Why royalties…?
Published 1 year, 7 months ago in My life.If I am a carpenter and I make a door then I get paid for it. I do not get paid again every time someone goes through that door. If I am an electrician who installs a switch or a plumber who puts in a tap then I get paid for the job. I do not get paid again every time someone turns it on.
But if I am a muso…….
I can write a song or play an instrument and get paid for it and, if I am credited on a recording, I can get paid again. And again, and again. It’s known as royalties.
Don Mclean was once asked what the convoluted lyrics of American Pie meant. He answered “It means I never have to work again.” Implying that the royalties would make him rich and continue to make him richer.
You can buy blank CDs in bulk for a few cents each. Anyone with a PC can copy CDs faster than it takes to play them and some software and recordings are manufactured so cheaply that they are given away as freebies. Yet the recording companies continue to charge upwards of $10 for a CD. They try to justify this as production and distribution costs but hang on; surely these costs would be almost the same as for blank CDs.
All of this just plays into the hands of the bootleggers and good luck to ‘em I say.
If you disagree, wait till the tradies catch on, every house will be classified as a work of art !
11 Responses to “Why royalties...?”
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You reckon the tradies haven’t caught on……I had a washing machine repair man, come to fix my machine. I’m sure he had it sussed within 2 minutes what was wrong…….but he acted out the concerned trady, for as long as he could before charging me $95.00 for a fuse.
If you designed the door, you would probably be fairly annoyed if someone copied it and took the money. If you invented the switch or the tap you would be demanding to be paid if someone else wanted to use your invention for free.
Artists have always been amongst the poorest people in society. The percentage who actually earn enough from royalties to live comfortably is remarkably small.
Don Maclean was one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century. His songs made a lot of money for a lot of people; radio stations, advertisers, record companies and the list goes on and on! Why should he or any other artist not be paid for work that has been so enormously successful for everybody else? At the end of the day his percentage of the takings was probably fairly minimal in comparison. Even today for a musso to get 14% of the profit would be considered a great deal.
Artists have fought tooth and nail for the rights they currently have - and believe me there a still plenty of ways that artists get ripped off. Last week my mother sold two paintings, after deducting the framing fees, gallery fees, transport fees, and material costs she ended up with less than 40% of the selling price. I believe that Godzillah will back me up when I say that this is fairly normal and she was probably lucky to get that much.
If you don’t want to pay other people for the work that they do, if you don’t think that the product is worth the cost, then don’t buy it, no one is forcing you to. But don’t use that as a justification for what is essentially stealing. If having to buy music is really so irksome to you, I suggest you learn how to play guitar or piano and entertain yourself with your own musical stylings, instead of paying someone else for theirs.
I wonder if you will find that coming up with something that other people want to hear is as easy and worth as little as you seem to think.
confession first here, i am a muso…
Thing is, once the door, or light or whatever has been installed, there is no on going entertainment value inherint in the installation. A door is a door is a door.
Key word here is entertainment. A door, and all the other forementioned examples are constant fixtures for want of a better word.
Thing about the music. It is an ongoing entertainment thing. To be theatrical, it is a friend. Chill out, soothe out, stir up etc.
cheerio
theshadow
I agree with you Gramps.
If everyone did it for the arrrttttt, we wouldn’t have these fat songwriting teams writing annoying tunes for the likes of Britney et al.
People would make the music for the love of it, like indie bands who have to work to pay for their studio time.
And anyway, downloading and burning gets bands more exposure than they ever would - unless they are signed to a big label….
Sorry Hannahsgranpa! Upon re-reading my reply above, I realised that I sounded a bit terse. It is just that the sort of reasoning that you use in your post really pushes my buttons. It implies that everybody is entitled to make money from a work of art but the artist, or that the artwork is not worth that much to begin with. (I use the term artwork for any work produced by an artist be they musso, actor, visual artist, dancer etc) It diminishes the vitally important role that artists play in society and by comparing them to a plumber putting in a tap, cheapens, amongst other things, their talent, their vision, their experience, their educations and their passion. Most artists put hundreds of hours into their work that is never acknowledged or paid for. Most artists will never be able to live solely on the proceeds of their art.
Having said that, there are many artists who are paid a fee for their work and never receive any further payment. A classic example is that of my brother in law. He designed the Boxing Kangaroo logo, which has now become an iconic Australian image. The image was designed for a client, he was paid a fee and thereby relinquished all future rights. If he collected royalties every time we saw the Boxing Kangaroo he would be an extraordinarily wealthy man.
I guess the point I am trying to make here is that the business that surrounds the artist, the managers, agents, recording companies, production houses, galleries etc. are in general the ones making the money not the artists themselves. When you encourage bootlegging and piracy, sure, you will stop these businesses getting richer but you also deprive the artists of the absolute pittance they receive in royalties.
I hate pirates… Ninja are better!
I paid good money to have my fence built. The fencer did a good job. I recomended him to others and others still, having seen my fence, asked for the fencer’s details. The fencer has made several thousand dollars in royalties from my fence. It seems every time someone looks at it he gets another buck or two.
The pleasure I get from looking at my fence is as nothing compared to that I derive from listening to a Tom Waits tune. Tom deserves his royalties and I am happy to have paid the piper.
In 1956 Spike Milligan produced a wonderful piece of nonsense - The Ying Tong Song - which he claimed to have written in 10 minutes on the train. The Goons warbled their way through some meaningless tosh and Milligan earned himself a tidy sum in royalties. Those royalties, among others, helped fund Spike’s career as an entertainer.
Given that Spike was one of the funniest men that has ever lived and through the blackest depression penned one of your all time favourite poems HG – I’d have thought that you’d have thought those royalties represented good value for money.
No, I still don’t get it. Surely, a fair days pay for a fair days work. If it takes three weeks work to write a song or a play or a book then you get three weeks wages (plus expenses) when you sell it. If you spend three days recording a song or 18 months recording an album then you get paid accordingly and you set the price of your product or your labour accordingly also.
I don’t see it as stealing if somone has already been paid and the work is in the public domain.
And fossil’s argument seems to be self-defeating. Yes, the best way to get more work is to a good job to begin with, I agree with that wholeheartedly. But Tom Waits and Spike Milligan have been paid over and over again for the same bit of work; where’s the sense in that.
And I’m afraid I feel the same regarding G1’s brother in law. Presumably he was happy with the fee he charged for his work at the time. Perhaps he should have incorporated his initials to as a form of advertising? As for your mum G1, I agree she was rooked but 100% retail markup is not unusual.
I’ll keep an open mind but so far I remain unconvinced.
s
So do you believe that - say - a car company should be able to use Don Macleans American Pie in their advertising, to sell their automobiles, for free?
Or a Theatre Company should be able to put on a Pinter play, for instance, and reap all the accompanying benefits free of charge?
Or that any famous painting should be available for reproduction on anything, anywhere for absolutely nothing?
Come now Hannahsgranpa I do not believe you are that naive!
If you go to a concert that these artists put on you pay for a ticket to hear them. Why then not pay a small amount to listen to them on a CD or whatever, you would probably hear it more times that way than listening to the radio, so why shouldn’t they benefit from their work? They get nothing when they are not performing.
Sure they get big money for shows, but how long do many artists last, the majority are “one hit wonders”.
There are some good tradies out there, I took my car to Midas inEssendon to have the brakes checked, and he worked on it for nearly an hour for no charge! When I asked him what about the time he had spent he said, “Nothing else to do!”
That’s exactly what I’m saying. If I go to watch a concert then, to my mind, the artist is working, I pay for a ticket. Quid quo pro. Of course they get nothing when they are not performing - neither does anyone else. Ah, but recording artists do. They get paid again for work they have already done and been paid for.