You are wrong about my motivation.
And tTalk to Drew Sanders at Sony. He’ll tell you they buy out the publishing contract if they really want the artist.
I love you aj, you know so much about everything.
But i dont seek attention, i seek facts.
Like ROFLMAO, right? Those kind of ‘facts’? No man, you’re here to say any damn thing that draws attention to yourself, regardless of whether it’s factual or not, and regardless of who you defame in the process.
Please, share with us your own experiences of being signed by a record label.
My, oh my. Have I missed something here?
I’m back to addressing the question @AJ113 posed about the percentages of revenue coming from physicals disk sales vs recorded content licensing.
I had very little time today…I did want to mention that I looked through the monthly sales journals from Warner…going to look at Universal and Sony tomorrow. Warners annual holding statement was 586 pages. I need to go into the sales journals reports and look for a breakdown of the monthly earnings in the non-publishing categories. Fun fun fun. Going to bed now.
I’ll attempt to predict what you will find:
When a label signs an artist for an album/albums, the money is all about master recording sales. You only need to do the math to know that. Mechanical royalties from album printing brings in about 3% of the amount that the label will make from physical sales, and at least 50% of that goes to the writer (depending on the deal struck).
I confess I’m not sure about streaming royalties but I do know it’s very little. Put it this way, we’ve never received a bean from streaming. That leaves publishing income from performances and broadcasts. I’m pretty sure that will not get anywhere near the revenue from sales.
But there is another type of song, like the aforementioned Happy Birthday. One that is so popular that it is ubiquitous, it’s all over the place, almost in the public domain, or songs that every artist and his dog has covered, or songs that are played almost constantly on the TV or radio as themes, intros, advert synching etc. These are the songs that rake in the publishing money. But they are a completely different animal to a ‘standard’ artist album deal.
Just one point: I’m just wondering what ‘income from streaming’ is listed as in the accounts, i.e., what is the breakdown, in terms of master recording rights and copyright ownership, or do they just lump it all together as ‘income from streaming’ so that it perhaps looks like publishing income, when in fact it isn’t.
I can’t vouch for the Trichordist site’s authority, but if this article is correct, it’s confirming what I am saying. Publishing brings in about 10%, master recording sales brings in 90% - approximately - including streaming revenue.
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Interesting. Almost all our income is from streaming. Not much, but far from peanuts
How do your figures stack up to the figures quoted in the article?
That figure per stream is tiny and matches to what we get.
Ah, so that may underline the accuracy of the stats.
In that case, there is no reason to suppose that the master resale/publishing breakdown is incorrect. It certainly ties in with my experience, i.e. 90% master resale, 10% publishing, and this also reinforces my assertion that a record label is not going to duck out of a deal just because they can’t get the publishing, since 90% of the profits come from sales.
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Probably right. Mind, those tiny Streaming royalties have confounded me in the past, for a while, we were VERY big in Finland and Estonia.
Yeah…I see it. That’s interesting. I would probably accept Trichordist as legit info until someone gave me a strong reason not to. If you were measuring the $50 k pr 1 million to the $5k per one million (on publishing) the mechanical does seem to dwarf the publishing in this particular case. If I read that chart correctly, its only tracking online streaming from two sources, but regardless, it does make a strong argument in favor the mechanical based revenues vs the strictly ip based revenues.
I’m still going through a breakdown of the sales journals. I’m not real fast at this…I’ll share what I find, as soon as I think I have a good handle on how the revenue streams are broken down, which I don’t at the moment. I’m having a little bit of trouble understanding which income figures are derived from intangible assets post-amortization. I’m trying to figure out what value the catalog maintains after the net revenues from CD sales were converted to owner equity on the asset sheet, diluted, then re-purposed. Thats where I think he year-to-date sales of the physical records would fall significantly behind the publishing (and loosely defined ‘licensing’ or copyright publishing) value on the current market. So AJ…there’s chance you’re right. But I’m wondering if only looking at the P&L, and the cashflow statement without, reading the value of holdings into the balance sheet over the life of the company is actually giving a misleading number. The number you get may not be a valid test of the statement “record labels make the majority of their cash off selling (insert item here)”. BTW: It doesn’t change a whole lot, but when you say ‘make the majority of money’, I interpreted that in the context of total net profit.
Bottom line:
-I’m stuck on the breakdown shown in the sales journal
-I’m stuck on the relationship between the balance sheet
(Note: This doesn’t imply anything about the record label of course, this is honestly due to my limited financial literacy dealing with numbers from a company this large).
The ‘newer labels’ which I’d mentioned earlier, that were coming out of the NY, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood entrepreneur hotspots are a little easier to break down because they’re still so young, not as big, and their biz models are much simpler.
Just so that we don’t talk at cross purposes, mechanical is publishing. You mean physical, right?
And on this point, I can assure you that mechanical royalties for CDs are significantly less than 10% of sales revenue. Unlike streaming royalty data which is extremely guarded, CD mechanical royalties are easy to research.
[quote=“Jonathan, post:50, topic:1135”]
I interpreted that in the context of total net profit.
[/quote]No, I meant album by album, because you gave a specific example of an artist signing an album deal.
Oh! Absolutely. We’re on the same page there. Hmm…I don’t know if they’re ‘significantly’ less than 10% in the US (as significantly is a subjective word when a 10th of a percent might matter), but I would completely agree at large. Anyone coming in with a royalty anywhere is going to end up with a fraction of the mechanical sale.
…We have federal laws that attempt to protect the royalty rate at 10% to the songwriter…they’re not with their loopholes though.
OK now I’m confused. If you know that and accept it, why would you believe that revenue from publishing outweighs revenue from sales of the master recording? (You mean physical sale, right? 
)
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Gotta take a step back to get on the same page. I really really wanted a copy of my notes from law school, but I can’t find them anywhere in my house 
I really wanted to see them because I’m so familiar with how the terminology was laid out in my own notes…its ok. I’ll wing it… Bare in mind, the terminology i’m personally familiar with is what US law defines within the scope of intellectual property. Here, the music industry adopts the same legal vocabulary for matter of ip because its sufficient for practical application. Consequently, any financial statement a record label ‘publishes’ (haha) has to comply with SEC (securities exchange commission) regulations, and G.A.A.P (General accepted accounting principles) and some others, so there should be some common terminology in there about what ‘publishing’ can or can’t refer to since it is a matter of our federal law. So going forward, I’m not trying to tell someone from the UK your terminology is ‘incorrect’…just that I suspect ours might be a little different.
I think I’m used to the term ‘fixed’ as you may be calling physical…referring to the master copy of the recording. Not necessarily pressed to disc, vinyl, tape, etc…right? So the minute the master is bounced to disk and consolidated in .wav or .mp3 format, would you still consider it physical?
So you might consider Killer Home Recording to be a fixed medium though non-physical (digital) book? Correct?
[quote]
mechanical is publishing [/quote]
Tell me what you mean here…I don’t understand this.
In the US, copyrights are an entire collection of ownership privileges afforded to the creator of a musical work. ‘duplication’ is one of them. ‘composership’ is another ‘right’ under the umbrella of copyright. As is ‘publication’…first rights, moral rights, derivative rights, etc…all of those combined are the general category of copyright.
…lets find some common ground on our definitions then I can expound on what I’m seeing here.
It’s not a UK thing. It’s an internationally recognised term.
http://diymusician.cdbaby.com/musician-tips/what-is-a-mechanical-royalty/
Just in case there was any doubt, $91 per 1000 CDs. What would sales revenue be on 1000 CDs? $5k? $10k? If it was $5k the publishing revenue would be 1.8% of the sales revenue. I may have been a bit generous when I suggested 3% earlier in the thread. If I was a label exec, and I was trying to sign an artist, I wouldn’t be that bothered about publishing. It’s just a little cherry on top of the cake. I certainly wouldn’t make it a deal breaker.
Master Rights (a.k.a. Recording Rights)
The owner of the Master Rights owns the actual recording of the song’s sound. These rights usually belong to the party that financed the recording. Often this is the record label if they don’t lie with the artist. It allows permission for the licensee to use the recording for a particular project.
This why I suggested you check what is meant by ‘licensing’ on the accounts. I believe it may refer to master recording licensing revenue, which incidently comes mostly from back catalogues as opposed to current releases.
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I think you mean GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles).
Right, it’s licensing for use of the copyright under specific terms. Correct? I think this would have come into play when all the old masters that originally came out on vinyl or tape products as current releases then were remastered (in some cases) for CD release. If it was still the same record company that held the masters and licensing, and they had their own CD manufacturing facility, they may not have had to license to someone? But otherwise the manufacturers/distributors may have had to enter into a license agreement? Just curious how all that worked in the late 80’s to 2000’s when much of that was going on.
No. Copyright refers to song ownership. Here we are talking about recordings of that song.
Pretty much correct as far as I know. But this is licensing of the master recording, nothing to do with copyright.
Song ownership => copyright => “publishing”
Master recording ownership => master rights, aka recording rights => “artist royalties” (which basically means “sales”)
Both songs and master recordings can be licensed for use if the owners wish. “Licensing” has always implied distribution and sale of the recording to me, and indeed that was confirmed in my recent degree studies. I know that the copyright can be licensed too, but copyright payments tend to come on an as-and-when-used basis rather than paying up front for a license, as far as I know. Happy to stand corrected on that.
To clarify: I refer to ‘physical’ when it’s CD or vinyl. Sales of the master recording can also be digital, e.g. downloads and streaming. I refer to the master recording as, well, the master recording.
@AJ113 is right. Here in the UK, I protect my ownership of the recordings through PPL. I can also protect my ownership of physical products (CDs, Cassettes, Viynl) through PPL.
So it is possible to merely protect a recording. No matter what format. But is possible to also protect the physical products such as CDs.
The rights of the people who perform on those sound recordings are also protected through PPL.
I protect my ownership of the songs (authorship/composership) through PRS, that is the song copyright.
PPL is a collection agency for performance or broadcast of those recordings. They license broadcasters then redistribute the pool pro-rata to the master recording owners. Think of them as a kind of “PRS for master recordings” (hence the “p” (phonographic) sign next to the © sign on CDs), In reality, PPL’s main payouts are to labels, since it is usually labels that own the master recordings.
In this thread, we’re talking about selling the master recordings, as opposed to broadcasting them.
Not sure what you mean by ‘protect’ in the context of your post. The main concern for copyright owners and master recording owners is usually to get paid what they are due.