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On 02/05/12 15:18, Martijn Grooten wrote:
A musician, if they're extremely lucky, gets 10% of the sale price of a product that’s practically free to distribute. A (big) farmer gets around 30% of a product that has real distribution costs. The farmer still gets screwed but how much milk would you buy if it was 3 times the price. Ditto the music industry. So how many sales are musicians loosing because of exorbitant pricing and restrictive practices the music industry? I'd guess the market would be 4 or 5 times larger in real terms without the industry. For every artist they push they put another several hundred (more talented) artists out of making a living from music. There used to be bands in most pubs but a law got passed 'to protect the IP of the industry' and no longer can you see local talent and buy their CD's direct from them. Fortunately you can hear them on the internet but its a lot more restrictive.On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Julian Hall wrote:That's the difference in the case of the music industry. People like the BPI are claiming that piracy is robbing the *artists* of their revenue, while everyone knows it's the big music publishers like Sony etc who are losing the most because they take the most. If the companies gave the artists - without whom they'd have zero income - a reasonable percentage I think more people would be sympathetic to their argument.The point I'm trying to make is that there's nothing unreasonable about the percentage the artist gets. And artists do lose out as revenues for the music industry decrease. You may not think the percentage they get is reasonable, but it's still a percentage. Which means that if sales halve, so does their income through record sales. Which is why some artists (Metallica, most famously) are vocal opponents of file sharing.Remember the artists can survive without the publishers - the example I quoted earlier of Prince - but the promoters cannot survive without the artists and it's about time they realised that IMHO.But Prince is an exceptionally successful and well-known artist. He doesn't need promotion to sell his new album, and if he signs a deal with some newspapers, distribution is also taken care of. Likewise, if you are a tomato farmer and for some reason people really want to buy _your_ tomatoes, then you can can them on your farm and sell them to anyone who comes to buy them -- and thus sell them at a lower price, while striking a bigger profit. That's of course an unreasonable scenario, but Prince is exceptional among artists that he has the option of doing it this way. If you're an average artist, even if you can live off your music (which would make you exceptionally successful), and you want to make money through selling CDs, you still need the CDs to make it to the people and the people to know about your new CD in the first place. Mind you, I do think that most of what the record industry does isn't necessary any more and the way artists make money will change (and is already changing). But that is because it is outdated, not because it was wrong in some kind of way. Martijn.
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