Paying for commercials
Recently, pop singing superstar Lily Allen — as Exhibit A in her argument against music file sharing — said the practice cuts into her hope of paying back her advance from the record company. She bragged that she is almost out of debt with her record company.
Lily Allen — who has sold millions of CDs and downloads, who has had her own talk show even — is still in debt to the company that releases her work. In other words, Allen currently makes no money off her work — she works off an advance payment for the work, with no royalties in her pocket until that loan is paid off.
Certainly, that’s reasonable — the record company fronted the money; it should get its investment back. Although I would argue there is a certain creative nobility in investing in talent and not expecting immediate payback, but rather eventual profits from nurturing the act — one thinks of EMI’s handling of Kate Bush in the 1970s.
But this system creates an inflated funhouse version of what should expected from creative profit, as well as perpetuates a reality in which the greatest disparity between classes is in the arts.
It becomes all or nothing, rich or poor, with no perception of a singer being a good middle-class occupation.
How, then, does Lily Allen live the high life, if she is owned by her record company? Live shows. It’s been reported recently that even as actual music recording sales have fallen, concert sales have grown. Ticketmaster has reported that sales keep climbing, and one study out of Great Britain has shown that the CD sales slump moves downward even as the concert rush rises high.
In this scenario, the recorded music is reduced to the role of advertising for the concerts — Allen gets paid a fee for producing 10 or so commercials, and the funders of those commercials are paid back their production investment and then some. Allen utilizes what she can of the publicity from the recorded music in order to run her real business — the Lily Allen brand name — which makes money, yes from live shows, but also from all sorts of other marketing and products.
The recorded music is — at this point in history — almost the least important part of the moneymaking in the music business.
Lily Allen isn’t hurting for money, nor is anyone else on Lily Allen’s level — it’s the music industry that is suffering even as it attempts to justify business practices that are unsustainable. If you think people like Lily Allen require millions of dollars to record the sort of music she does, then you’ve lost touch with what actual music sounds like. I have two sons who record music every week using an affordable guitar, bass and whatever else they can find and mixing the sounds through Garageband on their Mac, and so do thousands of others in a new breed of musicians who don’t need riches to follow their muse.
At the same time, a study commissioned by Industry Canada found that music downloaders actually purchase more music than non-downloaders.
For all the big to-do from the entertainment industry, the general public is, at this point, being threatened penalties for what amounts to downloading commercials.
The same argument can be made for film, as well — the American movie industry has turned into a blockbuster producing machine where the movie itself often ends up being a commercial for toys and loads of other products tied up in licensing deals. If the movies are so unimpressive artistically, it’s because commercials need only to be just interesting enough to plant the need for a product inside the brain of a consumer. If it entertains as well, it’s a lucky side effect — that’s the way films like “The Transformers” and “Avatar” are conceived and wrought.
Meanwhile, Tim Quirk — the lead singer of the ‘90s band Too Much Joy, who had a few minor hits — posted his royalty statement from Warner Brothers online. Quirk works for Rhapsody, so he is able to track the band’s actual digital download sales. He was able to catch the company in a $10,000 accounting “mistake” that saw Warner claiming the band had only earned $62.47 in the last five years.
Given this reality — and Quirk’s characterization of the company’s attitude toward his complaint — I’d double check those statements if I were Lily Allen. She may be surprised by what she finds.
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