SamhainRising wrote:
Just chiming in to say that at least one person here buys LAM CDs, as well as t-shirts and other merch -- but only because some horrible jerk uploaded an LAM song to Youtube and I found out about the music . So much for record label promotion.

Having said that, file-sharing can be tremendously hurtful to artists for obvious reasons. While I don't engage in it or promote it, it seems that that Apple and other distributors screw over artists pretty hard. I've heard that, depending on the label, a purchase of a 99-cent track on iItunes gives the artist between 10 and 40 cents. Is this true?

Obviously YouTube can provide a service. If it weren't for all the bootleg LAM videos on there now I would have had some up long ago for promotion, but not full songs. The promotion aspect of YouTube is fine, but the real problem is people not seeing, or not willing to see, the harm in filesharing or using YouTube as a radio station type service - consuming the music via YouTube rather than a way where the artist is compensated.

I don't know what the deal is if you make it directly with iTunes. But those numbers sound off to me. I know I get a much better rate than that through my aggregator (the company that provides my digital content to iTunes, etc).

If so, I'd rather find a better way to pay LAM directly than just giving the money to Apple or whoever is getting the profit. Wouldn't it be cool if people were honest enough to download an album for free over filesharing networks and then send a check for 15$, 25$, or 30$ directly to the artist so all the middlemen were cut out?

THAT would be awesome, and since it doesn't happen it proves my point that filesharing is not occurring because people are angry at labels, or over prices, or whatever fake reason people like to give to justify it. If they were, then they would be compensating the artists directly.

Sean



Last Edited By: LAM Mar 27 11 12:51 PM. Edited 2 times.