[Info-vax] OT: About Digital and divisions

[Neil Rieck]

On Nov 20, 11:41 am, hel... at astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---
undress to reply) wrote:
> In article
> <2a46af63-1e22-4c62-931b-43d562b25... at h5g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>, Neil
>
> Rieck <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> writes:
> > To your point, I read recently that Amy Winehouse was not as rich as
> > many people thought. For every $1M in sales, she only received $70k.
> > Someone, either traditional music publishers, or e-publishers like
> > Apple, were taking $930,000.
>
> This is a margin of 7%.  The margins in many other businesses are much
> smaller.  Also, the $930,000 is not profit, since it includes costs; ALL
> costs---"real" costs and profits---are covered by the $1M revenue from
> sales.
>
> > Why is it that creative people keep
> > getting the short end of the stick? Imagine a world where all creative
> > people are driven back into traditional jobs: No music, no TV, no
> > movies, no books, no games, no art. What a crappy world that would be.
>
> Indeed.  And illegal downloading is bringing us closer and closer to it.
>
> I find it strange that people who complain that artists get a too small
> fraction of the income generated from sales offer as a "solution" that
> the artists get nothing at all.

Someone (perhaps it was Roland Hughes) relayed a personal story a few
years back about publishing through Amazon. In the early days of
Amazon the web site grabbed something like 25% of the costs sent back
"to the industry" which includes "the creative talent" as well as the
marketing talent". Nut then along came iTunes who were reaping
something like 70% and returning 30%. That's when Amazon go the
message and decided to become more iTunes-like. Amazon will make
direct deals with authors but require you to sign on with the 70/30
split, or worse.

First off, if they decided to create a gizmo to read the books which
means they wouldn't need to deal with industry bozos to publish in
paper (this also does away with shipping and warehouse problems).
While shopping around for someone to make their gizmo, other computer
companies decided to jump in the market ahead of them. As everyone
already knows, the gizmo ended up with the name "Kindle" but many
companies without a book-site have also jumped into the market.

Even still, it kind of bothers me that a modern-day Isaac Asimov (or
in the case of iTunes, a modern day Johann Sebastian Bach) would only
get 30% of the royalties. Since these people are the creative talent,
they should get at least 50%. This would encourage them to create more
content because this stuff makes the world more enjoyable.

NSR