Re: General Pearl Jam Bitching
Posted: Tue August 20, 2013 6:24 pm
That's a very vague and misleading article.
Current industry standard for individually paid songwriting royalties is nine cents a song. In fact, it's not just standard: it's the law. So, if you write eleven songs that end up on an album, you're looking at 99 cents. It's also separate from performance or other payments...which can range from virtually nothing to around 30 cents. So when you read that "high end royalty rates are a dollar an album," or that "low end rates are substantially less," it's often a misrepresentation of the fact that there are multiple types of royalty rates, and a "band" or "artist" who relies on outside songwriters is getting substantially less than an artist who writes.
Let's ignore the fact that nine cents is the base or starting point number, and that an increase is usually built into contracts that climbs as high as 200% over various benchmarks (half a million copies, one million, etc.)(this serves as a carrot on a stick that most artists will never attain, while keeping successful artists feeling both happy with and indebted to their labels "generosity"). We'll justify not factoring that in by also not factoring the various "all your base are" record company debtor schemes that promise to thoroughly fuck up the first half million for any band, anywhere (justifiable...for example, 'return privilege' is mostly irrelevant to established successful artists, and completely so with back catalog albums)
Round to 90 cents and divide it by five band members, and you're looking at each person getting 18 cents per record. Multiply by the 31,000 copies per year that Vs and Vitalogy averaged together 2006-2012, that's somewhere around $5,500 a year. So maybe I was off by $500. But then, there is that radio play for Daughter and Betterman to buffer...
Anyway, that still leaves the 12 songs for which he is songwriting-credited (remember all of this is based on the very likely scenario that the band claimed joint credit for this on the legal end, as this is common practice) appearing on the greatest hits record, which has averaged more than 90,000-100,000 copies a year every year since its release. Greatest Hits are great because there's virtually no production cost (i.e. no label debt), and they rely on songs for which the debt line has already been cleared. There's a reason bands release these things all the time: bank.
It's also worth remembering that, for a successful band, all of these "this industry is bullshit man" details are very, very skewed towards the first million, or first year of release (whichever comes last). The label pretty much gets its share first and, until you have paid them back for recording costs and any loans related to touring, they get most or all of yours as well. There are a lot of other little things like that, but they're also designed to lean heavily on the first million sales. This is why bands love repackaging and rereleasing their hit records over and over again: even more fucking bank. If it sold a million copies the first time around, and they repackage it and sell another 100,000 copies, they may make substantially more on that 100,000 simply because they don't owe anything on it anymore.
Songwriting is everything. It's no coincidence that people like the Stones and Paul McCartney were willing to dedicate entire decades of their lives to fighting for the rights to songs that they were tricked out of in the 60's, and there's a reason someone wanted to trick them out of them in the first place: Gary Portney made enough in royalties off of the Cheers theme song that, in his own words, he'd never have had to work again if he hadn't wanted to. And he was saying this in 2012, long after the show ended. Don McClean acknowledged that he continues earning something like $300,000 a year just off American Pie royalties, and that was also post-2008 (I forget the exact year).
Now, this doesn't discount the Camper Van Beethoven argument that the digital era is shit to artists, but the victims there are the bands who don't sell a lot of records/downloads or are trying to establish themselves. But we're not talking about freshly released albums selling 31,000 copies, or 100,000 copies...we're talking about catalog sellers who have long-since passed all the royalty-bleed benchmarks.
Even now, if you take a song like Moves Like Jagger...according to Rolling Stone, Benny Blanco (who shares songwriting royalties with THREE other people and does not play on the track) earned half a million dollars in the first six months of the song's release from songwriting royalties alone (as in, not counting commercial deals or his producer's credit), from that song alone. The song was purchased in some way/shape/form 4.5 million times during that six months.
Current industry standard for individually paid songwriting royalties is nine cents a song. In fact, it's not just standard: it's the law. So, if you write eleven songs that end up on an album, you're looking at 99 cents. It's also separate from performance or other payments...which can range from virtually nothing to around 30 cents. So when you read that "high end royalty rates are a dollar an album," or that "low end rates are substantially less," it's often a misrepresentation of the fact that there are multiple types of royalty rates, and a "band" or "artist" who relies on outside songwriters is getting substantially less than an artist who writes.
Let's ignore the fact that nine cents is the base or starting point number, and that an increase is usually built into contracts that climbs as high as 200% over various benchmarks (half a million copies, one million, etc.)(this serves as a carrot on a stick that most artists will never attain, while keeping successful artists feeling both happy with and indebted to their labels "generosity"). We'll justify not factoring that in by also not factoring the various "all your base are" record company debtor schemes that promise to thoroughly fuck up the first half million for any band, anywhere (justifiable...for example, 'return privilege' is mostly irrelevant to established successful artists, and completely so with back catalog albums)
Round to 90 cents and divide it by five band members, and you're looking at each person getting 18 cents per record. Multiply by the 31,000 copies per year that Vs and Vitalogy averaged together 2006-2012, that's somewhere around $5,500 a year. So maybe I was off by $500. But then, there is that radio play for Daughter and Betterman to buffer...
Anyway, that still leaves the 12 songs for which he is songwriting-credited (remember all of this is based on the very likely scenario that the band claimed joint credit for this on the legal end, as this is common practice) appearing on the greatest hits record, which has averaged more than 90,000-100,000 copies a year every year since its release. Greatest Hits are great because there's virtually no production cost (i.e. no label debt), and they rely on songs for which the debt line has already been cleared. There's a reason bands release these things all the time: bank.
It's also worth remembering that, for a successful band, all of these "this industry is bullshit man" details are very, very skewed towards the first million, or first year of release (whichever comes last). The label pretty much gets its share first and, until you have paid them back for recording costs and any loans related to touring, they get most or all of yours as well. There are a lot of other little things like that, but they're also designed to lean heavily on the first million sales. This is why bands love repackaging and rereleasing their hit records over and over again: even more fucking bank. If it sold a million copies the first time around, and they repackage it and sell another 100,000 copies, they may make substantially more on that 100,000 simply because they don't owe anything on it anymore.
Songwriting is everything. It's no coincidence that people like the Stones and Paul McCartney were willing to dedicate entire decades of their lives to fighting for the rights to songs that they were tricked out of in the 60's, and there's a reason someone wanted to trick them out of them in the first place: Gary Portney made enough in royalties off of the Cheers theme song that, in his own words, he'd never have had to work again if he hadn't wanted to. And he was saying this in 2012, long after the show ended. Don McClean acknowledged that he continues earning something like $300,000 a year just off American Pie royalties, and that was also post-2008 (I forget the exact year).
Now, this doesn't discount the Camper Van Beethoven argument that the digital era is shit to artists, but the victims there are the bands who don't sell a lot of records/downloads or are trying to establish themselves. But we're not talking about freshly released albums selling 31,000 copies, or 100,000 copies...we're talking about catalog sellers who have long-since passed all the royalty-bleed benchmarks.
Even now, if you take a song like Moves Like Jagger...according to Rolling Stone, Benny Blanco (who shares songwriting royalties with THREE other people and does not play on the track) earned half a million dollars in the first six months of the song's release from songwriting royalties alone (as in, not counting commercial deals or his producer's credit), from that song alone. The song was purchased in some way/shape/form 4.5 million times during that six months.