Warner Music says music video games must pay more. Apparently they signed deals that were acceptable but now think they should get even more.
Rock Band tracks cost around $2 each, which doesn’t include the ability to actually just listen to the song on my iPod or stereo. They do have the value — added from Harmonix and NOT the music industry – of the individual tracks prepared for playing, as well as animations and audience members.
The music industry can go to hell. They’re a cartel and not needed any more. Their practices are ruining what should be a creative free market, one ruled by the content creators not by the conglomerates who pay for studio time.
Edgar Bronfman, CEO of Warner can go fuck himself. Here’s hoping Harmonix basically tells him that and let his artists NOT get any promotion for their tracks because they weren’t included in the game.
Bands: stop signing record deals! You don’t need them any more and you’ll make more money publishing your own music online because it goes to you, not all to your record company who then decided that they spent another million on promotion which comes out of YOUR share.
Making money off of music when signing a deal with one of these asshole-filled companies is like playing the lottery. Only the very, very lucky end up making enough money to have a career. But if you publish and promote yourself — easy to do online these days — you can make a decent amount of money with little cost and little risk.
For myself I can say that Divine Industries treats The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets great, and does a lot of things for the band - like put our mp3s on all the various download sites, just to name one - that the band members ourselves would never handle properly or follow-up on. Musicians are kind of idiots, myself included of course.
You could do that through TuneCore yourself and not have to give a record company a cut of your sales forever, or sign over any kind of rights.
TuneCore would charge, for “The Shadow out of Tim”, a 14 track album:
One-time fee:
$13.86 (that’s $.99/song)
$.99/store, so let’s say iTunes, iTunes Canada, iTunes Japan, Napster, AmazonMP3 and Rhapsody for $5.94
Yearly fee:
$19.98.
After that, you keep 100% of the royalty from sales. They don’t take a “cut”, they don’t own any rights to your songs, they won’t overspend on promotion and claim the money comes out of your profits first so in order for you to pay that off you’ll have to sign over complete rights to your song…
(Big) record companies will be a thing of the past. Everything they do is cheaper and easier now, and is only continuing on that trend.