Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Creamtastic Too Much Joy, Not Enough Money: Major Label Royalty Funny Joke
Posted by Steve Haruch on Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 12:44 PM
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Do you remember a band called Too Much Joy? Kinda silly, sometimes sorta serious alternative band (not indie!) from the '80s/'90s. Had that song "Crush Story." Got arrested for performing 2 Live Crew songs in Miami. Penn and Teller are big fans. Yeah, them.
Too Much Joy were on a major label for a while and didn't exactly make it big, but they're still known enough that today people are still downloading and streaming their songs on the Internets, something that bands on major labels should get paid for, seeing how the recording industry keeps suing the shit out of people left and right in order to protect their artists, whom they love and cherish so dearly. At least the ones that recoup. Today, TMJ's Tim Quirk posted an alternately hilarious and thought-provoking (kinda like a TMJ album!) entry on his band blog about his royalty statement from Warner Brothers. It starts like this:
I got something in the mail last week I'd been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero income, and our unrecouped balance ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the same. [...] So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of...Quirk, who works at Rhapsody and so knows a bit about digital royalties, goes on to dissect the situation, basically calling bullshit on WB. The major labels, he says, could be much more accurate with their royalty reporting, what with all the fancy technology and stuff these days, but he comes to this simple conclusion: "They just can't be bothered. They don't care, because they don't have to." Read the whole thing. It's worth it. Or there's this.$62.47What the fuck?
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randomly remembered this band today and found this article. They were such a fun band to see live. Sad to hear they didn't make any money off their efforts.
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Posted by
ed
on December 1, 2009 at 2:29 PM
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