year (minimum) could help them sell at least 5,000 subscriptions.  

Subscriptions?  I thought you were talking about albums!  We are, to us it is the same… a subscription is better for the fan – they can download, burn, whatever they want to whatever content we have (just please limit the passing on to 3 friends & let them know where you got it and what a good deal it was for the artist).

Okay… so 5,000 subscriptions + our non-recoupable costs we give to the artist through direct tour support, equipment, marketing + partial transportation reimbursement (gas is expensive) + other perks…

An artist would get approximately (using ‘aprox’ because can’t really tell to the penny without taking hours to calculate every last detail)… ready for this… $85,000.  

I know you want to know what we make on that… well… not too complicated… our gross revenue is approximately $140,000…

So there you have it… you can get 1.3% and a guaranteed short career OR you can earn 60% and grow your career until you are ready for the big leagues.

We have been looking for an interesting diagram that shows how much an artist makes with a traditional record label contract. The premise is the artist sells 200,000 albums at $17 each. The artist/group receives roughly $45,500 from the sale of the albums.

Who else gets a chunk of the $3.4 million gross sales?

• Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Amazon (retailer) – $1.275 million (37.5%)
• Distributor (owned by record label, if major) – $340,000 (10.0%)
• Record Label’s portion
• Manufacturing – $150,000 (4.4%)
• Marketing – $600,000 (17.6%)
• Additional – $528,000 (15.5%)
• Mechanicals (split between songwriter & publisher) – $160,000 (4.7%)
• Artist – $344,000 (10.1%)

So why does the artist only get $45,000 when you show $344,000 in the calculation. Oh, we forgot to tell you that there are ‘recoupable costs’ of approximately $250,000; Managers need their money too (15% of what the Artist’s net); business manager commission of 5% of the Artist’s net.

Wow… someone created something in this hypothetical situation that the consumer was willing to pay $3,400,000 for… and they only got to keep 1.3% of it… one word – AWESOME!!! Awesome if you are a label, or marketer, or retailer, or maybe even a business manager. But is sucks if you are an artist.


The full article from which this chart and figures is based can be found at Performing Songwriter.

Why pay the artist? Hmmm… we feel that the bearer of the majority of the benefits should be the one who created the art (‘Intellectual Property’)… simple… right or wrong???

Well, we are working on developing our website currently and hopefully should have a Beta version when we go to Colorado for the

Well, we are working on developing our website currently and hopefully should have a Beta version when we go to Colorado for the South Park Music Festival.

Sorry for the lack of updates, not that many are looking. We will be getting some diagrams up in the coming weeks and hopefully a few surveys.

Hugs, kisses and whatnot…