The NY Times has an article indicating that Natalie Merchant "will release her next album, a collection of traditional songs called "The House Carpenter's Daughter," on her own label, Myth America Records. It is to be released June 1 through Ms. Merchant's Web site, nataliemerchant .com, and July 1 in stores."
It's stories like these that show the Recording Industry to be such liars and unnecessary middle-men.
From the article:
"The House Carpenter's Daughter" needs to sell only 50,000 copies to break even, less than 15 percent of what "Motherland," her last album for Elektra, sold.
"We're not trying to recoup some enormous debt," Mr. Smith said. "The economics of making this record are very prudent. When we sell 200,000 copies, we'll be standing on our chairs, hollering. If we released this record with these kinds of goals on a major label, we would look like a failure. At Elektra, if you just sell 1.5 million, everyone goes around with their heads down."
Ms. Merchant is not the first well-known musician to become independent. Prince, after battling Warner Records over his desire to release more music in a year than the label thought it could market, started his own company, NPG, and has since released double- and triple-CD sets at whim. Todd Rundgren markets his music directly to subscribers to his Web site, patronet.com"
On Wednesday, NPR's Marketplace had a story on several other musicians who have given up on the big labels and started their own. Read and/or listen.
From the report:
...the big labels are increasingly reluctant to spend their money and time developing artists that don't fit a narrow pop formula. ... The artist contracts are notoriously one-sided. Most major label artists, for example, will never see any money from the sale of a record until that record has sold about a million copies. This is because the major label contract stipulates that artist royalties are paid only after the label has been paid back all the money they've spent on recording the record, promoting it to radio, making videos (usually 50% of this is the artist's responsibility), touring costs and the artist's advance. But these costs can only be paid off using the artist's royalty percentage. In other words, if the artist is supposed to be paid about $1 of the retail price for every CD sold, then only $1 of the income made from the sale of each CD goes against paying off the artist's debt to the label. If the label's costs were a million dollars, which is pretty standard, the artist would have to sell one million CDs to break even.
Not many artists sell a million copies of any of their records. So, except for the advance that labels pay their artists in anticipation of a new record, the vast majority of artists on a major label will never make any money from the sale of their records.
The most shocking part of this story was that Aimee Man's former band 'Til Tuesday (recall Voices Carry from the 80s?) sold over 2 million records for their former label Sony and never made a cent. It's absurd! The big labels are dinosaurs and we are watching them drive themselves into extinction...
Posted by Brian at March 14, 2003 11:17 PM