And now she's getting a better deal from Apple than she is from her own record label, which no doubt gets a "promotion allowance" for copies it gives away.
And she has certainly not been paid for giveaway copies of her music before. It's a standard clause in a recording contract enabling your label to take usually around 5% of your copies for promotion, with no royalty.
Artists now seem to think the "hard copy" past was some idyllic world where every musician made a living and were given fair treatment by their labels, distributors (for indie artists) and publishers. It just wasn't so.
Also, Appke has relented and will pay royalties for the free trial listens, which is a fairer shake than any major label ever gave.
The iTunes Store once ran at a loss too.
It's called "starting up." And despite the losses, not only are streaming services becoming entrenched, everyone seems to want to start one.
Marginal artists don't make money, or have to find, er, creative ways to do so. It has been that way since there was money in music. It hasn't changed; the only thing that's changed is who the musicians blame for their poverty.
Keep in mind that much of the "fabrication" was done by Kurt himself.
I completely believe that he did and said a lot of things just to get a rise or for shits and giggles, AND I understand that means any "first-person" bio taken from found statements/scribblings and things he said to random people to get a rise out of them should be taken with a grain of salt.
In fact, in a way this bio is perhaps Kurt's way of giving a finger from beyond the grave to anyone who would obsessively pore over the details his life.
Whoa. Hold on just a second:
"That money, of course, goes to labels and music publishers, and only a tiny bit ever seems to trickle down to artists. We’ll have to see whether the other services do much better on that score..."
What score is that? The artists sign those contracts that give most of their sales revenue to the labels and publishers, not the streaming services.
For this discussion to ever get real, we can't forget that even for a minute. Doing so is like blaming the gas station when your car gets 10 MPG.
Dear streaming services,
Thank you for taking the blame for artists that make no money on their recorded music sales. We used to take the heat for that.
Signed,
The record labels.
PS: Thanks for the big royalty checks.
Even the Right isn't as stridently defending the Baltimore cops as they did in Ferguson...which means they're turning the full force of their "You have rage? Well, we'll see your rage and raise you some moral superiority!" towards the protests themselves.
All that said, Prince isn't known these days for his subtlety, so it'll be interesting to see what kind of song comes out of this.
I'm guessing that when a lot of those "founding member" artists start actually seeing those Tidal royalty checks, they won't be quite so excited about their new venture.
This...plus, I find that as artists get older they become less melodically direct. If they can make up for that in other ways, they can still create great music though.
Oh, I can argue it. I've heard it four times now and:
• I still can't remember the verse melody five minutes later.
• I still think the chorus is more try-hard than actually catchy, like the writers were deliberately trying to make some kind of cascading melody while clearly avoiding any plagiarism lawsuits.
• Looks like America agrees - it seems to be stalling out on the download and streaming charts - hasn't even made Spotify's chart - although payola, I mean radio play, hasn't kicked in yet.
While I don't give a rodent's posterior about "advancing music" (that may literally be the most pretentious reason to make music ever, literally)...
That song does nothing to make me say "wow, what a hook." It's like a whodunit you solve in the first five minutes that then spends two hours doing no plot development, just scene after scene convincing you the detective is a good guy and the villain is a bad guy. And the good guy is Tom Hanks and the bad guy is Danny Trejo.
And like that hypothetical movie, not even Tom Hanks can save this song.
It really is kind of a try-hard song.
The best pop songs make you pleasantly surprised at a sudden bit of melody/lyric. Call Me Maybe had that. Single Ladies. Bang Bang. Happy. Even something like Uptown Funk, which is more a genre exercise than an original song (I still flap my arms like I'm listening to The Time when I hear it), has a way of leading you down a path you weren't thinking about. Even (ack) Shake It Off, after the try-hard verse, pays off with the melody if not the words.
This...kind of sits there. Someone thought it would be cute to put lots of "reallys" in the chorus, but the title even prepares you for that. I've already forgotten the melody, which is something that never happened when I heard the songs mentioned above.
Mr. G wasn't claiming he (or Starbucks) invented the name or the drink. He's claiming that he gave Starbucks the idea that Starbucks should have a drink like that.
So, not wrong.
I demand credit for the Grand Budapest Hotel reference. I will accept the Tom Petty "I Really Did Think I Made It Up Myself (Before Remembering the 1000 Times I Heard It On The Radio As A Kid)" 25% share.
I think the only time one can, and SHOULD, have a problem is when the critiques are wrong (usually due to a lack of even perfunctory research, such as the above).
I think it's our duty to point out injustice, but it's also our duty to point out where there is NO injustice when it's clear there isn't - maybe the Grammys' gender/race record in its large/general categories should be held up as an example of where people of all kinds are on equal footing.
That all said, the other two major cross-genre categories, Record and Song of the Year have been dominated by white artists, although since around 1996 they've also often gone to younger artists, and this year the Song award broke a five-year string of being awarded to a song performed by or featuring a female artist.
So maybe Kanye would have made a more accurate statement by running on stage during Sam Smith's acceptance speeches - although I'm sure that wouldn't have gone over quite as well.
Was just going to write that.
Go to TheSmokingGun, pull up a rider at random, and I GUARANTEE it will be more "ridiculous" than this one.
(Did SpinMedia make you use that headline, Stereogum? Is the corporation's accounting showing you falling short on your quota of viral clicks? Level with us, we're on your side, Stereogum!)
As for the guac recipe: find David Lee Roth's explanation of why Van Halen asked for the purging of brown M&Ms. EVERY rider should have at least one item that acts as a quality check to make sure the staff is reading the actual important stuff.
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