An ask Metafilter question that caught my eye: Will my money get to the musician, or all end up with the record label?

Interesting question to me, but maybe not for the reasons the asker intended. While I recognize that fans want the artist to get paid, when a label is involved it's more complicated:

• The artist entered into an agreement with the record label. Even if it's a shitty deal, why are you second guessing a decision that the artist made? Are we assuming that every artist on every label has been tricked?
• The record label likely put up a lot of money to get the record made (which is a loan) -- this is why most of the money goes to the label. Why do they not deserve to make their money back? The record might not exist without them.
• The artist may actually enjoy the support they get from their label. Recording advances, promotion and tour organization are some of the more common benefits. The label's only solid metric for determining the success of an album is sales through their distribution channels. If you take away those sales the label will likely decide the artist is a bad investment and drop them.

Independent artist money breakdown

For independent artists it's simpler of course as we have no record label loans to pay back, but there's still a lot of mystery. I'm asked often where I get the most money from awesome people who want to make sure their dollars go to me. Today in the interest of science and like... money... I did up some charts:

Net amount received by me per album sale. That's the amount that actually goes into my pocket, so bank fees, postage, digital distribution fees, manufacturing and other charges along the way are factored in. The album price per service is listed next to the service name.

Percentage received by me per album sale, based on the same data above.

Neither of these graphs take into account any signup or yearly fees. Amazon is $30 a year and CD Baby (who handles all the other digital distribution for me) is a $35 one-time fee. I'm also not 100% sure I got the iTunes UK album price right and Magnatune lets buyers decide the price from $5-$18 so I used an average of $8 which I think I read somewhere.

Analysis

No big surprise, buying direct from me is the best (for me). Direct digital sales (using my free open source digital store, natch) is the best in profit and percentage as I only pay Paypal fees and a negligible Amazon S3 amount. I make more per sale on CD Baby and iTunes UK than direct CDs from me, but that's only because the unit price is three or four dollars more.

It's interesting how low Magnatune ranks in both charts. Magnatune is a non-exclusive record label that I'm on (and enjoy being on), but unlike other label agreements I referred to in the beginning of this post, I have no debt with them. It's their decision to split the income and bank fees 50% with the artist, which means significantly less money for the artists than most other services.

Conclusion

It's pretty simple. The less middlemen, the more money gets to the artist. The best would be to pirate the album and personally hand the artist a ten dollar bill. That would be as close to 100% as you're going to get.

Getting started with Ogg - A good intro to Ogg Vorbis via the Play Ogg audio format campaign. I want to be down with Ogg, but the support isn't there (yet).

Recently I finally got off my ass and wrote a thingmabob to track MP3 downloads. Here is the fallout: China, you are cut off.

Seriously, I've never to my knowledge received a single nice email from anyone in China about my music or sold a CD, yet you guys make up like 60% of my bandwidth usage via sites like QQ and Baidu and Yahoo China Music.

I mean maybe if I felt like I was huge with this silent mass of Chinese I'd just roll with it, see where it takes me, but the fact of the matter is that every MP3 on my server gets hammered 24/7 by the same blocks of IPs, over and over again. Is it just their haywire search bots? Is it proxy requests from very shy Chinese Brad Sucks fans? I don't know!

So for now you're blocked, go sit in the corner and think about what you've done.

Interesting article over at Pitchfork: What Do You Look for in Music Writing? As in music reviews, not like, writing music.

Music advocacy (well, it sounds better than "what mp3 blogs do") is exploding. Music criticism on the other hand survived commercially for the past 40 years or so by hitching itself to its own version of advocacy. In an age of limited music supply, the word of an informed expert was invaluable, and the flights of fancy or theory that expert indulged in were part of the deal. Sharply and suddenly, the internet has broken that link.

Since I was a teenager I've thought music criticism was silly. I've never really understood why I should care that someone doesn't like an album, it alway seemed like trolling -- a ploy to get fans riled up and generate attention. I prefer the idea of music advocacy, though I get impatient reading overwrought poetic waxings about music when I could have decided if I liked the music in the time it took to read the article. (Also there are only so many times I can read the word "scintillating" without wanting to puke.)

Lately as I've been working on my album I've been getting existential. Is there still a point to doing albums? Why should they be in 11 or 12 song bundles? What will I do when it's done?

It used to be a bad idea for a musician to release too many songs too quickly. You get the rep as being a prolific genius, but the quality pretty much always goes down. You oversaturate the market with a lot of b-side material, confuse potential fans and make it hard for anyone to find the songs they'd like.

But now that music advocacy is the name of the game, are things different? It seems like all you have to worry about is if there are enough people interested to separate the good from the bad. The bad gets ignored, the good gets spread around.

Great collection of old metal show photos in Ye Olde Metal Days. Here are moves and outfits I'd like to pull off sometime:

Here's a clip last year of us playing Riverpalooza. Fireworks are sweet.

I was helping out at the White Glove Tracking project today, creating white glove data that I'm sure will be used in a way that will better humanity. Anyway, it made me go re-watch Michael Jackson's legendary 1983 Motown Billie Jean performance:

It's still entertaining, but two things stand out:

• Michael is so obviously lip-synching. I don't hear many people mention that when they talk about this performance.
• That glove is huge. Did they have nothing in Michael's size?

Well, after having it pointed out to me that it's at least a good idea to get in front of people who might like my music, I'm now on Sellaband.

My original nitpicking about Sellaband is still valid I think, but I guess we'll see. Have a read through the comments of that post for some rebuttals to my cynicism.

I just posted a quick faster demo of There's Something Wrong. Trying to find the right feel for this sucker.

I like how previously rare or hard to reproduce things like Dark Side of the Rainbow are just plain on Youtube these days:

I had never seen it before and it works amazingly well. Just enough sync to make it seem meaningful. More links:

Dark Side of the Moon Wikipedia page

List of sync "moments" in Dark Side of the Rainbow

Synchronicity Arkive - dedicated to other video/audio syncs

Magnatune & I will soon be putting out a double CD of Creative Commons-licensed ccMixter remixes of songs off I Don't Know What I'm Doing. It's a pretty awesome project that shows a lot of the super wickedness that can come out of the Creative Commons. Only hitch right now is: OMG we need album art!

I have no visual arts talent, so I'd really appreciate some help. I need four pieces of artwork: the cover, reverse side of the cover, tray card (back) and the CD itself.  (If you need the dimensions they're here under jewel case print dimensions.)

The title is "Mixter Two: Brad Sucks / I Don't Know What I'm Doing". Even if you (like me) have no artistic skills, you could contribute by rifling through the Creative Commons Search (particularly Flickr) for photos or drawings that might make good album art material (make sure to check the two boxes at the top for photos that can be remixed & used commercially).

I don't have much to offer other than eternal peace in heaven. We'll credit you on the album and I'll send you some CDs and buttons and maybe a letter explaining how nice I think you are.

Post anything you got in these comments, my forums or email me directly. Thank you!

Wow, check out this Stevie Wonder Drum Solo.

I already knew he played the drums on a lot of his recordings, but it's still awesome. [via kristin]

Making The Hypothetical Band is pretty funny. Choose Your Own Adventure books as band names. Asher Sarlin is a favorite of mine, his Elephantitis of the Mind comic is funny.

Had one of those "this is all garbage, maybe I should bail on this album and start over fresh" musical panic attacks yesterday. So I think I'm right on track to release my second album around 2010.

Hey, the new Frontalot album Secrets From the Future is out and I'm totally on one of the tracks (Livin' at the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe).

There's a new section on the site called You, an organized directory of all the remixes, lyrics, videos, tabs, frets on fire projects and so on that people have made to go with my songs. (For example here's Making Me Nervous.)

I know I'm missing a lot of stuff in there so please submit if you notice something missing. Also let me know of any credits and credit urls you want updated, I did a fair amount of guesstimation.

Also: newer songs are not in there yet but will be soon. Just upload stuff as "other" for now and let me know in the notes what it's for.

By the way, I stole this idea from Jonathan Coulton.

Thank you to everyone who's contributed stuff, it was awesome going through it all again.

I've been looking forward to CD Baby's SNOCAP integration so I can sell songs direct on MySpace. It's now up and running and it seems all right. Here's the player/purchaser thing:

It's not the most glamorous player, but it gets the job done. From what little research I've done it seems to sell in DRM-free MP3 format which is cool. It would be nice to allow longer previews and replace the default MySpace player with it.

I ask all you Ableton Live experts: is there a way to dynamically change the tempo in the arrange view?

I'm trying a different way of laying out my set and everything hinges on this. (PS: I may throw up in rage if there's not a way to do it.) Thank you!

Create Digital Music has some great videos and information (1, 2) on the Dr. Who Theme. Here's one with the composer:

And here's one with Delia Derbyshire who was responsible essentially for "producing" the theme and giving it so much of its sonic character:

Whenever I feel frustrated with my audio setup here I'm going to re-watch that video.