I purchased from Borders, for an overpriced $17.23 dollars, the latest Cold album, A Different Kind of Pain. I've been downloading their mp3's and I've been hooked and fixated on them as the my group. I imagine this will be a phase, as much things seem to be. A brief feeling of fixatation that fades.

But it got me thinking, why do I still buy music? I suppose its the old adage and belief of buying music to support the artists. But is this really true?

Well let's break it down. For that $17.23, I've included 7.75% CA sales tax, which means even the state is getting its fingers in the pie too. So $1.24 of that goes to the state, leaving $15.99 as the Border's sticker price. Seeing as I've seen the advertised price on Amazon for this album as low as 9.99, I imagine at bulk wholesale, Border is probably shaving at least 50% of the sales profit. So let's estimate 8 dollars going back to the distributer. In this case, for Cold, that would be the record label, Lava Records.

Depending on the type of record deal or contract an artist signs with their labels. Cold is fairly high profile of a band. Relatively. Record labels usually pay a flat fee for the album and will pay the artists a certain royalty of the sales profits. Of course this is tricky as it because legalese jargon over what is profit vs operating costs. Distribution, production, advertisment and promotion, mastering, trademarks... Let's just be conservative and say of that remaining 8 dollars of profit to the label, they consider 5 was "spent" on overhead and we have 3 dollars to divy up between the label pockets and artist royalties. And since Cold has had a hardcore following, and hired a good agent/manager, let's say they've been fortunate enough to broker a competitive royalty and get to keep a whopping half of "profit," and in our hypothetical example, a 1.50. Of course, before we proclaim our work done, let's not forget in return for have that ace agent that negotiated a top end deal needs his commission. Let's make it easy and assume that he's also doubles as the manager so he's giving a discounted commission rate of say 10%, so our band gets about $1.30.

That means today, my wallet is 17.23 lighter, but strangely only a little more than a dollar will make it to the artist's pocket. Don't get me wrong, if a mid-size album sells in the range of 40-60k copies in a year, that's a good 50K-75K a year for the band of a hot artist. But it does seem a little bit out of place, that so much of the money goes to fuel, well, something...

Its makes you wonder if you truly like someone's music, you might be better off downloading the mp3's, and then mailing a $5 bill directly to the artist. Of course this will never fly, but yeah.

Except for a very small select group of uber-elite artists that routinely sell in the platnium and gold range, most bands make it by going on tour. With record sales to boost augement their funds.

So I guess I'll do what I think is good for this artist and give them some free publicity.

-Cold

A Different Kind of Pain.

The latest album for Cold diverges from their hard egdy grunge music towards more of a lyrical ballad style. Is it mushy? Not necessarily, although it covers themes such and love and loss which may point towards "softness" towards more fans who appreciated their older sound.

Nevertheless the album combines powerful riffs and melodies and when driving around with the music blaring in the sun, you feel a sense that this is what it feels like to be happy and alive.
[ esca | 11:39 PM | ]