The Good, The Bad, and the Necessary: Surviving the Music Industry

One thing I never liked about people that’s high up the music industry is that they never tell you the whole truth. A lot of them give you only bits and pieces and/or don’t go in depth when giving advice to upcoming artists/producers etc.

Case in point: They always say labels have to recoup all the investment the labels have invested in order for you to receive your royalties. But they never tell you WHY!. The advances they front from you is in fact YOUR money.

That money taken from your future royalties. But here’s what else they don’t explain, that Royalty rate (for example) 15% is too low for you to recoup you an artist to recoup (depending how big the advance is). So if the advance is 1 million dollars, music/album would have to sell At least 10 million dollars in order to recoup that 1 million advance.

And most deals that 15% is only going to be taken out on the NET profit not the gross profit (it probably different not because of streaming). Also here’s another thing they don’t tell artists, you don’t have to take a big advance or any advance upfront.

Just because they offer it doesn’t mean you have to take it. There’s no written rule where you HAVE to take an advance from a record company.

And then you have an influx of artists on major deals who are upset because they’re not getting any Residual income because they spend their advance money irresponsibility. They signed a contract they didn’t fully understand.

Then they spread the narrative of “Oh I am in a bad deal”. Most likely these artists are in fair deals they just didn’t understand the Process and protocols when dealing with companies who are generating millions of dollars each year. most of them think they can just “Do whatever they want” when a company already fronted you 6–7 figures.

These the type of shit these so called “industry professionals” don’t explain to young people who wants to get into the music industry. understand the basic principals of business in general. Because most of the general business practice can be applied to the music business.

Truth be told, if a label paid me 1 million dollars to create an album and they want to own the masters, they can have that shit. I’ll create a dope ass album for them, collect my advance and Maximize on the big opportunities within their system and resources to help me make more money in the long run!

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