Courtney Love's Manifesto : Surprisingly good read about Record Companies and Piracy (1 Viewer)

[Adam Tyner]

Some of the discussion in this thread reminded me of an interview the Onion's AV Club had with Fountains of Wayne last year:

CC: You know, you can't come out the same week as Bell Biv DeVoe, because their record people have to call radio stations and suck off the local guy that week.
AS: There's a theory that, no matter how big these companies get, they can really only work one record at a time. So, if Matchbox Twenty has something going on that week, you're fucked.
O: I've heard that, and yet each label puts out about 75 records a week. It's interesting how it's harder to get attention from your own label than to get signed in the first place.
AS: It's crazy, I know. The other thing is that the numbers are so overblown these days. If we were at this level in the mid-'80s, we would be considered an extremely successful band. Bands like R.E.M. and even The Replacements, during that initial wave of college rock, would sell 40, 50, 100,000 copies of a record, and that would be seen as extremely successful—and definitely enough to keep doing more. These days, you really have to sell at least gold [500,000] to even be on the radar. It's so much easier for them to keep making money by selling another two million Jewel records, or whatever it is.

 

[Brian Perry]

The more you think about it, there are other industries in which the bulk of a company's profits are made by one or two hot products and those two products carry the rest of the losers. For example, take pharmaceutical companies. Most of the potential products they conceive and test never make it to market. When Pfizer hit a home run with Viagra, the profits had to help cover 100 other duds that cost millions in research and development.

For every Metallica and Madonna out there, there are hundreds or thousands of acts that record companies lose money on. The only way the record company can make an overall profit is by structuring the deals so that the "winners" cover the "losers," and that is what is perceived as unfair to the winners. Courtney Love's beef should be not with the record companies but with all of the failed acts that are essentially taking money from the successful acts.