Quote:
Originally Posted by Dirty F
Can you just answer me please?
When would an artist make more. If his album would be available for free on the filesharing networks or if it wouldn't be available for free?
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I can tell you.
The answer is: it all depends.
Take for example Gideon's kickstart artist. They get $120K from people to put out their album. Meanwhile another artist signs with a major label and gets a $20K advance. The major label artist will have to pay all the money back that is spent on promoting them/their album before they will ever see any royalties so most artists never see traditional royalties from record sales (at least those with big marketing campaigns).
So Kickstart Artists spends $20K of that $120K recording their album,then they give it away for free. They get some nice downloads and start to develop a fan base. They then get to pocket the other $100k plus whatever they are making at their live shows which likely won't be much.
Major Label Artists ends up having $2million dollars worth of production and promotion put behind their album. They sell 2 million copies of that album, but still don't make enough to pay back the studio. However, they score a top 10 hit single so they are making some great money off of performance royalties from radio stations. They might license the music (if they own the publishing) and make more. Where they will score big is touring. A record that sells like that will have them playing a summer festival circuit followed by a ton of holiday large scale shows where they play radio station concerts, music festivals etc. By the spring they will have likely opened for a larger act and are now headlining their own tour and playing in front of 1,000 -2,000 people every night.
If that is the case then the major label artists wins by a mile. The kickstart person made $100K and played for 30 people each night for beer money while the major label artist made millions on the road, but it still in debt to the record company because their record royalties don't cover costs.
All that said, if the major label artist has their album come out and it crashes, burns and fails big, then the kickstart person made more because likely the major label artist will only ever see the $20K advance and little or nothing more.