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We've all heard that record companies are evil, but then again they often pre-pay an artist to produce a record, pay for studio time, mixing, mastering, etc. Th
by bphogan 16y ago
We've all heard that record companies are evil, but then again they often pre-pay an artist to produce a record, pay for studio time, mixing, mastering, etc. There's a lot that goes into producing music, videos, and books than you see. Open up a book and look at the production credits. People do indexing, typesetting, copy editing, distribution, translations, artwork, and on and on. So if nobody's buying books, those people get hurt. But let's look at the author directly.
Authors often get advances against royalties. Let's say BigPublishingCo pays you $10,000 to write a book. Let's say your book doesn't do well. What are the odds you'll get to write a second book? As an author, you're looking at your future and trying to figure out how you can increase sales.
One way to do that is to make the pirate copies disappear.
That's what publishers try to do, so they can stay in business.
- ThomPete 16y agoThe artist pay for the pre-recording not the label. The cost will often be deducted from their share of the revenue.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoRecord companies work in a similar fashion to the way company store farms and factories work. A typical music recording contract will involve an advance given to the artists which they must pay back via their earnings on a small percentage of the total revenues from their album sales (perhaps 7%). They must use this advance to pay for studio time, music video production, and other expenses. The studio receives a larger percentage of album sale revenues while also "recouping" the amount of the advance by taking the portion of revenue that would normally go to the artists. Let me know if you see any issues with this arrangement. Typically, by the time a band has "recouped" its advance and has only began to start earning for the artists and has theoretically broken even according to the bizarre accounting of the studios in actuality it has resulted in a return on investment to the studios of several hundred percent. Book publishing is similar but generally not quite so evil.