No Rock And Roll Fun

MONEY VERY MUCH FOR NOTHING: Just picking up a little further on John Kennedy's ranting at In The City, and his moan that he'd care a little more about how little songwriters get paid if record companies had a fifty percent margin - according to figures in Monday's Independent, they're getting damn near it:

[F]igures from the US show that Apple Computer, the dominant legal download business in Europe and the US, retains just 4 cents from each 99-cent (55p) track sale while "mechanical copyright" holders - generally the record labels, who own copyright in the song's recording - take 62 cents or more. Music publishers take the rest - about 8 cents.

Of course, the labels do have some costs - but if we assume that they see downloads as an extra, rather than CD sales, which most seem desperate to keep as a core business, that's 62 cents of pure profit from every sale. We'd love to be in a business like that.