The myth of the royalties?
Through my experience and the practical knowledge that I have gained over the years, I can hardly recall of a single artist or band, even close affiliated musicians, that has received roaylties directly from their company, in a predetermined, scheduled time. I will not refer to intellectual copyright collectors, like the American ASCAP & BMI or GEMA in Germany & JASRAC in Japan. I will try to focus on royalties derived from both physical & digital sales of recordings. To make it short, the notorious royalty is usually calculated as a fixed percentage of an album's wholesale price, when a quantity of albums is ordered by various distributors/diffusion channels that are responsible to forward the album in the markets. I should mention that music revenues have been decreasing because of increasing piracy phenomena, but this is another story to be discussed in a future post. I personally assume that not all labels deliberately strive to screw their artists, since the...