Too Much Joy» Blog Archive » My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement
http://www.toomuchjoy.com/?p=1397

"I’m simply explaining why I’m not embarrassed that I 'owe' Warner Bros. almost $400,000. They didn’t make a lot of money off of Too Much Joy. But they didn’t lose any, either. So whenever you hear some label flak claiming 98% of the bands they sign lose money for the company, substitute the phrase 'just don’t earn enough' for the word 'lose.'"

A great post from a musician's perspective on digital royalties for recording artists. Lots of insight here. The bottom line is that, moving forward, there has to be absolute and real-time transparency in royalties for artists and authors.

So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of… $62.47

So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of… $62.47 What the fuck? I mean, we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn’t insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid.

I got something in the mail last week I’d been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero income, and our unrecouped balance ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the same.

A rant on recouping an artist's repayment. Talks about revenue earned from digital sales.