Earlier quoted context omitted.
Culture has shifted and now piracy is not looked at as a real crime, but a passage of rite. These streaming services came around as an alternative to piracy and not paying anything for content anywhere. We're witness the bankrupting of artists over time. And it amazes me that on a forum of content creators, you can see the self-interested individuals rationalizing it as fair. We can argue about the business models al…
Have you considered that most of the money goes to the label rather than to the artist? [1][2] Unless you're paying them directly, you're still not paying the artist. Streaming and piracy don't even come close to the drain that labels put on income flow to artists. Artists made just about $23.40 for every $1000 their songs sold for in 2010, according to TechDirt [2]. I wish the world were as you described. But it's n…
Re: To Apple, Love Taylor
#471Labels put up all the capital (in the Techdirt example, they're getting a return of about 1.5:1 on a hypothetical investment of $4.4 million) but a lot of their bets don't work out, so the acts that do sell well are to some degree subsidizing the ones that don't. This doesn't make as much sense in a world of flatened low-cost distribution channels, but many digiterati have never given much thought to the economics of physical media production. IF you look at the balance sheets of media companies you see their profit margins tend to be in line with other industries - looking at it from the perspective of what actually flows back to shareholders rather than from the perspective of an individual band. After all, if a label puts out an album and it bombs, the loss falls on the label - the artist/band doesn't have any further obligation once the terms of the contract are fulfilled. In this sense, publishers act like VCs for the arts.