Josiah wrote:Since when did major label give artist 15+% of every album sold?! And the only risk was touring? That's a laughable statement.
This is what people do not understand. When they look at the royalties that the record labels paid artists it doesn’t seem like a lot. It seems unfair. Until you consider the guaranteed advances. Let’s say the artist was to be paid a lowly 12% royalty by contract. That compares unfavorably to the 61% of revenue that the independent artist gets from iTunes. But the artist is always given an advance and usually the advance assumes moderate success. But 9 of those 10 bands did not achieve great success even moderate success. It was never expected that all 10 would be successful. So the result was that the record label artist actually received a lot more than that contractual 12%. The unsuccessful artist may have received an advance that was equal to 90% of the gross revenue generated by that recording. And most artists were unsuccessful. So your average record label artist was actually receiving way more than 12%. The artist royalty rate is actually the floor. It’s the minimum share of revenue the artist will receive.
