Entertainment For Lively Minds
Canadian Record Industry Association faces huge bill over 'infringement'
Posted by el hombre malo on 9 December 2009 - 11:34am.
It's a long piece, but an interesting perspective on how record companies work : 300,000 songs used on compilations but not cleared!
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/735096--geist-record-industry-fa...
The bill could be between $50 million and $60 billion (if calculated on how the CRIA works out breaches of copyright by illegal downloaders)
What does The Massive think ? Will the CRIA pay up ? How have they got away with it for so long ?
- More from el hombre malo.
- Login or register to post comments
-
Fantastic
Lets hop the artists win. Kind of puts paid to the idea that the record industry is trying to protect the artists.
The intenational labels would pull out of Canada altogether
rather than pay a bill of that size.
(Not that it would ever come to that, of course. I suspect it's just a publicity grab)
First Nickelback, now this
those Canadians, eh!
Not entirely dissimilar
Reminds me of this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/06/edwyn-collins-sharing-music
Maybe Rob Fitzgerald should set his self-righteous sweary illegal download police on the big boys for a change...
Obviously everything owed should be paid...
...but please bear in mind that a great deal of artists owe their record companies.
The most illuminating thing on the web in months is this royalty statement for a band called Too Much Joy. They have been campaigning for ages for Warner Bros to give them an accounting of what they were owed for digital downloads.
Eventually they got it: for specific downloads of their songs they had earned twenty cents; for subscription services they were owed a further $62.27. They were entitled to that money as soon as they paid off the $395, 277.18 that the record company had advanced to them.
..in fairness
if you change your last paragraph to 'for specific downloads of their songs they WERE TOLD THEY had earned twenty cents' it'd be a bit more accurate. Very interesting article, thanks for the link.
Excellent article
The main point of which seemed to be not that record companies lose money on bands but that they are extraordinarily bad at reporting how much.
record co accounting
I very much doubt that the label lost money on the band.
The $400,000 odd that TMJ owes to the label doesn't represent $400,000 that the label lost on them... that's just the amount they have to recoup out of their royalty, ie out of the 10 cents or so they make per record sold.
The label made (guessing) $3 or $4 per record sold, and the band sold a fair few records in their day, not huge, but quite decent.
It would be interesting though
to see what makes up the figure of $395,277.18. that the band has been "advanced' during this period!
Well, I would imagine...
...it's the money they spent on making the records and promoting them.
Well yes
but to look at it and draw any meaningful conclusions it would be more than useful to see what items were included in the total of $395,277.00 that the record company charged to the band..No? We have the breakdown in sales why not the expenses?
But that would be FAR too helpful to the band
It's to the record company's advantage to keep the band in the dark as much as possible, and whilst they're unrecouped the record company have the whip hand.