XPost: alt.music.alternative, alt.rock-n-roll.metal.metallica, misc.int-property
XPost: alt.politics.media

http://www.alternativenation.net/manager-reveals-metallica-red-hot-chili-peppers-getting-screwed-money/

Manager Reveals How Metallica & Red Hot Chili Peppers Are Getting
Screwed Out Of Money

Q Prime’s Cliff Burnstein, who managed Metallica, Red Hot Chili
Peppers, Muse, The Black Keys, and Cage the Elephant, discussed how
bands are not getting their ‘fair share’ of streaming revenue in a new
All Access interview:

“Fair,” of course, is not an objective measure. “Fair” to one guy is
“not fair” to another. I would say that many artists who have signed
deals with major labels are not really getting their fair share,
because streaming is treated the same as single-track sales under a
lot of those contracts.

You have to start with the whole pie. Take the revenue generated by
the streaming company, then a percentage of it is paid out to the
labels. That percentage was pretty high, but even though they just cut
it by three points or so, it can be an enormous amount of money. I’d
say the total amount is fair in that the ratio is comparable to
wholesale and retail prices we’ve had over the years with physical
product. Digital downloads also had around the same percentage of
revenue going to the labels.

But the streaming business model is not inherently super-profitable
when paying all that out to the labels, because Spotify has yet to
make money. So is that fair to the streaming companies? Spotify may
say it’s unfair, as would Apple Music. From my perspective, if artists
are only getting 15% of what comes in from Spotify to the label, that
doesn’t seem fair to me. I don’t know what the exact percentage should
be. It depends; some labels have done almost everything for the
artist, while they have done hardly anything for others. The thing is,
if the music world becomes entirely based on streaming, then the
labels would have little if any manufacturing and distribution costs,
and getting 85% while the artist gets 15% wouldn’t seem fair to me.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)