Marcus Allen the Cat

jonathan-deamer:

It was recently announced that performance royalties are now a bigger source of income for artists than record sales.  My good friend and colleague Pursehouse gets down and dirty with some number crunching:

Chris Brown was at number 40 in the charts this week (week ending 43) thanks to shifting 4,658 downloads of his instantly forgettable ‘Superhuman’ song. If he’d have distributed that though an aggregator who only took a 15% cut (like Sentric Music for example) then he’d have pocketed £1909.78 (but as he’s on Sony BMG a good few people will have got a cut of that before he gets his hands on any cash).

If that song is 3 minutes long then he’ll pocket £54 per BBC Radio 1 play and therefore only needs 36 plays to earn more than he made from over four and a half thousand sales. Considering the fact that if you’re a regular on BBC Radio 1 then you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll also be a regular on every other pop station in the country and again you being to realise the potential cash that is out there.

I won’t use this as an excuse to bang on about my favourite hobby-horse of “the future of music is free”, “distribution is marketing” etc.  But basically, new artists, get your music out there and listened to.  If it’s any good, this will eventually lead to a bit of buzz so you get radio play, and thus income.

Don’t even think about selling your recordings until you’re playing stadiums.  Or at least have enough of a diehard fanbase who will pay proper money (ie. that which results in a net gain for you of more than 40p/track) for limited edition stuff, fancy physical releases etc.