Royalties

[Willy Nilly]

How much do artists get for royalties?

I expect it would depend on where the record/song/sample etc was played/used.

[angusfaldo]

It took me about 4 seconds to google this. it took me so long because I had 7 bottles of Leffe.

http://www.venturenavigator.co.uk/content/499

[Willy Nilly]

angusfaldo said:

It took me about 4 seconds to google this. it took me so long because I had 7 bottles of Leffe.

http://www.venturenavigator.co.uk/content/499

It talks of percentages, what I want to know is: if my song gets played on Radio 1, how much do I get paid?

Do they adjust the payment for audience figures?

People that have written the Christmas songs get their songs played for 2 or 3 weeks a year for decades, are those songs paying the mortgage?

[GetCarter]

OP - Yep, It all depends when and where it gets played.

I get most of my royalties from the States / Germany / Japan / UK (national stations), simply because so many people get to hear it. The same piece of music played on Radio St Ives would earn me pennies.

Edited by GetCarter on Sunday 1st January 19:16

[WTFWT]

Willy Nilly said:

It talks of percentages, what I want to know is: if my song gets played on Radio 1, how much do I get paid?

Do they adjust the payment for audience figures?

People that have written the Christmas songs get their songs played for 2 or 3 weeks a year for decades, are those songs paying the mortgage?

You get approx £140 per spin on Radio 1

HTH

[Wacky Racer]

So mega groups like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd etc, who's music has been played constantly 24 hours a day somewhere in all corners of the globe, for forty odd years must never have to worry about how to pay the gas bill.....

[Willy Nilly]

WTFWT said:

You get approx £140 per spin on Radio 1

HTH

Thanks, that's exactly what I wanted to know. Not as much as I expected though

[rufusgti]

GetCarter said:

OP - Yep, It all depends when and where it gets played.

I get most of my royalties from the States / Germany / Japan / UK (national stations), simply because so many people get to hear it. The same piece of music played on Radio St Ives would earn me pennies.

Edited by GetCarter on Sunday 1st January 19:16

Do tell then. Who are ya?

[vladcjelli]

rufusgti said:

GetCarter said:

OP - Yep, It all depends when and where it gets played.

I get most of my royalties from the States / Germany / Japan / UK (national stations), simply because so many people get to hear it. The same piece of music played on Radio St Ives would earn me pennies.

Edited by GetCarter on Sunday 1st January 19:16

Do tell then. Who are ya?

Check profile, be enlightened.

[Adam B]

I always wondered how it works on CD sales - seem to remember the artist gets £1 per CD/ download but wondered who takes the hit when the CD is £3.99 not £9.99 when it first comes out

[WTFWT]

Adam B said:

I always wondered how it works on CD sales - seem to remember the artist gets £1 per CD/ download but wondered who takes the hit when the CD is £3.99 not £9.99 when it first comes out

Retailers take the hit.

Quite frightening really when you get into it. If Amazon agree to buy an album from a distributor at £5 they then try to sell it at RRP, perhaps £12. However, they have software monitoring competitor pricing across the web and retail. If Tesco decide to start knocking that CD out at £3, Amazon will price cut to that match that price in order to maintain market share despite they are losing money on every unit sold.

Edited by WTFWT on Monday 16th January 01:20

[Gaspode]

Wacky Racer said:

So mega groups like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd etc, who's music has been played constantly 24 hours a day somewhere in all corners of the globe, for forty odd years must never have to worry about how to pay the gas bill.....

I think I read somewhere that David Gilmour makes £2m a year in royalties alone.

[davepoth]

WTFWT said:

You get approx £140 per spin on Radio 1

HTH

Is that the mechanical rights or the publishing royalties though?

[Adam B]

WTFWT said:

Distributors take the hit.

Quite frightening really when you get into it. If Amazon agree to buy an album from a distributor at £5 they then try to sell it at RRP, perhaps £12. However, they have software monitoring competitor pricing across the web and retail. If Tesco decide to start knocking that CD out at £3, Amazon will price cut to that match that price in order to maintain market share despite they are losing money on every unit sold.

You say distributor but your example seems to indicate the retailer takes the hit?

[WTFWT]

Oops yes. Post amended

[GetCarter]

davepoth said:

WTFWT said:

You get approx £140 per spin on Radio 1

HTH

Is that the mechanical rights or the publishing royalties though?

My music doesn't get played on Radio 1, but for those interested this is how it works with TV/film and the 'production music' model.

For instance: BBC uses a bit of my music on (eg) a documentary and pay mechanical royalties to the publisher for the privilege. The publisher splits this 50/50 with me. (Most of my stuff is published by 'Universal'). This isn't a huge amount of money, but it does equate to where and when the music will be aired and how long it lasts.

When the documentary is shown, the broadcaster informs the performing royalties chaps that there is a bit of music by me included, and must pay royalties every time it is shown. If the documentary is bought by SKY, and re-shown, PRS get paid again by SKY and pass it on. The contract I have with Universal splits the PRS 50/50 - but this will vary according to artist. PRS collect all the money from around the world, and pay out in distributions (about 8 a year). Unclaimed royalties pay PRS's salaries, so it costs nothing to be in PRS (but to join, you must have published works out there).

The big money comes when one writes the theme tune to something like 'Bargain Hunt' (ug). Because not only is it shown every day, but it's also bought by dozens of countries, and repeated endlessly. This will earn 6 or even 7 figures.

I gave up writing for specific programmes or commercials, as not only was it driving me nuts, but by writing 'generic' music, the same piece can get used on many different and unrelated transmissions... In the same way that 'Library photo's' can be used by different news organisations.

I guess 2/3 of my earnings come from performance royalties, and 1/3 mechanical.

Edited by GetCarter on Monday 16th January 09:42

[tuscaneer]

GetCarter said:

My music doesn't get played on Radio 1, but for those interested this is how it works with TV/film and the 'production music' model.

For instance: BBC uses a bit of my music on (eg) a documentary and pay mechanical royalties to the publisher for the privilege. The publisher splits this 50/50 with me. (Most of my stuff is published by 'Universal'). This isn't a huge amount of money, but it does equate to where and when the music will be aired and how long it lasts.

When the documentary is shown, the broadcaster informs the performing royalties chaps that there is a bit of music by me included, and must pay royalties every time it is shown. If the documentary is bought by SKY, and re-shown, PRS get paid again by SKY and pass it on. The contract I have with Universal splits the PRS 50/50 - but this will vary according to artist. PRS collect all the money from around the world, and pay out in distributions (about 8 a year). Unclaimed royalties pay PRS's salaries, so it costs nothing to be in PRS (but to join, you must have published works out there).

The big money comes when one writes the theme tune to something like 'Bargain Hunt' (ug). Because not only is it shown every day, but it's also bought by dozens of countries, and repeated endlessly. This will earn 6 or ever 7 figures.

I gave up writing for specific programmes or commercials, as not only was it driving me nuts, but by writing 'generic' music, the same piece can get used on many different and unrelated transmissions... In the same way that 'Library photo's' can be used by different news organisations.

I guess 2/3 of my earnings come from performance royalties, and 1/3 mechanical.

interesting insight into it there mate.the only royalties i was ever due i never saw a bean!!we signed a contract where we got royalty payments after a certain number of units were shifted.we never did find out how many were sold!!the official line was never enough!
another interesting one was a kid that used to come and see our band was on holiday in america and came across a skateboarding video that had one of our old tracks on the soundtrack.how this came to be i will never know but we did send plenty of demo's stateside to labels like revelation so presumably it was snaffled along the way somewhere.the kid had no memory of the title of the video when telling me the story months later and so we could do nothing about it.didn't exactly set the world on fire so no harm done.dozy bd!!

[Asterix]

GetCarter has explained it pretty much as I would.

What I found funny was when you'd get your payment statement it would list the places it got played - it would usually be the normal territories but you'd get the odd weird one. We had one of our songs played massively in some tiny African country for a while. What was surprising is that they even had an organisation to monitor what was getting played. PRS is purely the UK's organisation and other countries will have organisations with reciprocal arrangements to collect and notify.

We had one of our songs bought by Sky for the Monday Night Goals show on Sky Sports which was a one off payment negotiated with our publishing company (mechanical) and a coupel of similar eals.

There is also ratios of payments depending on how much of the song was played. I think if they played over a verse and a chorus then it was deemed the whole song was played, or something - was a long time ago now.

Record sales is a different matter as well - depending if the artist had paid back all of their advance or costs, they might not even see a penny. Then you have the woes of cross collateralisation where the costs/debt of one album might get bumped onto the costs for the next album and so on.

From memory, you needed to sell a fair few units of records to make money from that while publishing generally gave an immediate return depending on the deal struck. Also artists with a reasonable fan base tend to make money from merchandise sales and touring.