Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

well, it takes a long time! my first album for 4AD didn't recoup for well over a decade. but I go into all contracts with a very old-school assumption: that the only money I'm ever going to see is the money I get upfront. anybody who's banking on anything other than the advance is, in my book, waiting for unicorns to come along, and everybody used to understand this

what should the expectations be of someone who's had moderate success like Grimes? I could easily see a scenario where that just brings on more and more expenses and puts her ever deeper in hock to the label.

most contracts I know about work like this: you get two advances, one that's money for you and one that's for recording. the recording one you never see, it's paid by the label to the studio and billed to the release you make there. all this is recoupable. people seem to think that's unfair, I guess; I don't & haven't heard a coherent argument for why recording expenses on a release shouldn't be recoupable. the money one you have to earn back on sales before you go into profit, and then your contractually agreed-upon royalty rate goes into effect; it's often quite low, and it always is right there in the contract. some contracts may include a stipulation that the label will give tour support; we almost never asked for that, because we understood that any money we got was being billed to the album. we did get plane tickets bought for us & hotels paid for when we went to the UK; at no time did I imagine these were gifts from our good friends at the label. they're shared expenses. they're billable to sales. that seems fair to me. if I decide to have, say, big stage production & fly first class & travel in a bus...and I ask the label to front me the money for this...presumably they're going to recover that money from sales, and my album won't recoup as quickly or at all. I do not assume the label will be sharing this expense. major labels were notorious for billing lots of employee expenses to bands (like, everybody gets to fly to NY to see the big Fleetwood Mac show in '77 & stays in nice hotels & they're all label employees & hanger-on & then Fleetwood Mac has to pay for those guys? not kosher) but 4AD, to the best of my knowledge, isn't generally like this.

nobody has to ask for tour support from the label, and in my experience labels don't offer it unless you ask. I can't think of other expenses that'd be billable that one would incur without full awareness -- anything they buy you you have to pay for later and again I don't think that's unfair. the one thing that generally IS unfair is the royalty split. smaller indies often operate on a profit-share model, which imo is fairer than a flat royalty %. but smaller indies also often give no advance beyond p & d.

do you think it's possible that as an artist like Grimes gains popularity, they also get deeper in debt to the label and lose leverage? For example, it seems crazy to me that with people buying ever fewer albums, record labels expect someone at her level to crank out a half dozen videos. How do you ever pay that back?

with grimes, the label doesn't pay for recording because she makes the records at home by herself. the label also isn't able to spend much money on the videos, which only get made if many key personnel are willing to work for free. in this case, this generally means many many hours of unpaid labor from grimes herself working as director, editor, colorist, and main performer. the label chips in recoupable dollars for the first one or two videos, and any that appear after that are the result of cash infusions from external sources like the canadian grant system or tidal.

the main differences between majors and indies afaik are the royalty split (50-50 with an indie label, on a major like 80-20 or 90-10? it varies) and the amount of money the label is prepared to spend on marketing. even the larger indies are very small operations compared to the majors and spend much less on marketing. they also spend much less on hiring the staff that perform vital in-house functions like public relations, radio promotion, and digital marketing. major labels have departments full of people doing those jobs. with small indies they might not have anyone doing that stuff, and with a bigger indie there might be one or two people doing digital marketing and the entire cadre of beggars group labels all share that person.

at a major it would be much easier for the label to gain massive leverage over an artist because of the sheer volume of dollars being spent on the artist's behalf. when you see artists on major labels having label trouble, what's usually going on is that the artist has not turned in music that the label believes in, and they have refused to put their vast and expensive collection of resources behind that music. this is why a nicki minaj or an azealia banks will not be able to secure a release date for an album, or why a charli xcx will release a "mixtape" instead of an album that is not accompanied by much in the way of videos and digital marketing and radio promo.

in grimes' case nothing like that is happening. she doesn't take much money from the label and anything she does take is quickly recouped by sales.

if grimes got a 50/50 split from 4AD her manager deserves the biggest bonus of all time

what? are you serious? i don't think i've ever encountered anyone signed to a bigger indie that didn't have a 50/50 royalty rate in the deal.

oh boy

lol

https://i.imgur.com/lJjUg0B.png

So was the post above actual insider details about Grimes' contract or an educated guess? It sounds like labels have become much more generous and fair vs the old days.

Perhaps with physical media sales dwindling, the stakes are lower for the labels.

thread just went supernova

This is why it was suggested at new employee orientation not to discuss your salary with your colleagues!

- very frazzled 4AD Human Resources associate

lol I'm inclined to post a screenshot from my 2016 royalties statement from the Label In Question just for laffs but unfortunately the internet isn't as cozy as it used to be. I will again assert that I would be very surprised if Grimes got a 50/50 split from them, as I know a number of artists under that umbrella who would also be quite pleased to find themselves the beneficiaries of such a split. however, it is a new era, it's true, and the people I knew there, even at the top, are largely gone, so who knows. still, I would be surprised.

i don't think i've ever encountered anyone signed to a bigger indie that didn't have a 50/50 royalty rate in the deal.

out of curiosity I talked to some artist managers I know this morning - their experience does not reflect yours. the only indies I know who do a 50/50 split with anybody are the ones that don't pay mechanicals, standard royalty rates are MUCH lower than that.

indie royalties are a lot closer to an even split than major royalties, no? even if they're not as generous as 50-50

isn't 4AD a major indie

depends on the size of the indie in my experience. a big article on Future of Music Coalition's site states

Here it is important to remember that artists’ contract royalty rate is not statutory, transparent nor is it public. Traditional contract royalties begin at a much smaller “11 –13 percent” and allow for that royalty amount to be further diminished through a process of unfair deductions that are standardized within the industry.

indies do better than that but in my experience only the super-pure-at-heart indies do anything near 50/50. (And, as has been observed for generations, it often turns out that the indie that offers you nice high split like this will ghost at some point and you'll have to hire people to go get what you're owed & then it turns out they didn't even keep track of the master tapes and you wish you'd had a 17% royalty that paid reliably instead of having to waste whole days wondering if scientists have determined how to get blood out of a turnip yet, not that I'd know anything about any of this lol)

I wonder what’s the rate at Dischord.

just been waiting for my moment to drop "its the roc, baby!" in here

huh weird i got 100% royalties when i signed to 4AD

I gotta give props to 4AD for giving all of ILM sweet record contracts. The Lulu pre-covers really paid off!

lol, i just went and checked the soundcloud for that. pleasant plains's pumping blood has been streamed 4000 times. n/a's pumping blood has been streamed 1600 times.

Someone out there really likes blood.

everyone i know who signed to a bigger indie did so in the bloggy internet boom times when merge and XL were getting number one albums and everyone in that industry thought the dinosaur majors had been vanquished and could never return to power

i'm sure what passed for "normal" during that time did not reflect the experience of everyone from before that time and anyone who will ever come after

ha that was during that window when people were getting rich off TV commercial placements

good times, good times

Venus Fly behind the scenes. So freaking cool.

https://tidal.com/browse/video/70001854

https://i.imgur.com/t7CxXtTl.jpg

Fantastic.

important follow-up to that:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfmN-YDg6Rl/?hl=en&taken-by=grimes

hides looks good. they should collaborate on a pachinko machine for Konami.

this is cool:

Now she’s returned to social media to offer another update, clarifying that she’s “back in the studio making a million beats” and working on “one final album for my shit label and then my first album on a label of my choosing which im crazy stoked about eeeee. or i might go fully independent, researching options. the second one will be extreme darkness and chaos, the first will be highly collaborative and most glorious light.

https://www.stereogum.com/1984585/grimes-plans-highly-collaborative-final-album-for-her-shit-label/news/?amp=1&__twitter_impression=true

has 4AD done in this in the past / do they have a reputation a la Sub Pop?

So will the last album for 4AD be willfuly bad? She should do some 10 remixes and tape manipulations of “Scream” and call it a day.

Don't think Grimes would do that to her fans. The descriptions of both records sound great. Interesting way to work out a very particular type of angst maybe. We don't exactly what the problem is so might come out in the music. Whatever. I hope she comes thru & at least she's not walled off like Sky Ferreira - I can't believe it'll be 5 years since Night Time, My Time this fall. and I really hope Masochism finally comes out this year.

wasn't the last album technically released under two labels?

cool, hanging out with hideo kojima, he'll be good mentor as far as completing projects and having them come out in a timely manner

oh hush, you

hahaha

Hahahaha

alright, backstory for non-gamers?

hideo kojima made the Metal Gear series

i quit playing video games before i was a teenager but Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has stuck with me for 17 years and is remarkably prescient

kojima is a living legend

he also has had "problems with the label" recently, so they might have bonded over that

he notably has to be prodded to actually finish a game

Kojima is one of the most famous and ambitious game directors, known for huge budgets and way too many projects stuck in development hell.

Silent hill, man

The PT preview game for Silent Hills was so good and the most terrified I’ve ever been playing a game. I broke my controller against the wall after one of those hallway scares.. not joking. One of his projects I was looking forward the most.

^ amazing game. Buddy projected it on the wall, it was a hellish vortex. Crying babies drove mad

*drove me mad