It seems like two of the arguments (no ownership of the music, no direct compensation for artists) could be made for radio in the earlier portion of the 20th century, yet that vehicle was apparently successful for both the radio stations and the artists.
The reason why they make more money on tour is because of how the current music industry contracts are set up. The music industry take a massive cut of record sales leaving the artist with very little. Also, when recording an album, an artist gets an advance from their label to pay for the studio, the sound engineers, etc. This advance is paid back through their royalties before they ever see a cheque from the label. As you can imagine the cost of a professional cd recording is quite high. The combination of a small cut + reimbursement makes it so that most bands never see a cent from cd sales and make it up with touring and merchandise sales.
This however is changing and not in a good way. Increasingly, labels are forcing artists into what's commonly reffered to as a "360 deal" which gives a cut of everything to the label. CD sales, touring, merchandise, etc, the label gets a cut of it all.
Say for example an artist makes 1.35/album and sells 2 million(which is not too bad) and then does 100 shows (which certainly is not out of the realm of possibility)commands 40k fee + merch sales at the venue.
1.35/album * 2,000,000 = 2.7 million 100 shows * 40k = 4 Million + merch sales - costs
So it really depends, the more albums you sell the more money you make from albums. The less albums you sell but the more you tour, so for a middle tier artist who generally doesn't sell an obscene amount of albums but does a lot of gigs, they would certainly make more touring.
Someone like U2, probably makes more from album sales.
I think this is the future.. why worry about maintaining your catalogs and syncing between computers. Let it be online. As for the whole "but i like owning my stuff" argument, I mentioned that in my post. And as for the offline client issue, yeah they're working on it.. I still burn CDs for my car so I'll be interested in how this works out. But I figure in 10-15 years every ipod or other such device you listen to music on, even your car, will be online.. I never want to have to deal with ensuring all my songs have proper and accurate ID3 tag info. If I have to see Track 1, Track 2.. again I'm gonna go apeshit.
Our should we just pay homage to the fact that grandpa used to have his music on plastic pieces and could play it even after country music was made illegal by UN?
