torrentfreak.com — The Flashbulb, aka Benn Jordan, became so outraged when he discovered that iTunes was effectively pirating his music, that he uploaded copies of his latest album to BitTorrent. TorrentFreak caught up with Benn to learn more about the decision to stop distributors and 'coked-up label reps' from getting all the cash.
Feb 6, 2008 View in Crawl 4
toadlegFeb 6, 2008
An album costs a computer 400 nanoseconds to produce at Itunes, and an other 4 seconds to ship over the internet. The cost to Apple is about $0.000001, and everything else is profit, excepr for the royalties they...oh, right.BTW your perspective is broken - "what else can you buy for $1". What if they only sold half a song for $1? Or a quarter of a song? At what point does several moments of DRM restricted, destructively compressed sound become worth less than $1? What if you could buy 10 songs for $1? How much does it cost to fill a 40GB Ipod?
weareglassFeb 6, 2008
No it's the wrong label, the records were released on iTunes by his German distributor. See above.
kakcooFeb 6, 2008
Drama queen.
Closed AccountFeb 6, 2008
Courtney Love expertly breaks the anatomy of the swindle. The labels have basically legalized piracy and want to keep their monopoly."This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide. What happens to that million dollars? They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager. That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person. That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released. The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.) So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties. The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable. The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records. All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band. Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company. If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record. Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals ... zero! How much does the record company make? They grossed $11 million. It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support. The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties. They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That's mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry. 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. Of course, they had fun. Hearing yourself on the radio, selling records, getting new fans and being on TV is great, but now the band doesn't have enough money to pay the rent and nobody has any credit. 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. Like I said: Sharecropping. Our media says, "Boo hoo, poor pop stars, they had a nice ride. f**k them for speaking up"; but I say this dialogue is imperative. And cynical media people, who are more fascinated with celebrity than most celebrities, need to reacquaint themselves with their value systems. When you look at the legal line on a CD, it says copyright 1976 Atlantic Records or copyright 1996 RCA Records. When you look at a book, though, it'll say something like copyright 1999 Susan Faludi, or David Foster Wallace. Authors own their books and license them to publishers. When the contract runs out, writers gets their books back. But record companies own our copyrights forever. The system's set up so almost nobody gets paid. "<a class="user" href="http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html">http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/l ...</a>
fakesensationsFeb 8, 2008
last.fm have interviewed him over at <a class="user" href="http://nowformaband.last.fm.">http://nowformaband.last.fm.</a> He makes a bit more sense over there.
testiculeseFeb 26, 2008
Comprehend what you read!
testiculeseFeb 26, 2008
Very naive. Every sentence except, what they did would be illegal, was wrong.
testiculeseFeb 26, 2008
"enginemp3.com' MP3s have a bit rate of 192kbps"Garbage. 1/3 of decent quality, and 1/10 of CD quality. No thanks. (But the price is good)