Werd Al - Digital Delusion

[GhostShip]

We have all heard of Weird Al and his wonderul songs and most of thos who have heard them have bought a CD which is lucky for Al himself...

http://digitalmusic.weblogsinc.com/2006/06/14/weird-al-yankovic-says-digital-is-a-raw-deal-for-some-artists/

King of comic rock, Weird Al Yankovic says digital is a raw deal for artists like himself.
As you said Al, "Go figure". I'm a big fan, you've given me a lot of fun music over the years, and I wanted to do what you said. So, I went and did the math.
For an album with the average 12 songs, like your current release "Poodle Hat" which has exactly 12,  Apple takes in $11.88. Apple sends the label $7.80.
The label got their money back (by taking $7.80 of every $7.80 that Apple paid them) so, now they're going to start sending you most of the $7.80 per record they are receiving.

Not so fast. According to widely circulated data from the coverage of The Alman Brothers suit against Sony BMG, you could expect something like $45 of each thousand songs sold to be paid to you in royalties. That's around 4% of the amount paid to Apple for your work, and around 5.7% of what was paid to the label. For The Almans', that works out to $24,000 when taking Nielsen SoundScan data of 538,000 Almans' songs sold as downloads since mid-2002. I don't have SoundScan data on your sales, but I'm sure you do. So the labels and Apple got 96% and you got %4.

If all of your fans bought through iTunes rather than buying CDs at the record store you'd be looking at an overall reduction in income of 85%!
Eighty Five Percent! If they cut my income by 85%, I'd be making soup from old shoes down by the railroad tracks!

I suspect even purchasing the cd is fraught with the risk of obtaining DRM infested material, something that is 100% certain if you purchase it from itlunes , lets face it Al had better have a pension stash to fall back on as he wont make much revenue with all these middlemen taking the 96% and adding malware to his releases.

[SamSeeSam]

This is an outright scandal  But the sad part is that such stories are not going to stop.....

[Scyre]

That is just totally sad. The person working so hard to create something we all love getting shafted and screwed out of his value.
There is no reason for this and I hope the big music labels suffer horribly for this outrage. BOYCOTT ALL THE BIG LABELS! ONLY BUY INDEPENDENT WORKS THAT GIVE THE ARTISTS THEIR FAIR AMOUNT!

And hope the big media cartel collapses and dies a painful death, so that freedom will live on and artists will thrive and ass*ole corporate scum are in the line at the soup kitchens!