Posted: 21 April 2006 at 9:19am | IP Logged

Bloody Bigwigs!

Posted: 21 April 2006 at 1:03pm | IP Logged

Yeah, they'd probably call it a 'recording contract'  We wouldn't be unsigned anymore....at least not in the usual sense.

But, seriously I know what you mean, though I personally would not allow somebody like E.M.I to go anywhere near my wikid choonz for obvious reasons. I know that I'll be in the minority with this viewpoint, but that's just me

The thing is, the companies would need to pay a percentage of download royalties to the artists...which would equate to a contract, even if in a slightly different form to a traditional music deal. It's still going to involve all the usual paraphanalia of signing-on-dotted-lines, legal issues, copyright etc. etc. and of course any artist agreeing to such a deal would not be allowed to offer their music for download in any other form, and certainly not for free...the companies may claim ownership of all your material, and end users would not be able to share and distribute it. You'd lose control of your work, and the only payback would be any percentage of the cash made from downloading. If a typical track sold for 50p, you'd likely get around 5.7p for yourself...you'd need to be lucky in the extreme to succeed.

In short it would be akin to a traditional record contract, but without the benefits of being signed in the usual manner, and without the safety net of advances, backing, promotion etc.....you'd be seriously restricted in many ways, and purely reliant upon the whims of the downloading public, who may or may not grant you their custom. I'd personally not be inclined to give up my day job!

Posted: 21 April 2006 at 1:15pm | IP Logged

I looked into this before, ignoring the issues of whether people would pay.

Assume a cost of .50 per download. The credit card payment gateway take a cut. Having a payment gateway costs £150-300 a year.

Then the site has to act almost like a bank with the artist money, and when the site pays the artist the credit card payment gateway take another cut.

Plus the site would need to change the way that the music was streamed, resulting in higher server costs due to higher processor demand (its a techy thing, just take my word for it)

In addition there is the cost in time of administering the entire thing.

There is no money in it for the artist. I'd code it in if it was in any way worth doing for you guys, but I can't see how it is.