Download music

I'm with Steve Gilliard, I am waiting for the artists to realize that selling music directly to consumer is the way to go: cut out the corrupt middleman (record labels), and sell tunes cheaply.

As Steve says,

One day, a major band is just going to do this all themselves, release a digital album, make you pay $5 to download and walk away with fists fulls of cash. Why should Bruce Springsteen remain indebted to a record company? Ben Affleck isn't owned by a studio. He pays for his own publicist and PR people, and he's not arguing over how much he's owed.

Why? Because actors act like businessmen and musicians don't. They whine about theft when they should see the means of liberation is at hand. The record companies are going to fail like the old studios did. It's too expensive on both ends to control the talent and the production studios. It's a lot cheaper to partner with Tom Hanks than to own him.

Playlist: That's The Way The Money Goes

Regardless of whether the money Apple takes in from the iTunes Music Store goes entirely to overhead, many have wondered exactly how much of a $.99 download makes it way into an artist's pocket. According to the iTunes Artist-Producer Royalty Calculation document prepared by Los Angeles entertainment attorney Dina LaPolt -- and distributed at a recent national Association of Record Industry Professionals panel -- artists make less than a third of what Apple keeps and less than a fifth of what the major labels realize.


The document states that $.34 of that $.99 song never leaves Apple, major labels collect $.55 per song, and the artist receives the remaining $.10. According to the panelists, independent artists do a bit better.


While this may seem a pittance considering the artist's role in the work, such royalty rates are common with "real" recordings released on audio CDs. Traditionally, artists receive between $1.14 and $1.17 per CD. If a CD contains 15 songs, the artist can expect to receive a little less than $.08 per song."