I wish I had seen this much sooner.
“Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million. So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven. [..] Worst of all, after all this, the band owns none of its work … they can pay the mortgage forever but they’ll never own the house.”
“Toni Braxton also declared bankruptcy in 1998. She sold $188 million worth of CDs, but she was broke because of a terrible recording contract that paid her less than 35 cents per album. Bankruptcy can be an artist’s only defense against a truly horrible deal and the RIAA wants to take it away.”
“Story after story gets told about artists — some of them in their 60s and 70s, some of them authors of huge successful songs that we all enjoy, use and sing — living in total poverty, never having been paid anything. Not even having access to a union or to basic health care. Artists who have generated billions of dollars for an industry die broke and un-cared for.
And they’re not actors or participators. They’re the rightful owners, originators and performers of original compositions.
This is piracy.”
So the next time someone tells you file sharing is shafting the artists, just look glum and cynical and retort: “No, that’s the work of the recording industry.”