The RIAA Armageddon has begun

lol I was gonna call that out too but decided against it

Did you?

$56,000 isn't a lot of money?

Let's see, divide that by 4 for each band member, take away taxes. So an optimistic royalty for having the most popular video on youtube as a concert act is probably less than poverty level wages.

does Nickelback really split songwriting royalties four ways...?

xp Like that's their only income stream. "We'll put this video on YouTube and before you know it we'll be damn hell ass kings!"

Also they're Canuckian so that's like, 10 million loonies, right?

I don't know why don't you ask them.

yeah i mean, a dollar for every thousand views, or a thousand dollars for every million views, that seems pretty decent.

It DOES?

This is where I'm 100% pro-file sharing and 100% against mega-million dollar for-profit ad sites like Spotify and Youtube.

Mr. Que OTM with that info thing. I feel like every time i come to this page i want to relink it.

So an optimistic royalty for having the most popular video on youtube as a concert act is probably less than poverty level wages.

Well you add in Spotify, last.fm, album sales, ticket sales, bumper stickers, T-shirts...

well i guess it depends how much YouTube is making off each view. how much more can it be? there's no way they're clocking like 50 cents a view or something.

i would pay a lot more for spotify. if the catalogue was extended further i'd pay A LOT more

^^^^ what i'm saying. they're like the only monthly expense of mine that i think "yes, please, ask for more money, i'm getting way too good a deal here!"

^^^i would too, but until they pay their artists more, i won't.

well yeah, obv under that condition

it still blows my mind that Spotify is free

Well you add in Spotify, last.fm, album sales, ticket sales, bumper stickers, T-shirts...

...minus studio time, mastering, producer fees, booking/promotional fees, ticket master's cut, etc...

sorry, Live Nation

man, spotify is basically useless to me. blocked at work, and i mostly listen to music on an ipod in the car anyway. but i get that most people are fine with streaming and often won't even download something for free as long as they can keep streaming it whenever they want.

Lefsetz is also bang on the money, especially this:

To be fighting file-sharing is akin to protesting dot matrix printers. File-trading is on its way out. Because it takes too much time to do it. And you don’t fight piracy with laws, but economic solutions. It doesn’t pay to steal if you can listen instantly on Spotify and its ilk.

― moley, Tuesday, June 19, 2012 7:37 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(no disrespect intended to you, Milton, as obviously there are two sides to this)

― moley, Tuesday, June 19, 2012 7:43 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hey moley! you're a calmer man than I for being able to parse that Lefsetz post without taking it personally, and you're certainly right that there's a lot of constructive, hard line truths in there amid the insults. but when you think of music strictly in terms of economic solutions, it can only lead to this guy's unironic summary of the moral crisis with downloading: 'The Artists are the problem'. And... well... I've just never heard the industry's point of view summed up more honestly or succinctly than that, so I posted before calming down

Well you add in Spotify, last.fm, album sales, ticket sales, bumper stickers, T-shirts...

...minus studio time, mastering, producer fees, booking/promotional fees, ticket master's cut, etc...

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, June 19, 2012 3:56 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

everyone knows you have to spend money to make money but why are we pretending that Nickelback (or any act with 50+ million YT views for a non-meme music video) isn't operating at a profit?

Cos those dude keep asking me for change.

Armageddon....commence please

There's a longstanding view in pop culture that famous = rich which isn't necessarily true. And now that you can be youtube famous, I'm pretty sure it's even less true.

Snarf:

https://twitter.com/TheRealYLT/status/214817390339428352

Plenty of people believe that if you are on pitchfork or in Spin it automatically means someone is sending you 10k checks every week.

right, yes. but YouTube is just another tool for getting famous or letting people hear your work once you have an audience. anyone who's going broke because YT doesn't give them a dollar per view wasn't gonna get rich anyway.

http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/rock-stars/chad-kroeger-net-worth/

Chad Kroeger was born in Canada and has an estimated net worth of $50 million dollars.

i mean love em or hate em, Pomplamoose have proven that you can make bank off of this web 2.0 bullshit if you're savvy about it (xpost)

I wonder what Nickelback's drummer is netting?

Cause Chad is getting coin from mechanical royalties.

yeah this weird, persistent, and largely inflated myth of the "rock star" lifestyle is pretty insidiously embedded in the average pop-culture consumer's mind.

xp

http://www.chacha.com/question/what-is-nickelback%27s-net-worth

Q: What is Nickelback's net worth?

A: That is unknown but they are negotiating a new deal worth $70 million, for 3 albums & 3 tours. ChaCha on!

haha i think everyone knows that there are famous musicians who aren't rich, but for some reason this tangent happened while we were talking about probably one of the single richest newly minted rock stars of the 21st century

...about that ChaCha part.

i heard a radio interview with Kroeger recently where the interviewer hit him with the trivia that Nickelback are apparently the 2nd-biggest selling foreign band in the US of all time, after The Beatles

haha i think everyone knows that there are famous musicians who aren't rich, but for some reason this tangent happened while we were talking about probably one of the single richest newly minted rock stars of the 21st century

^^^

I mean, I can concern troll with the best of them but worrying that Nickelback isn't making enough money is next level

if the future is streaming instead of ownership of media, then what would a fair price be to stream a track/album once? how do we go about calculating this? does a microtransaction model work or is the 'all you can eat' model of spotify the only thing people will pay for?

clearly their problem is they aren't making enough music

Well music isn't like movies, people like to have it on in the background so anything that encourages people to listen to less probably wouldn't work...I would think the Spotify model is best

xpost Nickelback has outsold AC/DC?

that wouldn't surprise me at all

they were probably factoring singles or something in there -- looks like AC/DC has sold about 70 million albums in America whereas N'back stand at about 20 mil

otoh Nickelback doesn't even appear here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_music_artists_in_the_United_States

waiting for the first ILXer to do the Pauline Kael-on-Nixon moment ("No one I know listens to or owns any Nickleback").

I must have some relatives who do...

i worked with someone who was a pretty serious nickelback fan. like, she knew the name of the drummer.

Nickelback is one of the most commercially successful Canadian groups, having sold more than 50 million albums worldwide,[3] ranking as the 11th best selling music act of the 2000s, and is the 2nd best selling foreign act in the U.S. behind The Beatles for the 2000s.[4][5]

ok the DJ glossed over the "for the 2000s" caveat, my bad for not checking before repeating it. but still!

If people have the incentive to download, to use file-sharing etc. they will. Until you change that incentive it won't change the habits of most users.

I do like how ten years removed from Napster and we're still loling at NPR articles where Kids Who Download are given a blue book and asked "What does fairness mean to you?" and "What role do you think an artist plays in a Late Capitalist society?"

and NPR is f course still stunned to find out that people don't care who is getting ripped off because free music is pretty righteous, Mr NPR Man.

if the future is streaming instead of ownership of media, then what would a fair price be to stream a track/album once? how do we go about calculating this? does a microtransaction model work or is the 'all you can eat' model of spotify the only thing people will pay for?

― ciderpress, Tuesday, June 19, 2012 1:20 PM (11 minutes ago)

I think people are still bugged about the "they only pay 0.00000005 cents per stream" scare, but every industry thing I read about it suggests that it's something like, I don't know, a third of a penny per stream now? At least for major labels? You would certainly think that giant companies like Universal have managed to negotiate decent deals by now.

Anyway, using the ten-track album example, an album played ten times by 30,000 users (over time, of course) generates $10,000 in royalties at the third of a penny rate.

LOL, btw, of NPR of all outlets playing even a peripheral role in a debate about paying or not paying for content, seeing as it's entirely supported by donations and a modicum of taxes.