Comment Re:Paradigm Shift (Score 1) 128
A recording artist is treated like a small independant business by a record company.
Mostly all they will provide is a cash advance to help you afford to record an album. And only bands with huge followings tend to get advances for tour support. I've never known a single band to get a weekly paycheck, living expenses, or medical/dental benefits from their label.
Basically as a band you are your own business and you are on your own and the record label is just a publisher selling your music and giving you a tiny percentage of the profits every six months.
Only a handful of bands are really rich and it's only from them being around for many many years. It's not uncommon to have many successful albums and sell millions of copies of them and still not receive a royalty check from your label because you still haven't quote "recouped" the money they paid in recording costs, marketing, promotion and videos from the small percentage they actually will give you for each album sale.
The closest thing to this type of situation for a programmer would be if you wrote a piece of software and a larger software company gave you a sum of money to hire someone to help you polish it up and make it commercial quality so that publisher could sell it.
And then that publisher sold it and charged you all costs involved in selling it and marketing it (including the initial advance) and deducated all of those costs from a small percentage of around 8% of the list price of say $50 that they sold your software for and then only paid you on 90% of the sales.
Mostly all they will provide is a cash advance to help you afford to record an album. And only bands with huge followings tend to get advances for tour support. I've never known a single band to get a weekly paycheck, living expenses, or medical/dental benefits from their label.
Basically as a band you are your own business and you are on your own and the record label is just a publisher selling your music and giving you a tiny percentage of the profits every six months.
Only a handful of bands are really rich and it's only from them being around for many many years. It's not uncommon to have many successful albums and sell millions of copies of them and still not receive a royalty check from your label because you still haven't quote "recouped" the money they paid in recording costs, marketing, promotion and videos from the small percentage they actually will give you for each album sale.
The closest thing to this type of situation for a programmer would be if you wrote a piece of software and a larger software company gave you a sum of money to hire someone to help you polish it up and make it commercial quality so that publisher could sell it.
And then that publisher sold it and charged you all costs involved in selling it and marketing it (including the initial advance) and deducated all of those costs from a small percentage of around 8% of the list price of say $50 that they sold your software for and then only paid you on 90% of the sales.
